You have read well. I recently had the (dis)pleasure of being on the receiving end of a drill bit at the doctor’s office. And yes, exercise was the cure, not food!

Here’s the story…

I had a rare weekend off last month and used it to make some progress on a 1963 Corvette Split Window restoration. I’m still in the teardown process, so much of the time is spent removing and cleaning parts. dirty. This involves first a dip in parts cleaner and then usually some heavy polishing with a wire wheel on my bench grinder. Now, wire wheel grinders can be really nasty as individual wires sometimes break loose and fly at you at dangerous speeds. Think of little needle-shaped bullets.

So I always wear safety glasses. It is something that has been ingrained in me since I was a teenager when I helped my father and my uncles in the garage. Those were the days of the woodworking style glasses. You know, the really ugly ones that look more like snorkel masks? Regardless, the safety glass industry has made great strides in fashion since then and many safety glasses now look more like cool sunglasses. So that’s what I was wearing while polishing a rusty Corvette steering rod on my day off. But it was not enough.

The problem with those cool looking glasses/glasses is that they don’t fit the face well. They are better than standard glasses, but still leave gaps, both top and bottom. And that space below is the path a stray metal splinter took to hurtle into my left eye. I felt it, of course, but it was a very small particle and didn’t bother me any more than a piece of sand or dirt from a wind storm. I kept working on the Corvette and didn’t think much more about it that night.

The next morning when I woke up my eye still hurt. Again, just the feeling that there was a little spec in there and it wouldn’t come off. Or I thought maybe I just scratched my cornea and it would heal. The human eye heals extremely quickly.

I go to the doctor

But two days later the bread was no less. My wife looked closely with a magnifying glass and was able to see the spec. She couldn’t tell what it was, but it seemed to be stuck in the actual cornea of ​​my eye, not just floating around. Of course, it was Saturday, so I reluctantly headed to Urgent Care to sit in an uncomfortable chair for 2 hours.

When the doctor finally got to me and looked at my eye with his slit light, it only took him 15 seconds to figure out what happened. He said that he sees it quite often. The little sliver of metal was hot when it came off the grinding wheel, so when it hit my eye, it actually melted and stayed there. This is why normal tears and eye drops do not move.

Then the fun begins. He puts a drop in my eye that tells it. This is a strange feeling I can tell you. He leaves the room (probably to remove another splinter from the next guy’s eye) and returns after the gout has had a chance to do his job. He then he turns off the lights and uses this device to keep my eye open. It looked like a remnant from medieval times. Then the doctor takes out his tray of spikes, needles, and other sharp, shiny instruments. He picks out the sharpest one and approaches my eye with it.

OK, at this point I’m still calm… about everything. At first I thought there was no way I could stop my eye from twitching as the needle-sharp beak approached. But the numbing drops actually worked to counter my natural reaction of blinking. Well, that and the device praying for my eyelids to open. So he starts poking around the metal splinter. Every time I tried to get it out, my vision would change and blur as the needle rotated my eyeball!

He finally came out and I breathed a sigh of relief that the worst was over. But no, that was not the case.

The dreaded EYE DRILL!

The doctor explained that the metal frame had been in my eye long enough for it to begin to rust. Through a magnifying mirror, he let me look at my left eye with my right. In fact, you could see a slightly darkened halo on my cornea where the spec had just been. And apparently rust is toxic to the cornea, so letting it fix itself wasn’t an option. So, do you know how they remove rust from your eye? They pierce it!

The drill is a small hand job. It reminds me of the drill the dentist uses, which of course doesn’t help my mood right now. The doctors tell me to relax (yeah right!) and then they start drilling my eye. What I learned later is that it’s more like grinding, not drilling. The idea is to grind/drill all the areas where the rust has spread. Once the toxin is removed, his eye heals over where they pierced. Basically, it’s the lesser of two evils. The drill deals damage, but it’s damage you can recover from. Leaving the rust there would do more damage as it spread.

Everything went well, but definitely not something I want to repeat. So now, when I work on getting my Corvette ready for sale or anything else in the garage that has the potential to blow parts, I wear a full face shield. I still wear my cool looking safety glasses just because it’s a habit, but I have a full face shield by the grinder that I can put over the safety glasses. You should also consider it if you spend any time in the garage. Your eyes aren’t exactly replaceable!