Corneal Abrasion Treatment, Symptoms, Healing Time, and Causes

Today’s show, we’re going over corneal
abrasions. I’m Dr. Travis Zigler and I’m Dr. Jenna Zigler and in the 5
minutes, we’re going over everything you need to know about a
corneal abrasion including treatment what it is, what the heck cornea is,
and then what can cause it, which is a whole bunch of things and pretty much
we’re just going to let you know everything you need to know about them. Have you
ever had a corneal abrasion? Let us know what you did for treatment and what is your
experience with it. I don’t think it was a positive one but let’s first go
into a little anatomy about what the cornea is and explain what that is you
can kind of understand what a corneal operation is then the cornea is arguably one of the most important parts of the human eye or any
eye for that matter. The cornea acts as a shield to the eye. It protects it as
you’ll see and it’s one of the surfaces that allows the eye to see. The cornea
is basically the very front surface of your eye. It covers right on
top of that colored part of your eye Next, let’s go into what is a corneal
abrasion. An abrasion of your skin just think of it as a small scratch or a
small scrape. That’s the same thing that invisible dome that she just
described thousands and thousands of nerves on it. When you have that
invisible dome and you just get a nice little scrape on it, that’s an abrasion and an abrasion can be huge. It can be something that
pretty much takes out the whole cornea which is not good enough but the whole front layer of the cornea and you’ll have a nice big
scratch but it goes to be anything small it can be very small from let’s say like a
fingernail or something actually usually fingernails are pretty
big but like a makeup brush I’ve seen those and that actually causes so
some other things that can cause a corneal abrasion include a chemical in
your eye usually that’s a chemical burn but it causes small corneal abrasion as
well rubbing your eyes too hard You’ve probably seen people do this a
lot. I would not recommend doing that. It’s called hard knuckle rubbing. We
don’t recommend doing that at all. Eye infections can actually cause corneal
abrasions as well. If you over wear your contact lenses that can cause a corneal
abrasion as well getting something in your eye like dust sawdust and pollen.
The most common one I did believe I saw when I was in practice was a baby finger
nail. All the time baby fingernails are sharp like razor blades. They come at you
unexpectedly and if they get you that can cause a pretty
severe operation also tree sticks so branches and things like that
swing back hit a person in the eye and then the most common one that we usually
see is probably metal or like sawdust in the eye from somebody to do in
woodworking or doing like soldering or something. We worked in South Carolina
for a while in a very industrial part. I think I took a piece of metal out of
somebody’s eye every day if not every other day. It was one of my favorite things to do. Tania says, hello. Hello. Carol, hi. Not my
favorite things to do but what is the best course of action that they can take
if they have or think they have a corneal abrasion? Well, first off, if you
get something in your eye, you just want to rinse it out. If you you can get to
a tap water or eye rinse. Some workplaces have eye rinses. So, make sure
you find that rinse your eye out right away. If you feel like you still have something
in your eye you need to go see somebody as soon as possible so call
up your local optometrist do not go to your urgent care or your ER. Go to your
local optometrist or ophthalmologist. Get in right away. They’ll see you. If you
have a red painful eye right away Seek care immediately. Let’s
discuss some symptoms that you should be experiencing with your corneal abrasion.
The first symptom that you’re going to notice or most likely notice is just the
feeling of intense pain. Especially when you open or you close your eyes or your
eyelid goes over that area at all These are incredibly painful. It doesn’t really
matter how small of an abrasion is. It’s still going to hurt like crazy and you’re
going to know that something is wrong you may feel like you have something stuck
in your eye like we talked about earlier you know sand dust things like that you
may actually have something stuck in your eye or it may just be an abrasion
from something that was there previously so your eyes might be tearing like crazy
they might be watering you might have a really intense sensitivity to light so
this is both natural and artificial so when you go outside you can barely stand
it when you’re inside even working it might be tough for you to keep your eyes
open you might have redness in one or both eyes usually it’s just the one that
you know is effective but it’s possible that both are affected if you had sand
or something like that fly into your eyes also headaches that don’t seem to
go away because really that board it’s just like a boring pain that you’re
going to feel and it almost feels like a headache around your eyes. Sharon says,
it’s like a knife, it feels awful. Yes, it feels awful and your vision might be affected too depending on how large the
abrasion is but even small abrasions you’re tearing so much and you
can’t keep your eyes open and so your vision is just going to be affected with
this. If you’re liking this video so far make sure that you hit the thumbs up
button below and while you’re down there make sure to subscribe to our channel
and hit the little bell to get notified whenever a new video comes out and also
let us know if you’ve ever had a corneal abrasion and what treatment you used so
put that in the comments below so let’s discuss treatments next so treatment is
can range from there’s a lot that you can do for a corneal abrasion but I’ll
walk you through a typical patient of mine that walks into my office with the
corneal abrasion so the first thing I like to do is measure it. I’ll measure
it with we have rulers on our microscope I’ll measure how the size of it. The
width of it. The height of it pretty much measure everything to make sure that
when I see you back in a day or two that it’s improving even though your pain
level will significantly improve if it’s improving but the first thing I want to
do is I want to make sure this is covered because you have an eyelid
that’s constantly blinking and if you have a scrape on your skin and you’re
constantly rubbing it like this it’s going to take a long time to heal and
it’s going to be very painful so that’s what your eyelids doing every time you
blink and then another thing is when you sleep what can happen is your eyelid
closes over that abrasion it can actually adhere to it and then when you
open your eyelid next it’s going to rip it off even more which is more painful than
the actual abrasion itself that’s so you don’t want either those to happen so
what I like to do is get you on an ointment right away so usually an
antibiotic ointment because we want it to be an antibiotic because we want
to make sure that you have an open wound on your eye we want to make sure it does
not get infected if it gets infected if your skin gets infected it’s not as big
of a deal because it’s your skin if you’re a cornea which is your invisible
window that helps you see gets infected it can cause scarring and then the
scarring can cause blindness that’s what we don’t want and so that’s why we cover it with an antibiotic to make sure
it doesn’t get any worse I usually have my patient put the antibiotic on
multiple times per day because we want to make sure that that eyelid is not
rubbing up against it now what I prefer to do just depends on the patient again
I like to put a bandage contact lens on so advantage contact lens is just the
lens that you put on over your eye and it covers that area so the eyelid
doesn’t hit it now that depends on the source of the Ragin we don’t like to do
that with a fingernail or a tree ranch because we’re worried about other things
as well and keep in mind if you wear contact lenses we can’t put a bandage
contact lens on you and so what we do is I usually put a bandage contact
lens on them put them on an antibiotic drop to cover that base so we don’t get
an infection so either you use an ointment or a drop with the contact lens to make sure we’re not rubbing that
eye and to prevent an infection the nice thing about your cornea is it heals
incredibly fast so if you have a smaller abrasion it’ll probably heal within 12
hours to 24 hours if you have a larger abrasion it might take up to a week but
to give you an example I used to see a lot of PRK patients and that’s where
they create one big corneal abrasion it’s about 11 mm by 11 mm so it’s very big and it takes them about 4 to 7
days depending on the patient that’s a complete corneal makeover
pretty much they take it all off and it has to regrow and so that’s with PRK
that’s a refractive surgery and those healed incredibly quickly
so that’s how fast your eye can heal your eye heals as fast as your mouth
does so you can think of when you burn your mouth takes about a day to two
sometimes longer depending on the severity what else was I going to bring up
with abrasions so with abrasions you want to make sure that I always
recommend putting an ointment on it every night before we go to bed for the
next 2 months because we have five layers to our cornea and the second
layer forms anchors down to the last layer and that’s what strengthens that
cornea if you don’t let those anchors form which takes about 1 to 2 to
3 months then your cornea is going to be weak and therefore every time
you sleep you risk reopening that abrasion because your eyelid can adhere
to the front layer the front layer is not tough enough to take it and it rips
it right off so there’s ointment out there I like Muro-128 5% that’s
and over the counter ointment has a little salty solution to it helps
draw fluid out of the eye I like to put my patients on that for 2 months if my
patients tell her of advantage contact lens I’ll also keep that on them I won’t
use the ointment then and will keep the bandage on them for about a month yeah
really allow that cornea to heal and these are called so when this happens
again and it happens continually this is called the recurrent corneal erosion and
many of you may have had that so this is when you wake up in the morning and it
reopens itself so like he said we’ll put you on a hypertonic ointment
such as Muro-128 that’s after the abrasion has healed because you want the
cornea to be healed over but it hasn’t healed completely so
that’s going to help out with that back to kind of you want to prevent an
infection so eyelid hygiene is so key we recommend using hypochlorous acid
eyelid cleanser to make sure that your eyelid stays clean because your eyelid
has a lot of bacteria on it and we want to make sure that we reduce bacteria
because you have an open wound you don’t want to get to the
point where you have to have surgery but surgery in some cases is necessary and
it is an option if you continue to have recurrent corneal erosion so make sure
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friend who you think might benefit from this information also let us know in the
comments below if you’ve ever had a corneal abrasion and what the treatment
protocol was for you