When it comes to workplace safety, I have never been in the employ of a company that takes things more seriously than Disney. Truly, they go to great lengths to make sure their guests and employees are kept out of harm's way. They even have a slogan: "Safe D Begins With Me," emphasizing the importance that every cast member has on creating and maintaining a safe environment for themselves and others.

But sometimes, freak accidents occur that no one could have anticipated.

During my first Disney College Program Internship, I learned a lot of lessons about food and finances, dealing with homesickness and never assuming your bad day can't possibly get worse, but I had no idea that I was just starting to scratch the surface on suffering. And believe me, I suffered.

At the time, I worked at Disney's All Star Music Resort in their large food court. It's a great Quick Service spot for guests in a hurry to grab a bite to eat, and it even has an ice cream parlor (try an ice cream cookie sandwich sometime)! Tending the drink island, frying chicken strips, feeding pizzas into the giant oven, making salmon salads or even scooping ice cream were all within the realm of things I might be asked to do during a shift, but something that I had to do every day, no matter what, was cleaning. Since I always ended up with closing shifts (wrapping up between 11pm and 2am), my fellow closers and I were expected to do the most thorough scouring.

In a restaurant setting, food safety is paramount, but because we worked in a Disney restaurant, other forms of safety were rewarded as well. In fact, right before the incident, we had a party to celebrate over 100 accident-free days and the big cheese himself swung by to let us know what an awesome job we were doing. We were by no means a small location, and the more people you have on staff, the harder it is to go even a single day without someone doing something stupid. But we had accomplished the nigh-impossible! We were all so proud.

Then, a few days later, I was asked to extend my shift. Extending was a normal occurrence, and even though I was looking forward to leaving at 12am, I figured I would take one for the team and stay late to finish cleaning the ice cream station. It was one of my favorite areas to clean, to be honest. There was no grease to scrub away, like at the fry station, and there wasn't cheese stuck to everything like over in the pizza area. Milkshake spatter and rainbow sprinkles were usually the worst of it, and the steam well (where the hot fudge spent the day a-bubblin') needed a daily deliming. Easy peasy.

Except that, although I had cleaned this very same station during countless shifts over the last three months without a problem, this time, something went wrong. As I scrubbed the well, being ever-cautious not to get any of the corrosive cleaning agent onto my skin, there was a sudden, unexpected splash of liquid. Before I could react, it flew up towards me at the impossibly perfect angle required to bypass my glasses and land directly into my eye.

I howled with pain. The burning was instantaneous, and I raced to the large sink near the milkshake machines, yelling for my closing companion to read the warning label on the bottle for me and to get help. Luckily for me (and my eye), I'm the type of person who compulsively reads warning labels and side effects on everything, and I remembered that the delimer had the phrase "flush with water" in the "What To Do If You're Dying" section of it's MSDS page (yes, I read the entire MSDS book while on break one day, months prior - and you should too).

So, there I stood, one minute after midnight, on an evening when I should have been taking the bus home already, with my head in the ice cream sink. Water cascaded over my face and drenched my cheery, yellow uniform top as my manager stood beside me, reading the warning label on the bottle (quite calmly, considering the circumstances). It said to seek immediate medical attention.

"Are we calling an Alpha Unit?" I glubbed.

"We're calling an alpha unit," he said.

Now, I don't like going to the doctor, but I wasn't about to lose an eye. Twenty long minutes after the incident, I was taken by ambulance to Celebration Hospital, where they continued to flush my eye for another two or three hours. While there was no permanent tissue damage, my vision remained cloudy for months. Honestly, I'm lucky to be able to see at all. If I hadn't read about the chemicals I was working with beforehand, I would have been sunk (you can't really focus on the fine print when your eye is on fire, after all).

So, in conclusion, accidents can happen to anyone at any time, even in The Happiest Place On Earth, but if you prepare yourself to the best of your ability, you'll know what to do when the inevitable occurs. Stay safe!