That's A Lot Of Blood
Have I mentioned the time I nearly lost my eye?
Well, look, or, maybe look is the wrong verb to use in this case, but anyway, I have worn glasses since I was 5. This isn’t weird or anything, lots of people have astigmatism and mine came for me in church, when my parents realized I was squinting constantly and walking to the front to read see what was going on.
Life continued to happen and specifically sports continued to happen to me. I broke my glasses a fair few times because I never really got the hang of the whole not slamming into people and objects trick others appeared to master early on. In high school, I tried playing soccer without anything and basically just couldn’t function because it turns out that you need to be able to tell that the object hurtling toward you is a ball on a particular trajectory and not, say, nothing whatsoever, so you turn away and get thwomped on the ear. This totally never happened to me ever, though. Definitely not. So I reverted to glasses. It didn’t go well, as you would probably expect and the next and definitely first thwomping broke my glasses as I tried to direct a header into the path of a teammate during a counter. My coach caught a lens no the sideline 15 feet away. He put it in his pocket.
The savvy reader will be puzzling right now about this newfangled concept of contact lenses. It’s so new that Leonardo da Vinci apparently thought of them in 1508. Okay, so I tried contacts, but for whatever reason, I’ve always hated them. I’ve jabbed myself in the eye quite a few times and I swear all they do is spin in my eye when I run, further blurring my vision. They work okay. Better than glasses. So I try to wear them when I’m playing outdoors because there’s more space so also more high crosses and headed balls.
All of this is to say that my relationship with soccer and vision is on rocky ground during the best of times. But I also persevere in the face of visual impairment in a way that probably puts me in a category loosely labelled “complete idiot.” Can’t see the ball? No worries, the thwomp will tell me where it is.
On the day I almost lost my eye, I was playing in the playoffs of a league in Manhattan, my buddies and I squarely in the middle of the pack, but good enough to qualify for the post season. It was cold and windy along the waterfront of the East River and we were playing a team that was better than we were, if only by a little. I was wearing contacts and that is probably a very, very good thing.
What I remember is there was a scrap for a loose ball in someone’s box, I suppose theirs, and I stepped around another player to get a foot in and bang. Someone catapulted a ball into my face from point-blank range. I have no idea who or how they did it or what the circumstances were because I couldn’t even take the time to register it before the ball was bouncing away from my noggin in a most disrespectful manner. You could almost hear it titter.
I suppose it’s possible I was concussed, but mostly I just thought my eye had been shoved into my skull and that I’d have a black eye for a year and half. It was my right eye and I went and sat on the sideline and put one of those metal water bottles against it to ice it. It felt good to do that, so I kept doing that. Whenever I’d remove it to see if it was better, my vision in that eye was a bit blurry, but nothing that made me think about hospitals or ophthalmologists. My friends said it looked fine, maybe a bit puffy from pressing a water bottle into it for half an hour.
We lost the match and that was too bad. As we walked away from the field, I noticed that I could see a sort of shadow over everything in my right eye, like there was a dark, translucent cloth in the way. That was annoying, but it was going to go away.
I’m sure you’re prepared for this next line: it didn’t go away. I woke up the next morning with a slightly darker, translucent cloth over the vision in my right eye. It was a Sunday, so I went about my business, which involved a vague amount of worry the eye, but mostly some NFL or something. My wife suggested I go to an ophthalmologist on Monday, which I dutifully did. They fit me into their schedule when I described what was going on. By Monday night, when I got to ophthalmologist’s office after a day of close computer work in a grinding, fast-paced law office, I was sure I was getting better. My eye was okay! Why was I even here? The doctor heard my brief explanation of what happened, put those annoying drops in my eyes to dilate them, and then leaned in for a peek.
He straightened up almost immediately and his voice was startled as he said, “That’s a lot of blood!”
I want to say that that is not a great reaction, but it’s also probably the correct one. Apparently the impact of the ball had broken a series of vessels in the back of my eye and the blood had pooled considerably at the back of my eye.
After further examination the doctor concluded that I was “extremely lucky” that the injury had stopped bleeding and “maybe next time go to the doctor right away” and “that really is a lot of blood.” I then took the subway home with dilated eyes, which is a fate worse than death. And it was dark and raining when I finally got to my destination: a dinner reservation with my in-laws who, while sympathetic, were almost as aghast as my brother was when I told him about the injury: you waited to go to the doctor when there was a cloudy spectral ghost in your vision?
The moral here is do not wait to go to the doctor, your brother will make fun of you and your in-laws will shake their heads sadly as you try to focus on how to eat with a fork you can’t focus on.
And also, had there been continued bleeding, I could be blind in one eye. There’s that minor detail too. Thwomp’s revenge, if you will.