so when you see the liquid aqueous humor
gushing out of the cornea you see the
eyes
perforated it's got a big hole in it uh
talk about a horror story so i recently
had a friend ask me about the scariest
medical stories i've ever seen so
in this video i'm going to share my top
true scary stories from the eye clinic
let's take a look
[Music]
what's up this is dr alan here from the
dr i health show and today we're going
to be sharing some
true scary stories from the eye clinic
recently i had a friend who
asked me about the scariest things i've
seen
in the eye clinic the most messed up
tough cases things like that and he says
every time he meets a medical
professional that's all he really wants
to know so i figured you know it's
really close to halloween
in 2020 has been scary already but why
not add a cherry on top okay so for the
first scary story
let's just start a little mild and we'll
save the really gross gruesome ones
toward the end
this first story right out of residency
i had a patient come in for an emergency
visit she was in a lot of pain
she was covering her eye with a wet
washcloth sort of thing
what we looked at underneath was that
the entire front surface of cornea
was massively abraded her entire front
surface was scratched
and she couldn't even open her eye well
enough without numbing medication to
even
even try to read the vision chart what
happened is that she ended up hitting
her eye with a
door mat she took it outside and she
shook the door mat
but it came up and swung and hit her in
the eye but this doormat wasn't just
like any normal doormat it's like a
straw doormat and if you've ever seen
one of those they kind of come up really
spiky and hard so you can
wipe your foot off on it she hit herself
in the eye with this and it looked like
some wild animal had scratched away at
her
eye unfortunately for this person the
other eye what made this so complicated
is her other eye
that wasn't hit she was blind in that
eye she was severely diabetic
and she had a bad surgery that didn't go
well and she didn't heal very well
because when you're severely diabetic
you don't heal as well
ultimately the good news for this
patient we got a lot of medications
things healed up and she ended up seeing
much better but it was a long
painful road for her all right now that
first one wasn't too bad
this next scary story also happened to
me this one
this was a patient who went through
cataract surgery and after
any eye surgery we usually put some sort
of a shield
onto the eye to prevent someone from
rubbing or poking at the eye
because if you push on it the wound on
the eye may open up
and that's not good now this patient uh
in the middle of the night
took the shield off and not only rubbed
the eye but
looked at the eye with their finger and
if you can imagine all the nasty
bacteria that can live on your hand
this patient scratched their eye after
surgery and because of the open wound
ultimately it ended up getting infected
if somebody gets a nasty infection
after a surgery such as cataract surgery
they usually don't show
signs of bad infection until about four
to seven days later
this patient ended up getting one of the
worst things you can get in eye care and
that's called an
endophthalmitis and endophthalmitis is
an infection of
the inner workings of the eye this
person
perforated their cornea the surface of
the eye ended up perforating
that's where the jelly the liquid of the
eye
ends up coming out of the eye and ends
up pouring out of the eye
it's pretty gruesome uh and again it's
one of those things where
as a doctor you you see these you study
these and then when you see it
you kind of you don't go into panic mode
necessarily but you turn into to me i
kind of turn into this military general
all of a sudden my charisma my attitude
suddenly
numbs out and i'm super serious and i'm
like okay we need to do this we need to
do this and you do this
and we need to descend her right away to
get treatment for the endophthalmitis
she needs an
injection inside the eye with strong
antibiotics
so she did have to have a needle go
toward the eye and give the injection of
the antibiotics
and then she ended up ultimately needing
a corneal transplant and patching
surgery they needed to
fix that open wound on the eye and yeah
it wasn't good and it's something that i
still think about
and you don't you don't forget those
cases all right so my third scary kind
of medical story here is not
mine it's one of my eye doctor friends
who
had this happen to them so when it comes
to
this case there was a husband and wife
and the wife had an affair with
another man and so the boyfriend came up
to the door
the husband answered it and answered it
with a knife straight to the guy's face
basically cut the eye in half like
cutting a grape straight down the middle
from there somehow the guy made it into
the hospital into the emergency room
my friend was called in for an emergency
consult to deal with the eye
and he saw the guy and thought you know
what this guy's probably gonna die
anyway but let's just
do all we can do so he used some
stitches he patched up the
eye sewed it back up and uh they were
going to see if the guy
lived through the night well the guy did
the guy survived
thanks you know thank goodness for
modern medicine and the er team
but this put my doctor friend my surgeon
friend in a
tough position because the eye was
severed and cut so badly
open uh he's now at risk of something
else
and if any other eye doctors are
watching this you're probably already
thinking about what what the
what the problem could be the issue is
when people have something like that
where the eye has
major trauma to it your eye doctor has
to decide and talk with you about
removing the eye and it's not that the
eye is in bad shape or isn't working
it's because of something called
sympathetic ophthalmia
now sympathetic upthelmia is where your
body's immune system
doesn't just attack the eye that was
hurt what happens is that
your eye is largely inert to your body's
immune system
your body doesn't recognize that the eye
is even there
so once you have trauma to the eye and
the
inner contents of the eye become exposed
to your body's immune system your body
creates
inflammatory cells and has an
inflammatory reaction
and starts attacking the other eye
so people will have trauma to one eye
but your body
can be six months to years later they
started attacking the eye that wasn't
involved
and so when there's major trauma like
this doctors often have to just go ahead
and decide
we're going to remove that eye that was
had the trauma
sacrifice that eye because you don't
want the immune cells your immune system
to attack
your other eye because it's better to ha
lose the bad eye
and just have one good functioning eye
than to lose both eyes and be blind
now the reason the surgeon friend didn't
just remove the eye right away is
because for legal reasons because if
somebody just comes and takes your eye
right away and they don't have
proof that your vision was bad enough to
remove the eye
at least in the united states there
could potentially be a legal battle
where
you could turn around and sue the doctor
that they removed the eye too
soon and blinded you in that eye sounds
kind of messed up but yeah that's the
way our legal system works with medicine
a lot of the time
so what they did is they let the guy in
the icu heal up
and they kept on checking on his vision
and they wanted to talk with them and so
that was the patient's decision to
remove the eye they had to explain to
him what was going on
and so finally he went in to go talk to
the patient
and really convince him hey we need to
take that eye otherwise you're going to
lose both eyes
but he couldn't the patient had
unhooked themselves from all of the
instruments in the icu
and just jumped out of bed and ran off
and left so
no one knows what happened to that guy
all right so my final scary story and
i'll tell you this one can be
pretty nasty for some people this one i
saw in my residency
uh i had a gentleman who uh and i'm
afraid i'm sorry to laugh sometimes but
i think that's just an automatic kind of
response from a lot of medical
professionals
when they had to deal with some really
nasty tough stuff
is that uh we have to cope with it
somehow so i think i naturally
try to laugh things off tough reality
but we see some tough stuff
sometimes so this scary story i was in
my residency
and this gentleman came in and his
entire face
was just covered in a cloth and i was
like
like what's going on here i usually went
into residency early in the morning and
looked up everybody's chart notes of who
was coming in
and this guy he had a history
of a bad basal cell carcinoma so he had
cancer
on his eyelid that went s grew so big
that it passed from the eyelid
into the eye and into the bone itself
and he had surgery where they removed
the eye
they removed part of the bone the part
of the tissue but then he never followed
back up
he was supposed to come back in so they
could do reconstruction
they could get him a prosthetic eye but
now he's here
in my office sitting in front of me
and i didn't i was just like okay
what am i going to see here so we
removed the washcloth
from the eye and what he had in there
was a conformer it's a little piece of
plastic that they put on there just to
kind of hold
everything shape it is the same piece of
plastic they had given to him
after the surgery and he never did
anything with it there was pus there was
goo
coming out peeling it away was an open
cavity
to his skull and it really did look like
two-face from batman from the the dark
knight movie
where when you see two faces you can see
the muscle and the bone
that that's really what it looked like
but the gross part was that yeah his eye
there was no eye there it's just this
open cavity and you could see all this
moisture and pus inside where the eye
should be
and the the tough part was that his
cancer had spread
and had spread further into the bone and
his bone
was flaking off so i could see his
ethmoid
air cells and i could see the sinus
cavities the other resident that was
with he
he he almost lost his lunch that was
probably the grossest
scariest horror story uh i'm pretty sure
that gentleman eventually passed away
from his cancer but uh yeah that just
something you don't expect to see so
hopefully you found these scary stories
kind of entertaining something a little
bit educational if you yourself
have a spooky medical story of any kind
either something happened to you a
friend a family
maybe you're an eye care professional or
another medical professional and you
want to share your stories leave them in
the comments section below
because i do find them pretty
fascinating otherwise i hope that the
rest of your 2020 is a little bit
more delightful and not so spooky after
here this halloween
thanks so much for watching again this
is dr alan here from the dr il show
keep an eye on it and we'll talk to you
soon
you