KLANG: A freak accident left part of a chopstick embedded in his eye, but miraculously, 13-year-old See Jing Yang escaped being blinded.
While playing with his elder brother Jing Fan, the Hin Hua High School student fell at the family home in Ambang Botanic near here. He hit his eye, which resulted in it swelling up and closing.
His mother Yoong Siat Kian, 48, quickly drove him to a clinic but was told to take him to a hospital instead because of the acute swelling.
“I rushed him to a nearby private hospital and was shocked when informed that a CT scan showed a 6cm object embedded in the eye,” said Yoong.
Ophthalmologist Dr Narendran Muthukrishnan, who was called to attend to the case, said although the medical team could clearly make the foreign object out, they could not tell what it was and how it could have entered the eye.
“I asked the mother to find out if there was anything broken at the spot where he had fallen,” said Dr Narendran.
When Yoong called her other son and asked him to check, he found the remnants of a broken wooden chopstick on the floor.
True enough, when the object was finally extracted, it was indeed part of the broken chopstick.
The chopstick had gone right through the eye cavity and into the sinus with the tip coming through the nasal cavity.
Doctors released it from the nose and removed it from the eye.
Luckily for Jing Yang, the broken chopstick’s entry was deflected and it went into the nasal cavity. If it had entered in a straight line, he would have been made blind.
Jing Yang said he did not realise that the chopstick had entered his eye and broken off when he fell.
“I did not feel it going in even though I felt a lot of pain after that,” said the youngest of three boys.
He added that he was happy that all went well as his biggest fear when his eye swelled up was that he would go blind in one eye.
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