Paintball Injuries: How To Treat A Paintball Eye Injury
The most dangerous and potentially damaging paintball injuries are related to the eyes. Therefore, it is incredibly important that paintball eye injuries are treated promptly and properly.
There are two reasons why paintball related eye injuries are the worst.
1- A human eye was not designed to withstand the force of a shot paintball. Many of the modern paintball guns shoot at ridiculously high velocity. A direct paintball hit to the eye can literally tear the human cornea.
2- The paint can chemically react with the biological fluid of the human eye. Most people don’t know about this. But often when a human eye is inflamed or damaged (ie by a paintball), that eye can lose the ability to filter out unwanted substances. One of the unwanted substances is paint, which is the cause of more paintball injuries than most people realize.
Most of the time, an eye injury caused by a paintball is a combination of these two factors. Sometimes, if a player is lucky, he won’t experience a chemical reaction.
Ways to Treat a Paintball Eye Injury
As you read above, there are two separate paintball injuries to treat. It is also important to note that these treatments are only for paintball eye injuries that are not serious. If you have a serious eye injury caused by a paintball, you need to see a doctor as soon as possible!
I don’t mean to scare the paintball community… but 1/5 of paintball eye injuries result in complete loss of one eye, and half of these injuries result in permanent vision loss. So again, you should see a doctor for most paintball eye injuries.
However, if you are sure that no permanent damage has occurred, follow these two steps.
1- Chemical damage: To avoid a chemical reaction in your eye, you should immediately go to a sink and pour water over the damaged eye for a good 10-15 minutes. Make sure you have completely removed any chemicals that may be detrimental to the healing process of paintball eye injuries.
2- Physical damage: as soon as you can, you must cover your eye with your own hand or with an object similar to a cloth. We certainly want to take this step as soon as we can. Your body has self-repairing processes, and for your eye, the main biological process that heals is your tear ducts. What you hope is that your tear ducts will provide lubrication and protection of the eye from further damage, as well as work to reduce pain in a soothing way. In most cases, you can cover up your eye right away, which you should cover until you get to a sink. Unfortunately, eye injuries caused by paintballs require you to uncover your eye during the washing process. Which should be done before long-term blindfolding.
paintball injury play by play
1- Paintball hits you in the eye.
2- Cover your eye until you reach a sink
3- Eliminate chemicals
4- Cover your eye again
5- Consider calling the hospital
