The Dissection
In honor of Halloween, I wanted to share a case that came into Charity Hospital when I was resident there. It is one of the most bizarre cases I ever came across and impossible for me to explain.
A woman in her twenties was brought in by ambulance. She was almost comatose because of a combination of drugs and alcohol. She had been found by her roommate naked in bed with “something wrong with her eye.” What we saw was that someone had taken a scalpel and dissected her eye. The lids had both been cut off in a circle around the boney edge of her eye socket. The fatty tissue, eye muscles and everything else around her eyeball had been carefully removed without damaging the eyeball itself. It was clean and the bleeding had been controlled just as it might have been in the operating room. All that was left was her eyeball, still hooked on by the nerve running back into her skull. Her pupil reacted normally, so the assumption was that when she woke up she would have normal vision. However, she would not be able to move her eye or keep it moist by blinking. The specialists said that nothing could be done to save the eye. She would have to have a perfectly good eye removed and some sort of a skin graft placed over the open tissue.
I never heard if they ever found any suspects or more clarification of why or how this happened. Another item to add to your list of reasons to not get smashed on drugs and alcohol.
Trackback from your site.
Comments (4)
Carolyn (Rose) Walker
| #
Holy cow, that sounds like a Criminal Minds episode I’ve seen! Seriously! There was one where eyelids were being removed.
Reply
Becca
| #
Who are these people??!!
Reply
Nathan
| #
Woah. Perhaps I’ll come back later to take a look at the cookie recipe. 😉
Reply
Teresa Velez
| #
That is a very sad story, and sadly she ha only her self to blame for 1/2 of what happened to her. So ?????
Reply