Why is it necessary to rinse eyes for 15 minutes after getting a chemical in? Wouldn’t 1 minute be enough?
In: 3596
[deleted]
Yeah, probably. But why do you wipe more than once? Because sometimes what should be enough, isn’t.
Most chemicals can “stick” as in leave a residue that you may have blinked into or under your eye lids. You’re basically just flooding out your eyes rather than washing them.
As a first aider you keep rinsing until the ambulance arrives. If you’ve rinsed too much they have wet face and hair. If you haven’t rinsed enough, they get a free labrador
You didn’t hear about “14 minute Fred”?
It’s not even “15 minutes”. It’s “at least 15 minutes”. You rinse until emerge arrives.
If you rinse ‘more than enough’, you’re okay to rinse longer. It’s all good. Water is fine.
If you think you rinsed ‘just enough’, and you’re wrong (because how are you supposed to know when enough is enough?), you go blind.
With that in mind, rinse as little as you’d like! I hear Golden Retrievers are great lifelong friends!
you may feel better after one minute, but there could still be stuff lingering than you can’t feel. that stuff can still do damage to your eyes, so it’s important to be very thorough
I got my Ph. D. in chemistry and took lab safety classes during grad school and for work later. I remember this particular part of safety training.
Your eye is relatively spongy. When chemicals get into your eye, they can soak in quickly. Then when you’re rinsing your eyes, you’re fighting equilibrium of the chemical being in your eye tissue vs going into the water. The constant flushing pulls the chemical away dissolved in water, but it takes a long time for all the chemical to fully leech out of your eye into the water.
As others have said, some chemicals absorb more slowly into the eye and stay on the surface more, making it easier for the water to wash it away faster, so those chemicals could be washed away in much less time.
But which chemicals absorb less well like this? We don’t know. So it’s best to play it safe and assume 15 minutes is required. And some chemical manufacturers may have done some sort of testing that indicate that the 15 minutes really are necessary to fully remove the chemical from your eye.
Not even just your eyes. I recently splashed some muriatic acid on my leg while cleaning. I quickly hosed my leg off, then got back to work, thinking nothing of it. The next morning, my leg felt like I had a bunch of mosquito bites that I’d scratched raw. Thinking that’s what it was, I didn’t even bother looking. It wasn’t until later that night that my leg really started hurting. I took a look and there were red about a half dozen red blisters, each the size of a dime – but the skin wasn’t broken – yet. It took a few minutes before I remembered the acid splash and put 2+2 together. It took a week before the pain stopped and the blisters popped and scabbed over, and another two weeks before things had sufficiently healed. I’m still not sure if the scars are going to be permanent.
All because I didn’t rinse long enough with water.
Hi. Former fireman here (with training for chem- rescue).
The long irrigation is because many dangerous chemicals will form solid precipitates/crystals when they first react with the eye.
These solids will continue to leech into the moisture that your eye creates to protect itself and continue to do damage. That is, unless you flush (irrigate) and keep doing so until all of those solids have been diluted away. That can take up to 30 minutes for some chemicals (and there are harsher demands for chemical showers in such facilities), but for most the 15 minute mandated minimum is enough (but hey, keep flushing if you can until the ambulance arrives).
Ideally you use a special irrigation solution (and most ambulances and all emergency rooms have irrigation fluid), because water is slightly different from the fluid inside the cornea and can cause chemicals to leech deeper due to osmosis. HOWEVER, immediate irrigation of the eye is far more important than ideal irrigation of the eye. So start irrigating with lukewarm water immediately and don’t stop until at least 15 minutes have passed.
Latest Answers