Woman glues eye shut after mistaking nail glue for drops

A WOMAN glued her eye shut after she mistook a bottle of nail glue for eye drops.

Paula Griffin, 29, woke with blurred vision and mistakenly squirted the hazardous substance into her right eye, gluing it shut for eight hours.

Eye specialists at Bournemouth Hospital in Dorset cut off her lashes to prise it open again and warned her she could lose her sight.

The company secretary, from Bournemouth, told the Daily Mail she was still sleepy when she grabbed the bottle from the bathroom shelf.

“By the time I realised what had happened, it was too late and I couldn’t dodge the liquid completely,” she said.

“I managed to stop it hitting the centre of the eye, and doctors told me later that it saved me from permanent damage.”

She said it was agonising and burning so she shut her eye when her eyelashes became stuck together.

In her confused state she had grabbed an identical sized bottle of nail glue that was next to the eye drops.

The glue is used by beauty professionals to fix false nails and carries a toxic symbol and a warning that it bonds skin within seconds.

Doctors gave her paraffin to help dissolve the glue and she had to take a week off work.

She has a cut across her eyeball and now wears false eyelashes.

Consultant in emergency medicine at Poole Hospital, Dr Simon Bell, said: “We certainly don’t see these sort of injuries every day.

“As long as the glue remains on the outside of the eye, the injury will be extremely painful but will only have superficial or cosmetic damage.”