Last night, my daughter got Oil of Cloves (toothache essence) in her eyes. I don't know how corrosive that stuff is so I got her to rinse her eyes with lukewarm water repeatedly while I tried to find out what to do.
So I phoned A and E. Sorry, the receptionist couldn't put me through to any A and E staff. Against the rules.
So I tried the emergency out-of-hours number for the surgery and phoned them. They wanted full names/addresses etc, then told me they couldn't help because my daughter lives in another town. (That woman was extremely rude and unhelpful, by the way. She had no patience with me when I said that we don't have time to muck about, not with an eye. That is one little receptionist with an inflated idea of her own importance and the extent of her responsibilities).
She told me to call NHS Direct. It takes forever for them to answer the phone, then they want the whole pedigree before offering to phone you back.
999 could have helped - if it was a life threatening emergency, which it wasn't.
I eventually tracked down some advice on the Web. My advice of flooding the eye with lots of water was right, which is no comfort at all because we are still left with the problem of what to do in a serious emergency that is not life threatening. Oil of Cloves isn't something I want to think about in someone's eye. It could have been something else. Where on earth do people turn to for advice after hours? What if it happened to a family who are not connected to the internet?
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