Tips to help sleep with corneal abrasion
Having a scratched eye is a minor injury so therefore it takes a few days to heal on its own. Sleeping helps to quicken the recovery process but due to the pain from the eye and continuous tearing up, sleeping may seem like a difficult task. These are a few tips to help you sleep with a scratched eye:
- Rinse your eyes: before going to bed rinse your eyes with clean water or saline solution. This will help remove the foreign present faster. To rinse properly make use of clean glass and rest the base of your eye socket on the rim of a glass.
- Pain reliever: Taking a pain reliever before going to bed helps to ease the pain or headache from the eye. Pain relievers such as Ibuprofen which is an anti-inflammatory drug [2] or Acetaminophen (Tylenol).
- Avoid touching your eye: After rinsing, avoid putting fingers, cotton swabs, or other foreign objects into the eye because it can worsen the scratch.
- Use of eye drops: if the eye is dry it causes the friction between the cornea and eyelids to increase thereby worsening the pain. Eye drops help to keep the eyes moist during the night and reduce irritation. But avoid the use of redness-reducing eye drops because it may increase the eye pain and won’t help the scratch to heal faster.
- Dim the light: light can irritate the ciliary nerve and cause muscle spasms to irritate the trigeminal nerve and the increase then increase the light sensitivity of the eye. It is therefore advised that the lights in your room and lights on the screens of your phone or any other gadget should be dim in order to avoid worsening the eye scratch.
- Application of cold compress: placing ice cubes in a plastic bag and then wrapping the plastic bag with a cloth can serve as a cold compress. Placing the wrapped ice cubes on the injured eye helps to reduce inflammation and pain.
- Avoid sleeping on the affected side: When the eye is scratched try to sleep on your back or the side with the unaffected side, in order to avoid direct pressure on the injured eye thereby increasing the pain and then sleeping, becomes a difficulty.