The warning to be well prepared for the eclipse and to make sure you do not look at it directly with the naked eye is something that most people know about.
But this woman did not heed the advice and is using what happened to her as a lesson to others. Keep reading to learn more!
A woman from Brooklyn made the mistake of squinting at the solar eclipse in 2017 without any proper eye protection. What happened next is something she never really expected.
29-year-old Bridget Kyeremateng made a video on TikTok warning people what could happen if they did the same thing as she did in 2017. She was unable to secure a pair of protective glasses and figured “a couple of seconds wouldn’t do anything.”
She was incredibly wrong. What happened the next day made her realize what a grave mistake she had made. She suffered from “irreversible eye damage,” including a blind spot in the middle of her left iris.
“I couldn’t focus on the sun or the exact curvature of the moon. I thought I would close one of my eyes to get a better focus. I could barely see anything, but I stared at the sun for a good 10 to 15 seconds before my eyes were starting to not feel good, so I walked inside,” she recalled.
She said while she felt fine the rest of the day, she woke up the next morning unable to read the words on her phone screen out of her left eye. This was the same eye she had tried to peer at the eclipse with.
“I couldn’t see every other word because there was a blind spot right in the middle focus of my iris, so for every other word I was trying to read, it was pretty much invisible,” she shared.
Kyeremateng recalled how it left her “freaking out” when all she was able to see were “white dots just floating around” from her left eye.
“I thought maybe I just didn’t wake up, like, I wasn’t fully awake,” she said. “I walked around the house, and I would cover up my right eye to see if I was seeing this correctly. There were these very white focal dots that would distort images.”
Kyeremateng shared that she went to the eye doctor immediately so that she could get to the bottom of what happened. She learned that while her retina was not damaged, the distortion in her eye was the result of the sun damage.
“There is some distortion that has happened because I looked at the sun, which causes a bit of what [the eye doctor] calls ‘slow 20/20 vision,’ ” she explained.
“I can still see perfectly, but it takes me a while to read letters or words if my right eye is covered,” she said the damage was lasting and resulted in a blind spot in the middle of her left iris.
After she also often experiences headaches and migraines on the left side of her head. She also revealed that she has astigmatism but is not sure whether the eclipse had something to do with it.
“I think my right eye and my left eye kind of work in tandem, but it doesn’t affect me much anymore,” she said of the issue, sharing that prescription glasses helped her a lot.
“I know your eyesight does get worse with age. Last year when I went to get the eye check-up, the left side was not doing so well, like just getting worse ever so slightly each year. It’s only a matter of time, but I hope that with proper precaution and continuing to wear the sunglasses I can slow down the progression.”
She said this time around, she would be getting eclipse glasses because she did not want to “test her luck twice.”
While she was embarrassed of her story before, she decided to use it now to educate others through TikTok because she was only met with kindness whenever she retold it.
“I think most people would go, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that.’ But you know, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and of course, you’re curious,” she said.
“I would advise to not look at it unless you have special sunglasses. You can look at it on your TV or on social media, but unless you have the glasses, having impacted eyes and irreversible eye damage after, it’s just not worth it.”
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This is such a valuable lesson in adhering to public health and safety advice, especially in the times of events we do not fully understand. Share this with others so they can know never to do the same thing!
