Obligatory not today, but last Tuesday. I work nights cleaning kitchen systems with pressure washers and chemicals. Well, normally I have some kind of eye protection with me because of said chemicals, but that day I forgot and just thought “eh, it’s an easy day. I’ll be fine.” Welp. We got to our first site and we had to also clean the hood filters there too, so we took them down and headed to the back area where the sinks are to soak them. I opened up the chemical jug to pour into the sinks and soak the filters in order for them to break down the grease and gunk so they’ll be easier to blast clean. The chem we use is basically soap on steroids, incredibly basic (in the chemistry sense) and will eat through grease like nobody’s business. Well, a single droplet of this stuff managed to splash out of the sink and directly into my eye. The burning pain was instant as well as the blurry vision. Luckily I reacted fast enough to flush it out with water in time, but dear god it was intense. I had contacts on at the time too so I was worried about what would happen as I was flushing my eye out.
After the major pain subsided, I went to the bathroom to take out my contacts and only then realized just how absolutely red my eye was. My eye was constantly watering throughout the night and luckily I had a pair of glasses with me so I wasn’t completely without vision. There was a dull burning for the rest of the night and for the next 4 days my eye kept watering and gunking up. Yesterday was actually the first day where I woke up and my eyelid wasn’t glued shut by the sheer amount of dried gunk. The redness is almost gone by now and no vision problems have occured from what I can tell. Surprisingly, I think my contact lens protected my iris and pupil from any real damage the chemical may have caused. Never forgetting my goggles again after this.
TL;DR: forgot my safety goggles, thought it was no biggie, karma shot me in the eye with cleaning chemical. Better now, but it hurt.
Comments
The goggles… they do nothing
I really don’t (ok I do… But still) get why people fuck around like this. We work with serious caustics at our plant and we constantly need to get people to wear their glasses. We hand them out for free. We even hand out some of the Gucci ones for free. Just…. Just wear them. It’s not worth causing even temporary eye damage. Let alone to have bad vision till you die because you don’t feel like wearing them.
The time I made jerked fish and was chopping scotch bonnet peppers. I swear a drop the size of a pinhead must’ve hit my eye because it was like napalm in my eye for the rest of the night.
I’m sorry that happened to you!
Here’s a random idea and something I do: if safety goggles are fairly cheap, I’d get a second pair and put it in the same container as the rest of my essential gear. That applies if you carry a bag of some sort to work at all. Most of the time I’d forget it exists, I’d use a “main” one, but the times I forget the “main” one is when the spare one in the bag gets to shine.
r/OSHA