♪ For your eyes only ♪♪♪
Sometimes you suddenly become aware that you have subconciously been humming on a song that, as it turns out, proves to relate to something currently going on. The song from the old James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only, had been playing in my head all night, but I didn’t realise the connection until day break.
The evening before, I had been hospitalized because of a severe eye injury. I had been checking the lead-acid batteries aboard Scorpio when one of the batteries decided to spew sulphuric acid into my left eye.
(Not a photo of me, but it looked similar]
When the acid hit my eye I knew I immediately had to irrigate with copious amounts of water. The boat was stored ashore in a boat yard and fortunately I had a water hose connected to a tap close by. After ten minutes of irrigation I stopped to asses the situation. The eye was blood-red, but I could still see, although vision was not as clear as normal, which I didn’t think was surprising. I decided to wait for a while; maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to get to the hospital at all.
An hour later I couldn’t see much with my left eye anymore. It was as if the world had gone complely foggy.
They took good care of me at Bangkok Hospital. First they irrigated the eye for an hour using a slow running hose connected to a drip bag of Saline solution. Every hour of the night I was given Visilube eye drops and every 4 hours both Tobra dex antibiotic cream and Genteal eye gel. In the morning the eye still looked horrible, but the vision was back – although not yet to full extent.
In a recent report I noted that we curiously appear to run into accidents more often ashore than afloat. However, I consider myself fortunate, that the accident happened close to an excellent hospital. The odds for this to take place, considering our life style, out on the ocean, say on a trip from the Maldives to Thailand, like the one we did earlier this year, are much higher than here on terra firma. On a long trip in the tropics, particularly the one mentioned, when we had to use the engine a lot, I need to inspect the acid level of the batteries every now and then. If the eye had been burned by acid in the Indian Ocean a weeks journey from any hospital, the outcome would probably not have been a happy one.
The wrong thing now clearly happened in the right place. However, we have faced two mishaps in a short time and in Finnish we have a proverb, ei kahta ilman kolmatta, meaning ”no two without the third”. Not to be confused with ”all good things come in three”.
I’m looking over my shoulder and crossing my fingers.
A note about our batteries: Our Trojan-batteries have the “pop-up” type filler caps. I have always liked them because they are easier to open than the screw-on ones, and they dont get lost as they are hinged to the battery body. However, I now know they are dangerous as they act as a catapult to any acid attached to them.
