Losing one eye - what's the standard medical care received?

[lin]

Googled - 'medical care for eye loss', 'first aid eye injury' and various other searches with similar terminology which didn't get me where I needed because it mostly centred on eye loss through disease, or eye injuries that weren't severe enough.

Cut for, ah, squicky subject matter.

Comments

[syntinen_laulu]

These days the favoured course of action is to try to keep the eye if at all possible, even if its function is irrevocably ruined.

About 10 years ago my elderly mother leaned over to pull up some weeds from her vegetable patch and poked her eye out on a pea-stick - actually a very common cause of major eye accident, and the effect probably not dissimilar to your character’s injury. The retina was detached, and she underwent several operations to try and stick it back, all unsuccessful. But even after they gave up on trying to restore its function the surgeons still didn’t remove the eye. (It looked rather weird as she then had one normal eye and one with no iris, just a black centre - very striking as her other was pale blue.) She had to take all sorts of tiresome care of it but even so she kept getting infections in it, and in the end asked her surgeon if it wouldn’t be better to remove it, and he agreed it would.

What they then did, after removing the eye, was to put in place a permanent fixed prosthesis in the back of the eye socket, so it kept its shape. It had odd bumps and dips in front, which matched dips and bumps on the back of the cosmetic ‘false eye’ which she put in whenever she wanted to look ‘normal’ (the permanent prosthesis, in pink plastic, was pretty icky to look at) and could take out and wash.

Two anecdotes which may or may not be useful:

- Despite the dips and bumps which were meant to keep the cosmetic front in place, it did sometimes slide without her feeling it, so that it apparently was staring wildly off to the side or up or down. When we were out with her in a pub or restaurant, we sometimes had to hiss at her, ‘Mum, your eye has slipped, go to the Ladies and put it right’.

- She didn’t always bother, and often went out with an eye patch. She found that dogs absolutely hated the sight of the prosthetic, and she could send the friendliest or alternatively the most aggressive dog scurrying away, tail between legs, just by raising her patch and looking the dog in the eye. You wouldn’t think that dogs were that visually sensitive, would you? But it was a quite consistent reaction.