Life of the IT-Drummer

This is a long personal story with a lack of interesting points, so if you have something better to do, you should do that.

A while back, our sink got totally blocked, and just wouldn’t drain water at all. So I decided to buy the classic sink-drainer in norway: plumbo. I usually have great respect for such strong base powder (or any chemicals in general), and at the beginning, this was the case.

We tried pouring down some powder directly in the sink (without checking the pipes below it), but there was just not enough space, so I actually filled the hole with plumbo before I realized it was .. not enough room to pour boiling water. Therefore there obviously was a mismatch between plumbo powder and boiling water. Therefore, the plumbo coagulated (if this is the right term), and made a solid mass in the pipes.

A day later, we discovered that it was possible to remove the pipes below the sink (this we should have done earlier), and managed to remove some water and a lot of dirt from the pipes. Now my plan was to hit it with plumbo again, but it didn’t help. Some time later, we managed to remove all the pipes, including the “problem”-pipe. This pipe had a massive blockage, consisting of dirty water, plumbo and dirt, and it was a pretty hard mix.

We tried slamming the pipe toward the sink in order to remove the blockage, but it was of no use. It was at this time, a time when I was pretty mad and very eager to remove the blockage, that I took a butter knife, and stuck it in there to remove parts of it. It was at that moment that a piece from the plumbo mix jumped up at a great speed, and hit me conviently in the eye. Great.

I immediately flushed my eye in the sink for about five minutes, and didn’t feel that bad. The pain was light and I thought to myself that this was ok. But still, the eye is not something you wanna play games with, so I planned a visit to the paramedic facility (Legevakten?) the next day. This decision was based on the fact that the pain was mild (it felt like having a splinter in my eye, for then rubbing it for some time), and my vision was as good/bad as before.

The next day I waited a few hours at the paramedic facility and a doctor did some tests on my eye. Their conclusion was that I was lucky, and it appered that the damage was mostly done outside of the iris of my eye. To be sure, I was sent to an eye facility the next day, and even got an eye patch, hurray! I sure felt like a pirate. I was not sure if my eyes should be closed or open inside the patch, but I think the point was to close my eye, but the patch did a very poor job, and I must say that it was VERY tricky walking around with one eye. It felt like beeing slighty drunk.

The next day, I went to the eye specialist, (the doctor from yesterday didn’t manage to get an appointment, so it took another hour and a half before it was my turn) and a nice doctor told me that I had been lucky, and that I should be more careful with plumbo. Ow, and if you, lady doctor, are reading this: When you search at things on google, you don’t need to use the + between words. (And what kind of world do we live in, when googling gives you better information than calling the poison central? I guess that’s progress. ) I also found out that my vision is poor, so a visit to an optician is at it’s place. So now I’m on steroids (Spersadex with Chloramphenicol, eye drops), and my eyes are feeling fine.

On this journey, I learned a lot about eyes and chemical injuries, here are the key notes:

• If your eyes have been in contact with chemicals: FLUSH YOUR EYES. For up to 30 minutes. At least 10 minutes. It’s damn important in order to milden the chemicals in your eye. This is MORE important than going to the doctor.
• Go find a doctor. This is important if you wanna save your eye. If you have such an accident, you probably will spend 3-6 hours under a special salty sink. Not much fun, but beeing blind ain’t either.
• When treating chemicals: Wear eye protection. All of the troubles I’ve been through could have been avoided by applying the right precautions.