It’s a moment of barely imaginable horror: a man picked up a tube of eyedrops and squeezed fluid into his eye – but it was actually superglue.

The rapid-acting glue quickly stuck his eyelids together, leaving him in agony. The horrifying case surfaced this week as part of 15,000 case reports republished by the British Medical Journal.

In the 2010 case report, the man turned up at Oxford Eye hospital in severe pain, and the glue had to removed using fine forceps with a slit lamp for magnification.

It would have been far worse if the man hadn’t washed his eyes out with water immediately, the doctors noted.

The glue in question was a cyanoacrylate nail glue, similar to superglue – but sold in a bottle near-identical to eye drops.

The doctors write, ‘Inadvertent ocular cyanoacrylate, or ‘superglue’, instillation has been reported frequently since 1982 when superglue was repackaged into ophthalmic style dropper bottles.

‘This case report highlights the continuing problem of cyanoacrylate eye injuries and serves as a reminder to healthcare professionals to report such incidents to manufacturers and regulatory bodies, on behalf of their patients, to promote the introduction of universal safety mechanisms on all household chemical containers.’