Woman rushed to hospital after mistaking nail glue for eye drops
A woman ended up in the hospital after mistakenly pouring nail glue into her eye.
Brianne Shipley, who uses the username @breezybre416 on TikTok, posted a video of herself sitting in the hospital with one of her eyes glued shut and a tube sticking out of it. “Okay guys, I’m at the ER because I was half asleep and I needed to put in my antibiotic eye drops tonight,” her video began.
“And instead of grabbing the eye drops, I grabbed the Kiss nail glue,” she recalled as her eye was being flushed out.
The video received over two million views as of Tuesday, November 5.
Further discussing the incident with People, Shipley explained that this was her first time using eye drops for a bacterial infection and they were kept on her nightstand. Her Amazon Alexa device was programmed to alert her every few hours to put the drops in.
“After I got the notification, I blindly reached over, grabbed the bottle, opened my eye with one hand, and put the drops in,” she told the outlet. “As the drop was falling I realized the consistency of the plastic bottle felt wrong. As soon as it hit my eye, I started screaming.”
She realized that she had accidentally grabbed a bottle of nail glue, which she showed in a different TikTok was the exact same size as her eye drops and had the same type of cap.
The screaming woke up her teenage son in the room next door who she instructed to call 911.
“That first 10 minutes was just huge panic – I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Shipley told People.
Her son then did some quick research on the internet, which told her to start flushing her eye with water until she could get to a hospital. This ended up releasing the eye from being glued shut. Her doctors told her that without taking that extra step at home, she may have caused more permanent damage to her eye.
“The doctors and nurses were very helpful, and immediately numbed it with eye drops,” she said. “Then they looked for tears and abrasions and used a Q-tip to fish the hardened shards of glue out.”
Because of the acid in the nail glue, her eye had to be flushed with a Morgan Lens, which has a suction cup on one end to attach to the eye itself while the other end has a tube meant to draw any impurities out of the eye. Shipley said this process took between 30 and 45 minutes.
Despite her embarrassment over the mistake, her doctor informed her that this happens “a lot more than you think.”
“I knew I would be embarrassed and there would be stupid comments, but it was more about letting people know: keep this stuff separate,” she told People.
“I was a first-time eye drop user so I didn’t think about it but now, I keep all my medications separate.”
Many people even mentioned in the TikTok’s comments section that they’ve made similar mistakes with other products.
“I accidentally put fingernail fungus drops in my eye instead of my eyedrops, same thing I was half asleep, and the bottles were exactly the same size and shape. Luckily, I immediately rinsed my eye,” one commenter recalled.
“They seriously need to change their packaging. This happens way too often,” another commenter suggested.
