Saturday, November 22, 2008

You can't make this stuff up!!!

A guy came in with some significant Left eye pain. He was very drunk, and rude, and stated that he was hit in the eye with a blunt object, possibly a bat or fist.

Well, we couldn't really examine his eye because there is a ridiculous amount of swelling around/on it and the guy was very combative. We get a CT ("Cat Scan") of his face, and there is nothing that looks like a normal eyeball in the eye socket. We tell the guy that his eye looks like it's toast (in more politically correct terms) and that we'd like to take him to the OR to see if we can save the eye or any vision. He agreed.

Well, in the Operating Room . . . it's very strange. There is NO eye at all in the socket. Not even the thick gel-like substance that is in the eye. In fact, there is not even part of the optic nerve, including the 2.5 cm of neve that's in the eye socket before it gets to the eye. Something isn't right with the guys story.

We wake him up and then tell him that something doesn't fit and ask him if his story is any different. Well, just like one of the rules of being an EM doc (Emergency Medicine), the stories tend to change over time. The patient then stated that he was really just playing a board game with his uncle, who suffers with some apparently pretty bad PTSD since the Vietnam War. Well, the uncle was not very pleased with now the game was going, so he reached up and literally ripped this poor guys Left eye out. Yup, ripped the eye and nerve, right out of the guys face. Thankfully for the patient, he was very intoxicated, so it hurt a little less. Pretty sick huh? Well, the story gets even a bit worse-- there was so much L eye nerve damage, that it affected all of the crossing fibers from the R eye (1/2 of the total R eye vision) that cross to the L -- so this guy now has no Left eye and he can only see from the left half of the world out of his right eye, the other 3/4's of his vision is forever gone.

Pretty messed up huh? And guess what game they were playing -- "Sorry"!!!!

2 comments:

Rachel Rowell said...

Haha, I loved the story. Sounds just like the ED to me!

Amy said...

that is too funny! and weird!