Experience: I was stabbed in the eye by a drawing pin
It was immediate and total agony, the worst pain I’d ever felt
I was in my first term at Brighton University in 2013. One November weekend, I visited my then girlfriend Mel at Sussex University. There was a party in her halls of residence. It was rammed, with about 30 people dancing, playing beer pong and generally running riot.
Around midnight, I was chatting to a fellow student on a sofa when I felt an excruciating pain in my left eye. It was immediate and total agony, the worst pain I’d ever felt. I instinctively raised my hands to cover my face. When I squinted down, there was a pool of clear liquid in my palms. I was pretty drunk but knew I needed to get to a quieter, safer space. Mel’s bedroom was the next room; she saw me go in and followed.
At first I thought my hands were filled with tears, so I wiped them clean and sat for five minutes, attempting to ride out the pain. I sobered up fast, and could barely open my eye for either of us to figure out the damage caused. Every time I tried to, my vision was blurry – like looking underwater in a swimming pool. My right eye was streaming, too. Soon we took a taxi to A&E, and we were directed across the road to the eye hospital, where I was called immediately into an examination room.
During this time, we began to piece together what had happened. My intuition told me that something had hit me in the eye, and right before it happened somebody had been running around the room, pulling decorations off the wall. We realised a drawing pin must have flown across the room and stabbed me in the eye. I didn’t know if it bounced back out or if squeezing my eye shut in pain forced it out.
Our thinking was confirmed when a nurse told me I had a hole in my eye. A specialist was called to find out how deep it went. If it was only partially pierced, I could be discharged immediately with an eye patch. The concern was that it might be pierced all the way through. The front of our eyes can cope with foreign debris, like dust, sleep and flies; but the back doesn’t naturally encounter this and so isn’t built for it. There was also a risk that if the pin had hit the back of my eye, and the bundle of nerves there, I could have gone blind.
The specialist found that the pin had entered my cornea, anterior chamber and iris, and pierced the lens. The pool of fluid in my hands had not been tears, but liquid from the lens. The risk of infection, which could lead to the loss of my eye, was high, so I was immediately put in the only bed available, on the children’s ward.
I stayed for four days, wearing an eye patch, while my eye was monitored. It had reacted to the lens liquid as a foreign substance, and attacked it, so the hole wouldn’t close. However, no infection developed, so I was eventually discharged and booked in for surgery to repair the hole in three weeks’ time. I wore an eye patch day and night while I waited.
It went well; the surgeon peeled back my cornea 80%, like a tin can, to expose the iris. He then reached through the pupil to pull out the damaged lens, replaced it with an intraocular lens (a lens implant) and stitched it on to the iris to keep it in place. I was given a general anaesthetic, woke up high as a kite and began praising multiple nurses around me for all their hard work. I later realised there was just one nurse, doing laps.
My aftercare regime was strict because the new lens was at risk of dislodging. Any exercise other than walking was not allowed. I went to my university end-of-term party but left immediately, too worried about being knocked by drunk, dancing students.
I used to have 20/20 vision, but five years on, my long-distance vision in my left eye is still blurry. I can read close up with both eyes: text appears very crisp, with a halo around it.
I was really unlucky, but I’m aware of how much worse it could have been – the pin piercing my eye in a different way, or an infection picked up en route to hospital could have meant I lost my eye.
But I don’t bear any resentment towards the person who did it, and I’ve never tried to find them or tell them. I didn’t want to burden anyone with the guilt: they weren’t intentionally flicking pins around the room.
As told to Grace Holliday
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