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Woman mistakes nail glue for eye drops, glues eye shut

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Looking for eye drops, the woman reached for the wrong bottle.

A woman in Michigan accidentally glued her eye shut when she mixed up her bottles of eye drops and nail glue, according to news reports.

The woman, Yacedrah Williams, said she had gone to sleep with her contact lenses in, but woke up at 1 a.m. and wanted to take them out, according to local news outlet WXYZ in Detroit. Since her eyes were dry, she needed some eye drops to help remove the lenses. 

So she reached for her purse, where she kept a small bottle of eye drops. But she also stored a small bottle of nail glue in her purse, for fixing broken fingernails, WXYZ reported.

Williams realized her mistake a second too late. "I was like, 'Oh my goodness.' It dropped in my eye, and I tried to wipe it away. It sealed my eye shut," Williams told WXYZ. "I just started throwing cold water [on it], and I was trying to pull my eyes apart but couldn't." 

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Williams' decision to put water in her eye turned out to be a good one. "If you ever get anything in your eye, the immediate thing to do is try and flush your eye out" by holding your head under a faucet or pouring a bottle of water over your eye, Dr. George Williams, an ophthalmologist at Beaumont Health in Royal Oak, Michigan, told WXYZ. "You'll make a mess but you may save your vision." 

He added that Yacedrah Williams is not the first person to accidentally put nail glue in her eye.

Williams was taken to the hospital where doctors removed her contact lens, which had the nail glue on it. "They said that contact saved my vision," Yacedrah Williams said. She lost her eye lashes on that eye because doctors had to flip the top of the eyelid and pull on it to remove the lens, she said.

Yacedrah Williams added that she'll never keep eye drops and nail glue together in her purse again, and she likely won't use nail glue anymore.

Originally published on Live Science.  

Rachael Rettner
Rachael Rettner
Contributor

Rachael is a Live Science contributor, and was a former channel editor and senior writer for Live Science between 2010 and 2022. She has a master's degree in journalism from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. She also holds a B.S. in molecular biology and an M.S. in biology from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has appeared in Scienceline, The Washington Post and Scientific American.