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beneficii
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06 Mar 2015, 3:23 am

I'm curious. Now I haven't tried this since January and my mental health professionals are aware, but I did wanna ask this question. Why did I not lose vision?

I bought drain cleaner from the grocery store and a high-pressure spray bottle from a hardware store and put the drain cleaner in it. In the shower (so I could wash my eyelids and surrounding skin), I pressed the nozzle of the spray bottle against my eyeball and then sprayed. I felt major pain in my eye for a few seconds and my eyelids shut automatically, pushing the spray bottle away. With my eyes closed, but not tense, I washed the drain cleaner off my eyelids and the surrounding skin. I did not wash out my eye. I've tried this repeatedly, but all I ever got was some redness in the white part of the eye and foreign body sensation which went away after a day or so.

I dumped out the drain cleaner, which I tested and found only had a pH of 11, and replaced the bottle with lye crystals, put in using a funnel so the lye crystals wouldn't drop everywhere, and then filled it with cold water. This solution had a pH of 12, somewhat more basic. The solution had a blue color to it. The bottom of the bottle was hot from the reaction between the lye and the water, but the bottle stayed together. I did not wash out my eye. I repeated the process as above multiple times, but again got only redness in the white part of the eye and foreign body sensation which went away after a day or so.

I then got 2 pieces of cloth, the better to keep my eyelids open, and an earwax cotton cleaner stick one side of which was made wet. I put a few lye crystals into a container. I then stuck the wet tip of the earwax cleaner to the lye crystals for about 30 seconds. I saw the same blue color on the tip of the earwax cleaner. I tested the pH, which was 13, the most basic of them all! Holding my eyelids open with the cloth, I slowly moved the earwax cleaner tip with the lye-water solution on it toward my cornea and made contact. The most searing pain imaginable occurred and I could not hold it to my eye even for a second as the eyelids immediately shut! The eyelids were not in pain, however, as the sides of the tip that they touched did not have the lye-water solution, only pure water. I did not wash out my eye.

Again, I had redness in the white part of the eye and foreign body sensation that went away after a day or so.

I have not suffered any permanent loss of vision from all this, even though I would expect some damage to have been done at least one of those times.

Why is that? I wonder.


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zer0netgain
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06 Mar 2015, 12:43 pm

Aside from WHY would you do this to yourself....the human body is a miracle of engineering. In spite of what SHOULD cause irreparable damage, a lot of things it can recover from.

My guess is that short of an acid or base that would dissolve tissue on contact (and likely anything that contains it), the body (and in this case, the eye) has a way to not only compensate for the exposure but to try and purge it. What's the ph of tears? Consider that the instant you did this, the body flushed fluid to and out the eyeball to try and purge the chemical you just used.

People say to let a cut bleed. It's sound advice if you aren't dealing with a danger of major blood loss and can't otherwise clean a wound. Blood flowing out will flush contaminants and germs AWAY from the body. Bandaging a wound instantly without letting it bleed or otherwise cleaning the wound only traps germs and contaminants in the wound itself.



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06 Mar 2015, 3:27 pm

The solutions were probably not concentrated enough, and the body is able to replace killed cells.
Nothing happened to my skin when some more concentrated than drain cleaner strong acid got on my face, there was no pain or irritation whatsoever.


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beneficii
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06 Mar 2015, 4:13 pm

zer0netgain wrote:
My guess is that short of an acid or base that would dissolve tissue on contact (and likely anything that contains it), the body (and in this case, the eye) has a way to not only compensate for the exposure but to try and purge it. What's the ph of tears? Consider that the instant you did this, the body flushed fluid to and out the eyeball to try and purge the chemical you just used.


I did use a very strong base: lye (a.k.a. caustic soda or sodium hydroxide). A base is supposed to bring the more severe kind of injury than most acids, because it can penetrate tissue. Lye has frequently been blamed for vision loss when it gets into the eyes. In fact, the container for the lye crystals I bought says this:

Quote:
POISON: [image of a skull and bones] MAY BE FATAL OR CAUSE PERMANENT DAMAGE IF SWALLOWED. CAUSES SEVERE BURNS TO EYES AND SKIN.


One one occasion when I used the tip of the cotton swab, a lye crystal got stuck to it. I forced the lye crystal into the eye itself.


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beneficii
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06 Mar 2015, 4:19 pm

btbnnyr wrote:
The solutions were probably not concentrated enough, and the body is able to replace killed cells.
Nothing happened to my skin when some more concentrated than drain cleaner strong acid got on my face, there was no pain or irritation whatsoever.


I knew I was using very strong bases. The pH was 11 for the store-bought drain cleaner, which I've read is enough to cause permanent vision loss to the eye on contact and many have lost vision because of this if they did not immediately wash their eyes out. I brought the drain cleaner to the ophthalmologist (physician specializing in diseases of the eye) who said I was lucky not to have blinded my eye after even just one time. (The ophthalmologist was left under the impression I only tried it once.) I went for an even higher pH, which would be expected to do more damage, 12, when I created a solution of lye in water; because this solution was even more basic than the last, I would have expected more damage. I then went for a pH of 13, very highly basic, which should have caused a lot of damage.


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06 Mar 2015, 4:26 pm

Why do you seem to desire permanant blindness or did you do that before being aware it carried that sort of risk...there are safer ways to wash you're eyelids than drain cleaner I imainge that don't carry that risk.


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beneficii
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06 Mar 2015, 4:57 pm

Sweetleaf wrote:
Why do you seem to desire permanant blindness or did you do that before being aware it carried that sort of risk...there are safer ways to wash you're eyelids than drain cleaner I imainge that don't carry that risk.


I intended blindness and washed my eyelids with water, not lye.

Here is an article on lye poisoning:

http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/MMG/MMG.asp?id=246&tid=45


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beneficii
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06 Mar 2015, 5:06 pm

This shows what alkali burns (i.e. burns caused by bases) can do to the eye; this section mentions lye:

Quote:
Alkali [i.e. base] burns. Chemicals commonly responsible for alkali injuries of the eye include sodium hydroxide (lye; found in drain cleaners and industrial cleaning solutions), ammonia (found in household cleaning solutions and fertilizers), and calcium hydroxide (lime; found in cement and plaster).

Alkali chemicals are lipophilic and penetrate cell membranes through saponification of membrane lipids. Hydroxyl ions, which are common to many alkali chemicals, denature the collagen matrix of the cornea and facilitate further chemical penetration. Affected tissues can undergo liquefactive necrosis, in which the inflammatory response triggers release of proteolytic enzymes, leading to a cascade of damage. Potent alkalis can reach the anterior chamber in less than 15 seconds, causing destruction of tissues in the cornea and anterior chamber (including the trabecular meshwork, lens, and ciliary body). Penetration can continue to occur long after the initial exposure takes place.

Direct chemical damage to the conjunctiva can lead to scarring, forniceal shortening, symblepharon formation, and cicatricial ectropion or entropion. Destruction of conjunctival goblet cells can contribute to a lifetime of dry eye. Severe burns to the limbal stem cells may cause limbal stem cell deficiency, resulting in opacification and eventual neovascularization of the cornea due to loss of corneal epithelial progenitor cells. Moreover, glaucoma can arise from injury to the trabecular meshwork, contraction of the anterior structures of the globe, and possibly chemical and inflammatory damage to the ganglion cells in the posterior segment of the eye.


Image

http://www.aao.org/publications/eyenet/ ... orPrint=1&

Never saw anything even near that in my eye, despite using lye, a strong base.

EDIT: Also, to clarify, the drain cleaner I used contained lye.


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06 Mar 2015, 5:39 pm

It's like this 100-yr old that smoked her last cigarette at 93 and only stopped smoking because her hands were trembling too much and she couldn't get the cigarette in her mouth no more.

In Belgium they stopped a woman that was driving erratic and when they breath analysed her she had a Blood Alcohol Content of more than 10 8O 8O The cops that had breath analysed her didn't know what to do as anything over 0.5BAC would normally make someone comatose. They took her to a hospital in the end for a blood test.
Turned out she was an ether sniffer. You can buy it over the counter at the pharmacy here.

Did not read your whole post as it is too gruesome for me and real reasons as to the why's of it not affecting you there aren't.
Having intoxicated myself to the limit over the years and lived to tell the tale I always thought of it as a lesson learned. I'm sort of hoping you can do the same with your experiences. Take care and remember... curiosity killed the cat :|