Nerf Wars
Blog Vol 7.10. Nerf Wars
My kids and their friends (and other nefarious family members) are having a Nerf War this weekend. As the saying goes, “It’s always fun until someone loses an eye!” I know it sounds cliché, but stuff happens. Dealing with eye emergencies at Burlington Eyecare, we have seen what a projectile does to an exposed and “vulnerable” eye.
In the last month, I had a patient who was shot in the eye inadvertently with a nerf bullet, a softer rubber-tipped projectile shot through a “nerf gun” (there are nerf guns and there are NERF GUNS). Generally, these bullets are harmless and do not cause much discomfort. For the eye, the difficulty is that the front tip of the bullet has a diameter of 10 mm while the average cornea, the window that protrudes from the centre front of the eye, is 12 mm.
This patient came in with traumatic iritis, corneal edema, and hyphemia from the impact, in other words, the eye was not happy. The patient’s vision was very blurry and required a cycloplegic to dilate the eye and quiet it, as well as a steroid to reduce inflammation. Fortunately, no permanent injury resulted. We gave the family a lecture on eye safety, now it’s your turn.
The force from a nerf bullet fired at close range can be up to 1.92 Newton metres, enough force to cause damage to the retinal layers. Air soft pellets and paint balls, of course, can be much more devastating to the eye; that is a whole other problem. Nerf is supposed to be a child’s toy, and parents need to lay down rules for safety, including eye safety. (Read more in: Traumatic injuries from foam Nerf bullets | Eye News). As the article points out, a Nerf bullet fired from the right (wrong) angle and distance can cause serious long-term damage such as retinal holes, tears, and detachments.
If you are going to sponsor a Nerf War, then mandatory eye protection is required. All the warriors at our Nerf Armageddon this weekend will be required to wear eye protection, period. No eye emergency for this one.
Word to the wise, ALWAYS, ALWAYS treat guns, toy or otherwise, as if they are loaded and can fire at any time and never point them at a person’s head. As Winnie the Pooh so well put it, “They're funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you're having them.”
‘til next week,
The good doctor
