Emergency Eye Care Services
We offer emergency services that require immediate and urgent eye care. If your eye is injured, don’t try to judge the severity of it. Immediately seek the opinion of an eye doctor to lessen the risk of hurting your vision. We understand ocular emergencies can arise at any time.
Please call us for further instructions. Use your best judgment. If you feel your vision issue is urgent, do not delay treatment – visit your nearest emergency treatment center.
Eye Safety – Safety Eyewear – Eye Injury Prevention
This short video stresses the importance of knowing the hazards at home and the workplace regarding your eyes. In this video, we review a few actual incidents where people lost part or all of their vision, along with one whose vision was saved by safety eyewear.
Symptoms that require emergency service include, but are not limited to:
- Sudden loss of vision
- Sudden double vision
- Sudden red/painful eye
- Pink Eye
- New onset flashes and/or floaters
- Foreign body in the eye (especially metal or chemicals)
- New or worsening swelling or pain after eye surgery
Things NOT to do while waiting for professional medical assistance:
- DO NOT press on an injured eye or allow the victim to rub the eye(s).
- DO NOT attempt to remove a foreign body that is resting on the cornea (the clear surface of the eye through which we see) or that appears to be embedded in any part of the eye.
- DO NOT use dry cotton (including cotton swabs) or sharp instruments (such as tweezers) on the eye.
- DO NOT attempt to remove an embedded object.
DO call our eye care centers in Norwalk 203-374-2020, Southport 203-255-4005, Stamford 203-840-1991 or Trumbull 203-357-0204 for further instructions! We are here for you!
Emergency Eyecare Q & A with Dr. Rapp
What if someone calls the office with an eye emergency?
Well, our staff, the front desk staff, are the ones who would be answering the phone calls. They have a protocol of how to handle specific eye emergencies, and we’re all in such close contact with one another that they would bring anything to my attention and know if it’s something that I as an optometrist can handle or not.
In general, if it’s not something that you need to go to the emergency room for, like your eyeball is not hanging out of your head, I can absolutely at least start to address the problem. And even if that requires further referral out to a specialist, I can at least guide someone in the right direction. And there’s a very good chance that I could take care of everything myself over here.
So think of me as the traffic controller they can reach out to. And we always have slots available, even if that means other people might be double-booked. We can handle emergencies. And again, if we can’t, I can point them in the right direction of who would do better.
Would you say that the vast majority of ocular emergencies need to be treated by an optometrist?
That’s a little complicated. I would say the vast majority, though. Yes, we can. So somebody gets a piece of something in their eye. I can handle that. Somebody has pain, has a little bit of bleeding, something like that, no problem. If somebody goes completely blind in one eye and they can’t see anything, that’s more of an emergency where I would say, don’t even come here, let me send you to the right person, because time is of the essence.
But yeah, I would say a lot of the emergencies we can handle here, especially because the definition of emergency is very patient-dependent. What an emergency it would be to someone else would just be. I could wait a week on that. So I can definitely handle the majority of ocular emergencies.
There are cases where you have a senior citizen with a preexisting condition that will lead them to have an emergency where they need to see a surgeon.
If someone has a serious preexisting condition, I would hope and maybe even assume that they already have established care with another provider. So hopefully in that case, they wouldn’t have to just find someone brand new. They’d already have that. But again, I could help direct them to, say, a retina specialist instead of just a general ophthalmologist.
Do you think a lot of patients run to the emergency room before going to you?
That’s what I saw when I worked in the more Medicaid-heavy areas. That’s generally what people do. Just because that’s kind of what they know here in Connecticut.
But if you go to the emergency room, you know you’re there the entire day, and at the end of it, it might not have needed urgent care. Also at the end of it, they might then just turn around and say, “take these drops, but go see your eye doctor tomorrow.” So they might as well just come here for an eye emergency, as long as, like, your eye balls are not hanging out of your head or something like that. Besides experiencing eye trauma, I don’t think patients are going to the emergency room, and I don’t think they should, either.
How did you get into emergency eye care? What made you feel like you could handle it? It just came naturally?
When I worked at another practice in a very busy area, I was working with a retina specialist and it was just the two of us for years before we hired any other doctors. So he was extremely busy with everything he was doing and therefore, everything else was mine to handle. So just, I guess, it was just having to deal with it. Now I’m able to generally triage a major problem and I’ve become more comfortable handling emergencies. I’m also absolutely willing to admit when there’s something I cannot handle as well.