Your next patient is an eight-year-old girl.

Her mother brought her to your office because she has a red, painful left eye.

Mother believes this is pink eye.

There's been no drainage or any known exposure.

On exam you see a significant amount of edema and

ear atema of the upper and lower eyelids and the surrounding soft tissue.

The patient's eye is effectively swollen shut and she's complaining of pain when you try to open the eye.

But you can see that there's some conjunctival injection.

She has a low-grade fever of 101.3, but otherwise she's non-toxic appearing and behaving normally.

So what do you think? Is the mom right about this being pink eye. Hello everyone and welcome back to the med geeks podcast this is Eric Gordon and today we're talking about the eye.

So for me taking care of acute eye complaints sometimes feels like walking through a

mine field because there's a lot of intricate anatomy and the eye serves such an important relatively complex function.

There's a lot of different pathologies that crop up with the eyes and what I wanted to do today was to talk about orbital cellulitis

particularly how it relates to preceptal or periorbital cellulitis because this is one of those landmines that I find

myself navigating pretty frequently.

We'll go over how to differentiate the two today, what you'll see on physical exam, how to treat each of them. That way you never miss an orbital

cellulitis. Later in the show, we've got a question that was sent in to AskMedgecom regarding joint fluid aspiration and how to properly interpret it.

But for now let's get started on the eye.

So preceptal or periorbital cellulitis is a relatively benign condition that's kind of easy to treat

whereas orbital cellulitis is a lot more serious it can both be a sight and life

threatening condition but they can both present pretty similarly. So it's

important to know how to differentiate the two of them. Let's start with anatomy.

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