Kelsey Salmon thought that getting her eyelashes done for her birthday and a vacation to Hawaii was a good idea, but her lash technician’s Chihuahua had other plans. The dog found the eyelashes appetizing and bit at them, ripping off Salmon’s entire eyelid in the process. She spent her birthday last month in a hospital and her doctors say it could take up to a year for her eyelid to heal.
Salmon wanted to get her eyelashes done before her birthday, but her usual technician was booked. She looked to Instagram for an alternative, and she found one, who asked Salmon to come to her home. Moments after the treatment was done, the technician’s Chihuahua suddenly lunched at Salmon. The dog pulled off the lash extensions and her eyelid with them. Photos after the attack show her entire left eyeball exposed.
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Thankfully, the entire eyelid was found and Salmon had emergency surgery to reattach it. Her eyelid was sewn shut for 10 days, reports The Sun. Her doctors said it could take a year to heal. Meanwhile, Salmon has been keeping her TikTok followers up to date on the healing process. She has over 124,000 followers there. She posted her first video after the accident on May 29, and it now has over 2 million views.
“It took place at the girl’s apartment, and this was the first time I’d ever met her. The living room was empty, aside from a lash bed in the middle of the room,” Salmon, a sales development representative from Atlanta, told The Sun. “I lay down to get started, and I could hear the dog barking in her room. This Chihuahua runs in and jumps up on the bed. I start petting him, everything’s fine.” After the technician was done, Salmon sat up, and the dog was staring at her. Then, “out of nowhere,” it suddenly jumped at her before she had time to jerk away.
The reattaching process took about two hours, Salmon said. Her doctors were shocked that the procedure worked since they had never seen an entire eyelid ripped off before. “They were in uncharted territory. They were hopeful but the odds were against me,” she said. “I now take antibiotic drops four times a day, and I also put on a prescription gel four times a day — just to keep it moist. They wanted my eye to be able to breathe during the day, but at night I’m wearing a metal eyepatch with holes. At the moment, my eye is all stitched up with dissolvable stitches. It should open eventually.”
Incredibly, her doctors let her to go Hawaii, but they advised her to see a doctor while she was there, then visit them again when she returned home. While it was an awful experience, Salmon told The Sun it could have been much, much worse. “I’m so lucky he didn’t grab onto my actual eye because that could have been a thousand times worse,” she said.
