The first ten minutes after something hits your eye

Put a 1-liter bottle of sterile saline on the shelf above your bench today. Two, if you use chemicals. That bottle, a roll of medical tape and a paper cup are about eleven dollars of insurance against the worst hour you'll ever spend in a waiting room, and they cover almost every eye injury a home shop can hand you.

The reason to sort this out now is that eye injuries steal your judgment. You get a chip of steel under the lid and your whole body goes into a crouch, one hand clamped over your face, tears running, and the only instinct you have is to rub. Rubbing is the one thing you must not do. So decide what you're going to do while you can still think about it clearly.

Three questions, in order. Did something go into the eye, or is it sitting on the surface? Was it a chemical? Can you still see out of it?

If a chemical splashed in, start flushing before you do anything else

Not after you read the label. Not after you call somebody. Flushing beats every other action, and the clock starts the second it lands.

Get to the sink, the garden hose on a gentle trickle, the shower, or that bottle of saline. Hold the lid open with your fingers, which is harder than it sounds because the lid fights you, and run water from the inner corner near your nose outward so you're not washing the chemical into the other eye. Standard first-aid guidance is 15 to 20 minutes of continuous flushing. That's a long time. Set a timer or you'll quit at four minutes and tell yourself it's fine.

If you wear contacts, get the lens out if it comes easily. If it doesn't, keep flushing and let the doctor deal with it.

Alkalis are the ones that scare eye doctors. Lye, drain cleaner, oven cleaner, ammonia, and the one nobody expects: wet concrete, mortar and lime. Cement dust in a damp eye turns into something with a high pH that keeps burning after the flushing stops. Acids tend to announce themselves and stop. Alkalis burrow. Either way, flush and go.

Take the container with you, or photograph the label and the Safety Data Sheet. The first thing they'll ask is what it was, and "some kind of stripper" isn't an answer.

If it feels like grit, it's probably grit, and you can help it along

Wood dust, drywall, a grinding spark that bounced off your cheekbone. The sensation is sand under the upper lid and it gets worse when you blink, because the lid is dragging the particle across your cornea every time.

Wash your hands. Then flush with saline or clean water and blink a lot underwater if you can. Pulling the upper lid out and down over the lower lashes sometimes sweeps the particle loose. A helper with a penlight and clean hands can look under the lid, and a corner of moistened sterile gauze can lift something that's visibly sitting loose on the white of the eye.

What you don't do: tweezers, a pocket knife, a shop rag, a magnet, or compressed air. Compressed air in an eye is a category of injury all by itself.

And if the grit was steel from a grinder or a chop saw, get seen the same day even if the pain settles. Hot metal embeds in the cornea and starts a rust ring within a day or two. An eye doctor can lift the chip and burr out the rust in a few minutes. Wait a week and it's a bigger job with a bigger scar in a spot you happen to look through.

If something went in, cover it and go

This is the one that kills eyes. Penetrating injuries come from nail guns, a grinding wheel that lets go, a nail struck at an angle, a cutoff disc shattering, and from wire wheels, which shed bristles at speed and send them through a T-shirt like a dart. A bristle or a chip that actually penetrates the globe often hurts less than you'd expect. Don't use pain as your gauge.

Don't flush it. Don't press on it. Don't try to pull anything out.

Take the bottom two inches off a paper or foam cup, set it over the bony rim of the socket so it touches nothing but bone, and tape it down. The point is to keep pressure, eyelashes and your own hands off the surface and to stop the lid from moving. Some people cover both eyes, because the injured eye tracks whatever the good one is doing. Keep your head up, not tipped back. Don't eat or drink, in case they need to take you to the operating room.

Then have somebody else drive. You're down one eye, your depth perception is gone, and you're rattled.

When you get to the emergency room, say the words "high-speed metal" or "nail gun" out loud. It changes what they look for. A tiny intraocular foreign body can be nearly invisible on exam, and telling them the mechanism is what gets you a CT and an ophthalmologist instead of some antibiotic drops and a follow-up in three days.

Blunt hits, blood and flashing lights

A board kicking back, a hammer head, a socket falling off a shelf. Cold compress wrapped in a towel, no ice directly on the skin, no pressure on the eye itself. Then watch for four things: blood pooling in front of the iris, a pupil that's a different shape or size than the other one, vision that's blurred or missing a section, or a shower of new floaters and flashing lights. Any of those is an emergency room trip, not a wait-and-see.

A curtain coming down across part of your vision after a hit is the classic description of a retina in trouble, and that clock runs in hours.

Welder's flash shows up when you're already in bed

Arc flash doesn't hurt at the time. You strike an arc without the hood down, think nothing of it, and six hours later you wake up feeling like both eyes are packed with sand and the ceiling light is an interrogation lamp. That's sunburn on the cornea. It generally settles in a day or two with a dark room, cool compresses, artificial tears, no contacts and over-the-counter pain relief.

Two warnings. Get it checked if it isn't clearly improving in 48 hours, or if your vision is off rather than just sore. And if anybody offers you leftover numbing drops from a previous injury, say no. They feel like a miracle and they slow healing and hide damage, which is exactly why nobody sends you home with a bottle.

The gear that prevents all of this costs less than the copay

Buy glasses marked ANSI Z87.1 on the temple or lens, and Z87+ if you want the high-impact rating. Nothing else counts. Your sunglasses don't count.

Keep a pair at each station instead of one pair you carry around, because the pair you carry around is the pair you're not wearing. Vented anti-fog goggles exist for a reason, and yes, sealed goggles fog and then you take them off, which is worse than the vented ones you keep on. Replace lenses when they're scratched enough to squint through. And for grinders, wire wheels and anything with a spinning disc, wear a face shield over safety glasses, not instead of them. Shields deflect. Glasses seal.

The habit that gets people is lifting the glasses to blow dust off a layout line. One second of exposure, one bounce off the bench, one bad afternoon.

Tape the address and phone number of the nearest eye emergency department to the inside of your shop door. Write down whether it's an eye hospital or the general ER, because some cities have both and the wrong choice costs you a transfer. Then find the bottle of saline, put it somewhere you can reach with one eye shut, and go back to work.