Mere hours after Monday's solar eclipse ended, the patients began lining up at hospitals across America.
In California, emergency physician Aimee Moulin treated a fractured foot on someone who fell off a step while wearing dark eclipse glasses.
In North Carolina, where the eclipse's path ended, emergency physician Bret Nicks' E.R. treated sprains, strains, lacerations and wrist fractures on eclipse viewers so intent on looking up that they failed to pay attention to their earthly surroundings.
And then, of course, there were patients with potential eye injuries like those at Mount Sinai's New York Eye and Ear Infirmary in New York City. "Dozens," said Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, who saw once-happy sky gazers citing headaches and blurry vision. Deobhakta, an ophthalmologist, saw eclipse viewers at his personal clinic, too.
He guessed that many New Yorkers heard you could view at a total eclipse without eye protection, but didn't understand that only applied to places in the path of totality. (New York wasn't one of them.) Others, he said, built last-minute pinhole projectors and -looked through the pinhole- at the sun.
Nurse Practioner Trish Patterson told TV station KRCR in Redding, CA, that no one came into her health clinic with eye damage from the eclipse, but a few had pain from putting sunscreen on their eyeballs.
"One of my colleagues at moonlight here stated yesterday that they had patients presenting at their clinic that put sunscreen on their eyeball, and presented that they were having pain and they were referred to an ophthalmologist," Patterson said.