You know what happens when you sneeze. The feeling in your nose builds up, your eyes close, and the sneeze explodes out. And thank goodness your eyes close, because otherwise your eyeballs would pop right out of their sockets with the pressure. Right? This idea has been known to scare some of us while driving. Do we shut our eyes and risk a crash, or do we leave them open and risk our eyeballs popping out? Neither option seems very appealing.
Well, we have to call this one a half-truth. It is physiologically possible for your eyeball to come out of the socket when you sneeze. Back in 1882, the New York Times tells us that an unfortunate woman in Indianapolis actually had her eyeball explode after she sneezed while on a streetcar. The article describes her as left in excruciating pain, needless to say. In the current medical literature, we could not locate any documented cases of eyeballs subluxing, or popping out, after sneezing. On the other hand, vomiting hard and frequently can make your eyeball pop out. In very rare cases, an eyeball can pop out spontaneously without anything else happening; the people that this happens to usually have weird muscles and can actually learn to pop the eyeball out voluntarily. Certain types of trauma to the eye can also cause it to pop out. But, for sneezing, we only have the sad, nineteenth-century story of the lady on the streetcar in our own town.
We are left with the expert opinion that it is possible but incredibly rare for an eyeball to pop out when you sneeze. Even if this were to occur, closing your eyelids would be unlikely to prevent the eyeball from coming out. A few years ago, the American television show Mythbusters forced someone to sneeze with their eyes open and noted that the person’s eyeballs did not pop out. This is just one anecdote and is not good enough evidence to prove that it is not possible. But it does help to remind us that it would be extremely unlikely and that, despite all the horror stories, the eyes are very, very, very secure in their sockets.