I’ve watched a couple episodes of Love is Blind‘s American and Japanese editions. I don’t typically watch reality shows, but I know a lot of people who watch and love it. Even Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan watch this popular Netflix dating show. It’s been in the news the most for controversy over how they treat contestants, and producers have been sued for mistreatment.

Here’s a wild story about a mishap on the show that could have ended badly. Elissa Finley, a contestant and ICU nurse, was in the women’s common room when she mistook a bottle of nail glue for eye drops. She then put it in her eye! The footage of this is at the end of the first episode for the most recent season, which came out February 11. I watched it and you can’t really see much except for the other women looking shocked and the medic coming in the room. Netflix has an interview with Elissa about what happened. Spoiler: she got immediate treatment and recovered relatively well, thanks to her medical knowledge. She knew not to close her eye. I’m excerpting the relevant parts below, which has no spoilers. The full article has spoilers about Elissa’s time on the show.

Heading into the pods, Elissa, an ICU nurse who is no stranger to emergencies, lands in the hospital after using what she thought were eye drops. “I was midway through one of the days when I’d gone on four dates, and there was a break,” she tells Tudum. “I went into the dressing room, and I just saw a little bottle on the table that looked like eye drops that we use in the hospital.”

Except, instead of giving her eyes some relief, she in fact picked up a bottle of nail glue, placing her vision in peril. “I put it in my eye, and I was like, ‘Holy crap. That is thick.’ ”

Elissa immediately looked down at the bottle and realized her mistake before on-set medics rushed to her aid. “I held my eye open because if you shut it, and you got glue, you’re going to pull off your skin,” she recalls. “Luckily, I had a contacts in, which ended up saving my eyeball.”

Despite her pleas to continue with her remaining dates, Elissa was ordered to go to the hospital, where doctors told her she had a corneal abrasion. “I had to sit there with a bag of saline, just flushing my eye. I got the glue out, and then I saved my lashes, thankfully,” she says.

With her vision and, yes, lashes intact, Elissa returned to the experiment the following day with an unexpected new accessory. “I had to wear an eye patch home, so that was fun.”

In her absence, the rest of the pod squad had no idea why she’d abruptly exited the experiment. “They were kind of freaked,” Elissa says upon returning to the lounge the next day. “They were so wonderful, though. That was the best part. Those girls rallied behind me and then on we went to the dating world.”

Never more determined to find her husband in the pods, Elissa’s experience proceeded normally — albeit with reminders from the crew to keep using her prescribed — and, most importantly, well-labeled — eye drops. “Did you know that eyes heal the fastest?” she says. “By day two, it was just a little blurry and not irritating. I just couldn’t wear my contacts, so I was in the pods half blind. I mean, I was really committed to this.”

[From Netflix]

Can you imagine?! I’m glad she’s OK and that her contact lens and quick thinking helped save her eye. When I first read this story, I assumed that she used the wrong type of glue for her false eyelashes, similar to the plotline on The Pitt the season featuring Patrick Ball’s real-life girlfriend, Elysia Roorbach. That seems on brand for this show, but instead she made an honest mistake and figured it out in time to do the least damage. Too many dangerous products have packaging that makes it easy to mistake them for something else. I’m pretty sure I’ve used hydrocortisone cream as toothpaste by mistake, but it wasn’t super poisonous and I caught it quickly. The Upstate NY Poison Control Center has a page with products that look dangerously alike and the first example is eye drops vs. super glue. Other top contenders include gummy edibles and vitamins vs. regular candy and pine cleaner vs. apple juice. I never realized!

The Sun video below does a decent job of showing the footage of the incident, it’s pretty fast and you can’t see much.

photos credit: Adam Rose/Netflix