I remember a painful (but somewhat humorous) tale from residency. This was one that involved another resident. She was an intern on call for medicine (a generally horrific year-long episode of torture) and was amazingly able to lie down in the call room for a few minutes at about 4am. She stumbled in and flopped on the mattress, putting her contact lens solution on the nightstand beside her. A short while later she noticed her eyes were burning so she decided to use some of the saline before she fell asleep. In the dark she grabbed a small bottle from the night stand and put in a few drops. Unfortunately, what she grabbed was not her bottle of saline. It was another intern’s Hemoccult developer that happened to be on the table next to her eye drops! (for those not in the know, hemocult or guiac developer is a solution used to test for blood in the stool. A small stool sample is placed on a developer card and a few drops of the liquid are placed on the card – turning bright blue if there is occult blood (it would be clear if there was no blood)). This solution is mostly hydrogen peroxide! Not something you would want in your eye! She immediately began screaming in pain and some of the other residents in the room (it was a room with about 5 bunk beds in it) awoke immediately. They had to walk her down to the ER for some tetracaine drops and a good two litres of saline irrigation courtesy of the Morgan Lens. About the only good thing that came from the experience was that she was excused from the rest of her call!
I was trying to see if there was sh#t in my eye!
Something similar happened to me. I accidentally put nasal decongestant in my eye because the two bottles were next to each other.
So THIS is where JCAHO got its brilliant idea to remove all the hemoccult developer from the rooms.
Maybe all bottles of eyedrops should have some sort of raised pattern on the lid and around the top of the bottle to make these sorts of accidents less likely – especially as those reaching for eye drops are often not able to see clearly and may not be thinking clearly either.
I don’t think that its as bad as a similar episode I saw in the ER that occurred with glue in the eye. That was a mess, to a terrified person that was easily remedied with bacitracin and a little traction on the eye lids pulling them apart. The patients leave in relief and everyone has a good story to tell.
An acquaintence carried both eye drops and nail glue in her purse. One day she put nail glue in her eye and ended up in the ER. Apparently the bottles are very close in shape, size, and color. I don’t think she carries nail glue anymore.