A 13 year old girl from Manchester was rushed to A&E after a pencil ended up stuck in her eye.
The incident left her with lead from the pencil embedded in her eyeball, and was the result of another student throwing it from the back of the classroom.
“At first I had not realized what had happened until my friend said I think you have something in your eye,” she said of the incident.
“A pencil had been thrown from the front of the classroom to the back where I had been standing chatting to my friends. A part of the pencil had gone into my eye which must have happened so quickly as I had not really felt anything.”
The girls eye, with the lead still in.
“After the operation, I could not see much out of my left eye at all but gradually my sight seemed to improve,” the girl wrote of her experience three years later when the case report was written. “I still have a few stitches in the back of my eye and also at the front but they do not affect me in any way.”
Incidents like this are more common than you think, with 800+ similar incidents reported within a 2 year period… adding substance to why your teachers give you an earful for throwing things around the room!
“I was told that the pencil tip was just millimetres away from causing me instant blindness so I know how lucky I was,” she said.
