I was blinded in one eye after using hair dye
A girl has been blinded in one eye after trying to dye her hair.
Olivia Stegin was attempting to dye her hair dark brown with a friend using an at-home hair dye with a metal tube that has to be pierced to squeeze the dye out.
The tube didn’t open properly, so Stegin tried to squeeze the product out of the tube. The pressure she applied caused the tube to “explode” in her face — shooting dye into her left eye, covering it in chemical paste and burning off the surface of her eyeball.
The 13-year-old’s mom Pamela Stegin-Sheppard, 40, heard her screaming from downstairs and rushed her to the hospital.
“I was in the kitchen and I heard Olivia scream,” the mom from Georgia said. “Olivia and her friends usually run around the house and scream and play but I knew that was a different scream, that was a serious scream.”
“I ran in there and panicked because her whole eye was covered, you could hardly see her eyelashes and you couldn’t see her eyeball at all,” she continued.
Stegin-Sheppard put her daughter in the shower and tried to rinse out the dye, but Stegin was in so much pain she didn’t want anyone touching her.
“It was probably on her eye for a good 15 to 20 minutes penetrating her eye before we could actually get it rinsed out good,” Stegin-Sheppard said. “Immediately she could not see anything and she kept saying how bad it hurt. I was just so scared for her.”
Doctors from Effingham Health Systems confirmed Olivia had a third-degree chemical burn on her eye and the top layers of her cornea were “burned off” and grew back scarred, causing her to lose vision.
“At the ER they put a little contact lens-looking thing with a tube coming from it on her eye to try to rinse it out as much as they could,” Stegin-Sheppard said. “In the beginning, we were told her eye would get better within 72 hours but her eye was worse than they thought — the top layer of her cornea was burned off.”
The teen was told she would need a cornea transplant to restore her vision — despite a high risk of a transplant being rejected due to her young age and her healthy immune system. Having a cornea transplant at such a young age also would require Stegin to undergo multiple transplants since effectiveness tends to only last for 10 years.
After the doctors rinsed out Stegin’s eye, she was sent home and told to return a few days later. She has had weekly appointments for the past five months since the incident with a variety of specialists attempting to heal her eye and restore her vision.
She was given prescription eyedrops to fight off infection and settle inflammation, as well as undergoing an amniotic membrane transplant to her cornea. Doctors found that amniotic membrane tissue donated from mothers who have C-sections can help heal the cornea, so they put that on her eye.
“She wore that for a couple of weeks and we thought that a miracle had happened because her vision actually started improving,” Stegin’s mom said. “She went from not being able to see anything at all with 20/80 vision, to 20/30 which is 10 degrees from perfect vision.”
“But that’s when we had a turn for the worse.”
Stegin’s sight started to come back in July, but she was quickly disappointed when she went blind in that eye again shortly after regaining vision. Her cornea grew back permanently scarred with blood vessels growing over it, making the cornea nontransparent and forever damaging her vision.
Stegin-Sheppared shared that if someone is waving a hand two to three inches from Stegin’s face, she’ll be able to tell something is moving but won’t be able to tell that it’s a hand.
“When she tries to look straight ahead her eye is kind of veering off to the side a bit because she doesn’t have control of it,” she said. “It makes her look cross-eyed and she suffers a lot of pain from it.”
“Unless a miracle happens she’s going to have to have a cornea transplant to be able to regain her vision,” Stegin-Sheppard added.
Stegin developed a limbal stem cell deficiency from her damaged cornea, meaning it can’t repair itself and she’s susceptible to inflammation and scarring, leaving her with chronic pain and a high chance of vision loss. Before she can get a cornea transplant, she will now also have to undergo a limbal stem cell transplant.
The mother and daughter are now fund-raising to cover the medical costs of Stegin’s weekly appointments with specialists and future procedures she will inevitably need.
While Stegin is struggling with the physical damage of the incident, she’s also taken a huge blow to her confidence.
“She’s been so strong but it has knocked her confidence and that’s what kills me the most because she’s a beautiful girl,” her mom said. “She doesn’t like taking pictures since the accident because she said that she looks ugly. It has caused her to have bad anxiety about going into stores — she is embarrassed because people stare at her.”
But the vision loss didn’t stop Stegin from continuing to dye her hair — she just takes extra precautions now by wearing protective eyewear and always having an adult present.
“She’s dyed it since with someone with her and we put an eye patch and safety goggles on just as a precaution,” Stegin-Sheppard said.
Stegin’s mom is now warning those who dye their hair to read the warning labels before using it and be sure to rinse their eyes if it comes in close contact.
“It’s a lesson learned for her that you have to read the warnings on any kind of chemical. It said right there on the tube don’t apply pressure to it if it doesn’t puncture properly because that’s what can happen,” she said. “Whether it’s at home or a hair salon, accidents can happen and if something like that does happen you’ve just got to bite the bullet, deal with the pain and get it rinsed out as soon as possible.”
“How long it’s on there is going to determine how much damage it does because it’s going to penetrate more into the eye,” she added.
