If overdose of opium tincture is suspected, rapid professional intervention is required. The primary concern is re-establishing a viable airway and institution of assisted or controlled ventilation if the patient is unable to breathe on their own. Other supportive measures such as the use of vasopressors and oxygen may be indicated to treat cardiac and/or pulmonary failure. Cardiac arrhythmias or arrest will require advanced life-saving measures. Intravenous naloxone or nalmefene, quick-acting opioid antagonists, are the first-line treatment to reverse respiratory depression caused by an overdose of opium tincture. Gastric lavage may be of some use in certain cases. In fiction
In Mary Shelleys novel Frankenstein (1818), Victor Frankenstein takes laudanum as his only means of sleeping and thus preserving his life while in recovery from months of fever and a series of horrible events. In Charles Dickenss novel Oliver Twist (1837), Nancy gave William "Bill" Sikes laudanum to keep him asleep while she ran away to meet Rose Maylie. In Uncle Toms Cabin (1852), an anti-slavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, an enslaved woman named Cassy talks about how she killed her newborn by laudanum overdose to spare him from experiencing the horrors of slavery. In the novel Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (1861), Silas finds and adopts a two-year old girl who had wandered into his house. The girl had been abandoned while walking with her opium-addicted mother, Molly Farren, who had fallen asleep in the snow and died.
Glaucoma is an umbrella term indicating ailments which damage the neural cable from the eye to the brain called the optic nerve, and which can lead to a loss of vision. In most cases of glaucoma, typically called primary open-angle glaucoma, the outflow does not happen normally but doctors can not see what is causing the blockage; with PEX, however, the flakes are believed to be a cause of the blockage. PEX flakes by themselves do not directly cause glaucoma, but can cause glaucoma indirectly by blocking the outflow of aqueous humor, which leads to higher intraocular pressure, and this can cause glaucoma. PEX has been known to cause a weakening of structures within the eye which help hold the eyes lens in place, called lens zonules. Causes
The cause of pseudoexfoliation glaucoma is generally unknown.PEX is generally believed to be a systemic disorder, possibly of the basement membrane of the eye. Researchers have noticed deposits of PEX material in various parts of the body, including in the skin, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, what is puzzling is that PEX tends to happen in only one eye first, which scientists call unilaterality, and in some cases, gradually affects the other eye, which is termed bilaterality. According to this reasoning, if PEX were a systemic disorder, then both eyes should be affected at the same time, but they are not. There are contrasting reports about the extent and speed with which PEX moves from one eye to both eyes.