- Wondering why your eyes are dry, blurry
or super irritated after general anesthesia?
Well, I'm going to tell you why
and how to take care of it, stick around!
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So welcome to the Eyecare and Wellness channel.
I'm Joel Hayden, and we haven't met before, welcome.
And we talk about all things to do with
how to take care of your eyes and yourself for life.
Let's get at it.
Alright guys, so I'm going to go over the top three reasons
that I believe your eyes are either dry, blurry
or super irritated, possibly even really super scratchy
after general anesthesia.
So the general anesthesia didn't have to be
from eye surgery, could have been from any type of surgery
that could have caused this.
A few of the things you need to know
that they do with your eyes during general anesthesia
is because the general anesthesia really
affects the oblique ocular muscle around the eye.
Our ability to close the eye well,
when we're under general anesthesia
doesn't work as well as it should.
And probably 59% of the time,
I believe I saw in the study
that the eye doesn't close all the way.
And that would...
as you can imagine, lead to a very dry, blurry eye
especially if that surgery
is going to last four hours or more.
Super, super irritated.
But they know this and that's why the nurses
will take the eyes closed during surgery.
It's not uncommon that even with the eye taped to that
they're super blurry and super irritated.
And why?
Well, my first thought is that it's possible
that in getting your preps or after surgery
and taking the tape off, something like a mask
or anything else could have hit your eye
and just scratched it and irritated it.
I gotta tell you, I don't think that happens very often.
These people are super professional and they know they've
done this a million times and they know what they're doing.
So I don't think that's the issue.
There can be the second reason this could happen.
As a patient, you may be waking up
on a general anesthesia
and you're dry.
You're waking up at a general anesthesia.
You don't even realize if your eyes open
or closed when you're rubbing that eye.
And that very well could be what caused a corneal abrasion
or just regular irritation.
And that irritation can lead to the blurriness
you have as well.
So it could be one eye or both eyes
but more than likely if you rubbed your eye
when you were waking up and you're eye was already open
and it's not unusual, that can do it.
But the third reason makes the most sense to me.
It's that the eyes it's just
we're not closed all the way taped or not.
And that can cause just a lot of irritation.
So the best thing to do,
if you're noticing that,
you've had some type of surgery, you're now awake,
you're in recovery and your eyes are killing you.
You probably want to tell the nurse
but you may not even notice it until you get home.
And the best thing to do is go down
pick up some gel drops that are non-preserved.
I'm going to throw some over my shoulder right now,
maybe this shoulder,
and pick them up, put them in before you go to bed.
And when you get up every single morning for a week
because they can be really irritated.
And if it's bad enough, call your eye doctor.
Your optometrist will know what to do.
And I see this a few times.
The first time was about 10 years ago, maybe even 15
one of my employees, her daughter had knee surgery
and she comes home and says...
Calls me up and says, you know, her knee's doing great.
Her eyes are killing her.
Why?
And I hadn't seen this before, but as I dug into it
I figured out that she probably just
didn't have her eyes taped well enough.
And then lastly,
the other thing that can happen is
you could have a reaction
to the tape on your lids
and you could have some irritation, lids swelling
because of that.
So again, call your optometrist if that happens
because they'll probably want to see you and take a look.
And of course, if you're just had surgery
and can't get there, I'm sure they'll give you
some tips that way you can do at home.
So I hope this was helpful.
It was a quick video.
I thought it was interesting.
I thought it was interesting enough to put it out there
because people don't expect to have eye problems
after they've had foot surgery
or any other type of surgery.
So I thought it was an interesting topic
and I hope you liked it.
I hope you found it interesting.
If you did, hit that like button, consider subscribing
and until next time take care.