A 37-year-old woman has been left blind in one eye after she was stabbed in the face with a shard of glass with doctors removing a plaited hair extension stuck in her eye socket after a fight with her sister.
According to Daily Mail, the lady whose identity wasn’t revealed was rushed to Delta State University Teaching Hospital where she was given local anaesthetic before surgeons pulled out the shard which had left her unable to see, then stitched up the cuts on her eyelids.
Before she was operated Doctors said she was in an ‘anxious state’ because of the gaping wound in her cheek.
Dr. Mabel Okiemute Etetafia of Delta State University reported the woman’s predicament in the journal BMJ Case Reports.
According to her, the woman’s right eye was producing excessive amounts of fluid and intensely red, the report said, but her eyeball was mostly intact. However, she suffered ‘irreversible’ damage to her cornea – the front of her eye – leaving it blinded and useless.
The section of hair believed to have been sliced off the woman’s weave during the attack were sticking out of a diagonal slash beneath her eye.
‘The cause of the retention of the woven artificial hair on the face was not initially clear,’ Dr Etetafia wrote.
Dr Mabel also revealed that the woman’s hair was hanging in front of her face and the plait became caught on the end of the glass during the stabbing.
She said it was driven into the flesh beneath her eye and pinned there by a piece of glass which broke off.
‘Although the patient had similar strands on her hair the flexible nature of the strands further posed a challenge to the cause of the retention.
‘The mechanism that introduced the woven artificial hair strands … is not clear but it is most likely that the hair was on the path of penetration of the broken glass at the time of the stab injury.’
Injuries of this kind can be life-threatening, Dr Etetafia added, because they are so close to vital body parts like blood vessels and the brain.