Saturday, May 8, 2010

Remember, safety 3rd..and lose your vision!

My stubbornness to see a doctor cost me a piece of my vision
Lessoned learned, wearing safety equipment is not all there is to being safe while working, you must also be smart. While I was wearing safety goggles when I was grinding some metal, a small piece of debris somehow got into my eye. I did not notice it until later and thought I had flushed it out of my eye. The discomfort I had I associated to the usual "something in my eye" feeling and brushed it off. After a week of eye drops and the pain doing an off/on thing it became clear there was a problem and I needed to see a doctor. This is where my "being smart" failed me in being safe, my stubbornness in seeing a doctor cost me a piece of my vision.

Nine days after the incident I went to an eye specialist and he removed a flea sized piece of metal from my eye. It had started to rust around the pupil by that time and I probably went to the doctor just in time before some serious damage occurred. I guess you can define "serious" for yourself, for me I still have vision in my left eye but it will be scarred for life and my vision will look like that bug splat on the windshield for a long time...if not forever.

4 comments:

  1. Oh Man that is crazy!!!
    I can't believe it was rusting in your eye.

    Glad you caught it before it got worse.

    Bob

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  2. Dear gawd. I'm cringing for you. I DO hope the "splat" effect will eventually diminish...or more hopefully, disappear altogether.

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  3. The hole has healed but left a bit of a scar so I am left with funky vision for sure, mostly hard to read now...but you do have the coolest name for sure!

    In the end, this is what I was building when I got struck

    Thanks!

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  4. Thanks, re: the name. It's my dirty hippie name, bestowed on me by a member of the Rainbow Family back in the days when I didn't shave my legs. My given name is "Katherine." Shhhhhhhhhhh. Don't tell anyone...

    Love the project in recycling engineering. I had to giggle at pic #4 -- I said aloud "it's a homeless Cadillac!" I live in the ghetto, where the homeless peeps park their carts behind my car, so of course that would be the first thing to pop to mind.

    A while back I saw where a group of artists downtown are using abandoned shopping carts to plant little mobile garden boxes with fruits and veggies in them. You could do the same with your Cadillac. How delightfully European you'd look tooling around with a big basket of geraniums in full bloom. Or maybe you could be a heckler on wheels, and grow tomatoes to be thrown at annoying people as you ride past them...

    :]

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