Yeowch!!!

I have seen my share of gym/weight lifting-related ER visits. Most are either people collapsing/having chest pain, or getting fingers or feet crushed between weights. This one was just a really bad luck case. A man was lying on an exercise bench that happened to be placed right next to a bench press. I believe he was doing sit-ups on it or using dumbbells. In any case he was really unlucky this one particular night. He finished his set and turned his head to the left as he was rising from a lying position on the bench. As he sat up, the adjacent weight bar that was sitting in the bench-press’s cradle jammed into the left side of his orbit. He was dazed initially and “saw stars” and shortly thereafter, decided to call it a night and went home. This was a bad idea since he continued to have eye pain and blurred vision. At his girlfriend’s behest, he finally went to the ER to have his eye checked.

One really should get them selves checked out when they have ocular trauma- especially when there is a diminishment in vision (this is common sense in my opinion, you don’t need a medical degree to realise that loss of vision is a problem!). Anyway this guy’s eye looked bad. Very swollen periorbital area, conjunctiva injected, pupil irregularly shaped (a tip off to bad things), and a he had only 20/400 vision in that eye. A hyphaema was easily visible with a penlight. The worst part was when he said “Doc, look what happens when I do this”: – he then proceeded to gently push on the outside (lateral) edge of his eye, causing vitreous humour to extrude out from a spot just next to his iris! Yeowch! The first thing I told he was NOT to do that any more, and then made a call to the ophthalmologist. He had suffered a globe rupture, or burst eyeball. Easily one of my least favourite things to see! He wound up going to the OR and having partially successful surgery. He regained about 50% of his vision. I bet he would have regained more had he come in sooner and not done the parlour trick!