A couple of weeks ago, on a Monday, I was doing a necropsy of a cow that I had taken in over the weekend. She had been in our cooler for at least 36 hours but had been dead for at least a day or so when we put her in there. That's a long way of saying she was definitely dead and bloated.
When I was reaching across her to remove the muscles and fat of the abdominal wall to expose the abdomen, I accidentally nicked her enormous, gas-distended rumen with my scalpel. The blast of gas and aerosolized rumen liquid shot up my face and right into my eyes.
Uh-oh.
I had an N95 mask on so my mouth and nose were protected. But not my eyes. I wear glasses but have not yet found safety goggles that don't damage my extremely expensive and utterly necessary eyeglasses. A face shield would have been useless. I stopped to wash my face but the inoculation had already occurred.
Sure enough, 48 hours later, I woke up with red, painful, gunky eyes. This progressed to a piercing headache that I couldn't tamp down with ibuprofen, and quite a bit of pain when I had to move my eyes.
I finally gave up the following Monday, called in sick to work, and hauled myself to an urgent care clinic. I was diagnosed with conjunctivitis, of course, but also something called epi-scleritis, which meant the muscles and other tissues around my eye were involved too.
Better living through the standard pharmacopia, however: antibacterial eye ointment (oily, gross) and diclofenac, a stronger NSAID than anything I could get OTC. I even got a steroid shot in my butt at the clinic. I started feeling better in just a few hours.
While this sort of thing is a fairly typical hazard of my profession, and I was not exposed to anything really nasty, it will certainly change my behavior in the future. For starters, I think I will decompress those rumens first thing!
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