Almost lost my right eye
Many years ago in a land far far away... wait... wrong story.

Twas the night before Christmas.... no, not that one either.

[Accessing memory files......... memory file found]

Ah, here it is.

When I was a kid I had a bike, not a very good one but it was usable. It had the bmx style handlebars but without the supporting strut that went along the top (a v shaped bar with the grips at the top)

At the time in question I was at one end of the street I lived on where the pavement on one side of the road is several feet higher then the other. There were several places where people have converted their front gardens to parking spaces and it was outside one of these houses the incident occured.

Details are vague but the house in question must have been doing some sort of renovation as there was leftover sand on the slope leading up from the street to their front garden. It was here that for some reason long since lost in the midst of time I got off my bike and pushed it up the incline. Quite why I didn't cycle up is long forgotten but half way up the sand betrayed me and I lost my footing and I fell forward smacking my head against my handlebars.

This wouldn't be a problem really if it wasn't for the fact that the right hand brake on the bars was loose and kept slliding down the U shaped bars, something I always kept meaning to fix. This meant the end of the brake handle was pointing straight up and it connected with the area of my eye where the tear duct is located.

Yup, I did a very good job of trying to gouge my eye out.

Thankfully, that didn't happen as I quickly pulled back thinking what a knob I was and put my hand up to my eye to rub the pain. It was a few seconds later when I pulled my hand away and I saw the blood was when the panic set in.

Rather crazily, I hopped on the bike and cycled one handed about a 1/4 of a mile down the road to my house with blood pouring from my eye.

Thankfully I only opened up a cut on the side of my nose in the eye duct area but just a millimetre or two more to the right and it would've been my eyeball taking the damage.

My mother took it all rather calmly and got me to put a towel over the eye until the bleeding stopped (and I distinctly remember The Sound of Music was on telly). A couple of days later when visiting the GP about the cut he said I should've had a least 5 stitches put in as it was a fairly decent sized wound (this wouldn't be the last occassion when I should've had stiches for an injury with family members shrugging them off with a bit of bandaging).

Just typing this is sending a shiver down my spine about how close I came to losing sight in one eye.
(ParaSitius is an Optimistic Pessimist, Tue 24 Aug 2010, 17:34, 3 replies)

count yourself lucky
i should be completely blind in my left eye within about a year :(
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Tue 24 Aug 2010, 20:37, closed)

Soz to hear about that.
(ParaSitius is an Optimistic Pessimist, Wed 25 Aug 2010, 16:39, closed)

Have a click
because my mother never believed I was really injured either.

Took a week to get an x-ray of my fractured wrist.
(xanthine, Wed 25 Aug 2010, 12:06, closed)