Schoolyard Game Really Does Poke Eyes Out

June 23, 2008— -- When a 14-year-old girl showed up at the Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Peabody, Mass., last spring with a seriously injured eye, she could hardly see anything except for major hand movements.

"Basically, she had an eye full of blood," says ophthalmologist Shiyoung Roh.

Without treatment and surgery, Roh says the building pressure from the wound would have likely left her blind in that eye.

Although the girl's 20/20 vision eventually returned, the eye trauma she sustained will likely cause early cataracts.

The cause of the trauma: a seemingly harmless, thin plastic water bottle.

As any older parent will tell you, adolescents can make a dangerous game out of the most mundane household items -- from using sleeping bags to slide down stairs to mixing an explosive concoction of Mentos and Diet Coke.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the humble plastic water bottle is the latest in the parade of household objects gone bad.

Coincidentally, Roh had heard her 9-year-old son describe the water bottle trick just a few weeks before she saw her first injured patient.

"There's a particular water bottle now that's softer, that has little twists in it," says Roh. The game: Loosen the cap, twist and twist the thin center of an empty water bottle and ... voila, a high-pressure water bottle cannon.

"When you bang the bottom with the bottom of your hand, then the cap shoots off," says Roh.

Roh says the 14-year-old girl she treated, who was unnamed in the report, just happened to be in the line of fire.

"It's amazing the amount of force that had, in order to cause the amount of damage that it did," Roh says.

Ask emergency room doctors around the country, and they may not have heard this particular story. But they likely know of the local dangerous fad -- water bottles in Massachusetts, soda bottles in North Carolina and creative firework manipulation everywhere else.

Dr. Benjamin Shain, head of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare in Evanston Ill., studies what motivates adolescent self-destructive behavior.