Thickair Blog

Its pretty amazing to think that we went a whole year in Panama, building a house etc. with out injury. Or REAL injury I mean, the psycho-emotional injuries are another story.  I am especially amazed when I think of those days when we were emotionally charged with anger using the air hammer….not such a good combination. YIPES.

So I was working away on the vegetable garden trellis, drilling thousands of holes for the copper rails and at some point the slightest tiniest bit of metal flew into my eye. Little did I know it though. I went to bed thinking I had a stupid eyelash. The next morning I woke to thinking I had a ‘cold’ in my eye or something, still not realizing what it might be. Went to bed seeing now that there was a little speck of black metal in my eye. I went to our clinic here, and because it was saturday morning there wasn’t anyone there. We drove to the fancy new clinic in Coronado and they attempted to remove it with saline solution and a q-tip. Still no effect. By this time my eye was swollen and red and in a lot of pain. They said that I could wait until an opthamalogist could see me, and they would call me when they could talk with him. It was Saturday evening so the likely hood was getting slimmer. He said that my eye would eventually absorb the metal and that is probably what would happen. EEK.

After a few phone calls to some very good friends that understand Panama and know a lot of people, we had through this person talked with an opthamalogist and he said I shouldn’t wait and must have it removed immediately. There is only one doctor in Panama City at the Paitilla Hospital on call that could do it. So we made the 2 hour trip to Panama City to get it removed. The doctor quickly responded to the phone call, bringing his wife and daughter with him, attended to me in 5 minutes. He stuck the tip of a needle right in my eye to remove the metal.  It was amazing that such a miniscule object could cause so much pain. He told me that he does 5 or 6 of these procedures every week because construction workers refuse to wear eye protection.

That’s for sure. While building the house, Pedro who was the person good at cutting things with the ‘flexible’ - this is what they call it but is a disc grinder that they use for multiple uses - cutting, grinding, sawing etc. He never used eyeware and there were always sparks flying wild. In Panama there are no real enforcement of safety, wearing a hard hat is sort of a joke and boy you should see the ladders they use.

This entry was posted Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 8:58 am and is filed under Construction, Panama. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.