Woman’s eye glued shut after mistaking nail glue for eyedrops

A Detroit-area woman says she’s lucky to have her eyesight after accidentally using nail glue as an eyedropper on her contact lens.

“It sealed my eye shut,” Yacedrah Williams told local station WXYZ.

Williams says she woke up in the middle of the night to take out her contact lenses last week when the incident occurred. She reached into her purse for her eyedrops and grabbed a bottle of nail-repairing glue instead, she told local station WXYZ.

The two bottles were similar in size and shape, and she was too groggy to tell the difference, she said.

Williams was staring into the dropper and squeezing out a bead to moisten her eyes when she noticed something was off. The liquid didn’t look right, she said.

But it was too late. The bead of glue fell into her eye and she knew she was in trouble. She tried to wipe the glue away but her eye was “completely shut,” she said.

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“She went into a panic,” said her husband Derrick. “I tried to keep her from panicking but then I said, ‘Derrick, this is her eye, not yours.'”

Williams rushed to a sink and immediately tried to flush her eye out.

“I started throwing cold water (on it) and I was trying to pull my eyes apart and I was just screaming for him to call 911,” she said.

They took her to the hospital where doctors managed to get her eye open and remove the glue.

Williams says the doctors pulled on her eyelid and flipped it open, then removed the contact lens. She lost her eyelashes in the process, but she’s glad she didn’t lose anything else.

“They said that actually, the contact saved my vision,” Williams said.

Ophthalmologist George Williams (no relation to Yacedrah) said she did the right thing by immediately washing out her eye.

“If you ever get anything in your eye, the immediate thing to do is try and flush your eye out,” he said. “Hold your eye open and just flood your eye. You’ll make a mess, but you might save your vision.”

He added that he doesn’t blame Williams for mixing up the bottles.

“If it’s any comfort to her, she’s not the first person to make this mistake.”

Yacedrah Williams says she’s learned a painful lesson about organization after her ordeal.

“I don’t think I’ll ever have nail glue again,” she said.