Receptionist With No Medical Training Glue Boy’s Eye Shut During Treatment

The mother of a three-year-old Quebec boy is going public after a receptionist with no medical training at a private clinic accidentally glued her son’s eye shut while trying to seal a small cut on his eyelid. “I thought I was going to faint. I got emotional, I got scared. I was angry. I didn’t know what to do. My son was screaming he was trying to open his eye … it was very, very, scary,” Julia Vavatsikos told Go Public.

On Canada Day, Vavatsikos took Vincenzo (Vinnie) to a private medical clinic called Clinique Médicale Privée Jean-Pierre Savaria et Associes located near their home in Blainville. The clinic has since changed its name to LeBlanc & Savaria Clinique Médicale Privée.  The family cat had scratched Vinnie’s eyelid. It was a small scratch, but his mom wanted to make sure everything was OK.

Dr. Jean Therrien was the only doctor working and decided the cut could be sealed with medical glue. He called a colleague into the room to help.  “I thought because it was Canada Day that maybe the clinic was short-staffed, and that he [the colleague] was either a nurse or medical student,” Vavatsikos said. “The doctor was holding my son and kind of holding his eye and then the co-worker applied glue. He kind of missed and he glued my son’s eye shut.” That co-worker was not a nurse or a medical student. Go Public has confirmed he was a clinic receptionist — a part-time employee with no medical training.

“My son was yelling, ‘Mommy, mommy.’ He couldn’t open his eye and also the doctor looked like he was panicking. He was trying to open my son’s eye with water and his fingers, he was even swearing at that point. I’ve never met any doctors that swear. At that point, I knew something was really wrong,” Vavatsikos said. Therrien then told Vavatsikos she needed to take Vinnie to an emergency room, where medical staff were waiting for them.

CBC.