Dad who ignored 'pink eye' could have died after infection left him looking like 'Sloth from The Goonies'
A dad-of-two who thought he ignored symptoms of 'pink eye' believes he would have died if it wasn't for his 'nagging' wife.
Jordan Niles, from Cornwall, woke up with a sore right eye on 24 March and wrongly put it down to conjunctivitis.
After initially carrying on with his day, the airport worker's eye began to swell up which left him temporarily blinded, and by his own admission, looking like Sloth from The Goonies.
As his face ballooned to three times its size, Jordan's wife Courtney Niles urged him to get it looked at.
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The 28-year-old underwent a CT scan and various eye tests at the Treliske Hospital in Treliske where doctors confirmed that he was suffering from a serious bacterial infection known as orbital cellulitis.
According to Cleveland Clinic, orbital cellulitis 'is a bacterial infection in the soft tissues that surround your eye, inside of your eye socket (your orbit)'.
"It causes pain, discolouration and swelling from your eyebrow to your cheekbone. It may make your eye bulge outward," they explained.
Medics said if the infection had got to the back of his eye, it could have been life-threatening. Thankfully, Jordan was able to make a full recovery.
"I woke up on the 24th and had a bit of a sore eye and I thought 'oh maybe it's a bit of conjunctivitis,'" the Bodmin resident said.
"You don't really do much but clean your eye with sterile water and hope it gets better.
"The next day it was a lot more swollen. My eyelid swelled massively, it felt like my eye was going to explode.
"On day three of it my wife Courtney said to go to the pharmacy, they looked at it and said I needed to go to hospital.
"My face was huge, it was three or four times the size it normally is, I looked like Sloth from The Goonies.
"When the doctors said it was a very serious infection that I could lose my eyesight or worst case scenario die - that's when I was thinking, 'oh no, it's not conjunctivitis then.'
"The doctors said I was very lucky that I went down and got treated before it spread further.
"Courtney's nagging saved my eyesight."
Jordan was forced to take a week off work due to temporarily blindness from the infection. He is now urging people to get themselves checked.
Courtney, 25, said her husband 'was moaning about it all day - as men do'.
"I'm a panicker and was Googling it all day and it wasn't getting any better. His face was hot to touch and I could see his cheek was swelling a bit more," she explained.
"I said to him 'I think you should go down [to hospital]. You need to get it checked out because you could either go blind or if the worst comes to the worst the children won't have a dad'. So I made him go the next day.
"When he rang me from hospital saying they were doing scans and he was on a drip because it had got worse I said 'I told you, good job you went down.' It was a relief [too] really that he went down at the right time."
Anish Vij