I am part of the “walk it off” generation. I’ve been shot in the leg with a BB gun, hid the event from my mother and then extracted the projectile myself. I’ve got the scar to prove it. When I was nine or ten, I threw a rock at my sister’s head and missed her temple by millimeters. I carried her back to the house while she bled profusely. In this day and age she would have been airlifted to the hospital. The adults back then gave her a bath to remove the excessive amount of blood, changed her clothes and gave her a tortilla to soothe the tears.
In 2020 I walked around with a stomach ache for the better part of a week. It was kind of a dull ache that I brushed off as having had too much dairy at Easter. My “walk it off” approach was working right up until I ended up in the hospital with a ruptured appendix.
Naturally, this approach has its flaws. A month ago I was at home doing my usual morning workout routine. Lying on the floor, I wrapped my 40-pound resistance band around my feet and gave it its usual pull. What happened next made even the eye doctor cringe. The band, for some reason, slipped, came off my foot and like a rubber band, snapped me directly on my left eyeball. (I’ll pause while you cringe.) After the initial hit I yelled out a four-letter word, jumped up and grabbed my eye. I walked around the room repeating the four-letter word until I could grasp what I had just done.
I made my way through the room to the mirror and through tears saw that, for a minute, it didn’t look that bad. “Okay, I think I’m okay, it’s not that bad,” I stupidly thought and, just like a kid from the ‘80s, proceeded to walk it off.
That’s when my eyeball started to swell and my vision started to blur. Yet, still I tried to walk it off. I started to get ready to go to work and walked into the dark bathroom only to see weird lights in my left eye. It never stopped watering. I called my mom and when she was done cringing, she advised me to go to the urgent care. I did and ended up at an eye specialist that diagnosed an eye concussion.
You can’t walk off an eye concussion. For the following week I had to use steroid drops and watch and wait to see if the damage I did to my eye would be permanent. I am happy to report that my eye is about 100% better and now, when I use the work out band, I wear my glasses and keep my head turned to the right.
Thanks to all the PRT readers who noticed that my column wasn’t in the paper last month. Even though I have typed without an appendix, I couldn’t type with one eye.
Cassina Farley can be contacted at cassinaandzachfarley@msn.com