A 33-year-old man's face struck a birthday cake, leaving what looked like a minor cut near his right eye. Eighteen months later, surgeons pulled a blue plastic straw about 3 centimeters long out of his eye socket, where it had been sitting the entire time.
Ophthalmologists at the Loma Linda Eye Institute in California described the case in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports, published online Aug. 12, 2025. The authors, Shelly Rauser, Dalbert Chen, and Douglas Van Putten, wrote that, to their knowledge, it is the first published report detailing the consequences of plastic straws embedded in cakes.
