Carbon Fiber Reinforced ... Cornea

Saturday afternoon I got something in my left eye. Initially I thought it was just an eyelash. The discomfort continued through the evening and the night. Sunday morning we got some Visine and I started irrigating. This didn’t really help much, but it didn’t make it worse either. I figured I’d scratched my cornea. This morning I called Dr. Dame and made an appointment. Dr. Dame put some flourescent dye in my eye and had a look. He saw something right in the middle of my cornea. To remove the foreign object, he froze my eye. Using a small piece of sterile sponge, he gently moved the object away from the middle of my eye. I was doing a pretty good job keeping my eye open, but it wasn’t easy. Once the object was closer to the edge of my eye, Dr. Dame was able to extract it more easily. He showed it to me, but I couldn’t see it very well. My left eye was frozen, and both eyes were filled with tears. But there was a tiny little black speck on the end of the sponge. “It looks like a piece of carbon fiber.” “But we don’t own anything that’s made of carbon fiber. Could it be a hair?” “No, it’s not the right size and shape to be a hair.” Eventually tissue would have grown over the object – after about 48 hours. So I guess I was pretty lucky. Dr. Dame gave me some drops to put in my eye hourly, and sent me on my way. My eye has been extremely sensitive to sunlight. It was a little better without the object, but not as good as I would have liked. But by the time I’d come home and had supper, it was feeling quite a bit better. My left eye is still pretty blurry, but it feels much better now. I expect my vision will be mostly normal tomorrow.