Get The Dead Out

Being an eye surgeon, I was drawn by curiosity to a recent arrest article regarding a woman who poisoned her boyfriend.

With Visine.

You read that correctly.  It doesn’t just get the red out anymore.   I wonder if her boyfriend’s nickname was Red?

It was done in the kitchen, by Miss Scarlet, with a bottle of eye drops.

But like every great criminal mind, she was tripped up by the most unlikely of modern technologies.

He failed the drug screen.

He tested positive for eye drops.  (His blood actually looked white, since it got the red out.  Just kidding!)

And why did she do this?

So he would pay more attention to her.  I imagine he’s paying a lot of attention to her now.  So are the police.

Don’t you think the closet filled with 10,000 empty Visine bottles would have clued him in to something being wrong?  I made that part up.  I don’t know if she had a closet full of empty bottles.  Maybe there were only 9000.  In the basement.  Who knows?

Had she been successful, and the drug failed to show on a tox screen, the pathologist would have been baffled . . . “Don’t know what killed him, but he’s got the whitest eyes I’ve ever seen on a corpse!”

Seriously, Visine contains tetrahydrozoline, which basically constricts blood vessels.  As an eye doctor, I discourage its use.  You are much better off treating the cause of the redness, be it dry eye, infection, inflammation or allergy.  Constricting blood vessels isn’t usually a good thing, and probably explains his symptoms of high blood pressure, nausea, vomiting and breathing difficulties when ingested.