By Will Dabbs, MD
Saturday afternoon was when the really good stuff most often rolled in to my medical clinic. The typical story was that something went awry Friday night at a party, and the hero staggered to bed and fell asleep. Then he dragged his half-dead carcass out to see me after lunch on Saturday once he could sort-of think straight. That happened all the time.
I have, for the past quarter century, practiced medicine in Oxford, Mississippi. Oxford, you may recall, plays home to the University of Mississippi—Ole Miss in the vulgar tongue. Among other things, we produce the most beautiful women on Planet Earth. I married one of them. We also throw a mean party.
That’s not hyperbole. It has been said of my alma mater that we may lose the occasional football game, but we’ve never lost a party. You’ve not really lived until you have experienced the Ole Miss Grove on game day. However, there’s a dark side to that fully-justified accolade.
The Protagonist
Our hero was a 21-year-old white male. My nurse put him in Room 7. Room 7 is the treatment room—the playroom in my weird little world. That’s where I get to do all of my cutting and sewing. Nothing transforms a good day into a great day faster than a nice chainsaw to the thigh. Room 7 is where the real magic happens.
I walked in to find this guy sitting in the big dental chair with one eye shut. He seemed otherwise intact. I started our discussion with my obligatory, “What can I do for you, stud?”
He had been at a throwdown the night before at a local fraternity house. The beer was cold, the girls were hot, and the party was rocking. He found himself in the backyard horsing around with buddies when somebody threw a bottle against the brick wall. This guy subsequently got something in his eye.
He found a garden hose, irrigated the offended eyeball vigorously, made his way upstairs to his room in the frat house, fell into bed, and slept the sleep of the dead. He awoke the next morning with a killer hangover and some residual eye irritation. A friend drove him to see me.
The Injury
I gently pried his eye open to discover a healthy chunk of brown Budweiser bottle protruding from the center of his cornea. His pupil, which is customarily round in general geometry, was now describing a most unnatural trapezoid. The shard of glass had clearly severed the tiny ciliary muscles that govern the operation of that most remarkable little camera. In addition, the areas of the cornea adjacent to the insult were already starting to cloud up white. Once that starts, you’re pretty much done. There’s really not much that will reverse that process.
Sometimes my biggest professional challenge is simply not acting shocked. I have found that a medical crisis is seldom improved by having your doctor start running about in circles whilst screaming, “Holy crap!” over and over and over.
In this case, I simply said, “Hmmm…”
The Aftermath
This kid wasn’t stupid. He could tell this was shaping up to become a fairly big deal. He then said, “Listen, doc. I just graduated last week with my commission via Air Force ROTC. I start flight school in three weeks. Is this going to cause me any problems?”
I pondered that for a moment and said, “Well, yeah, probably so…”
I learned a great deal in medical school. One of the things I learned was that I wasn’t even remotely qualified to pull a big piece of beer bottle out of some aspiring pilot’s eyeball. I punted him up the road to the ER, and they brought in the on-call ophthalmologist. That guy wouldn’t touch him, either. They then evac’d him to The Med—the big trauma center in Memphis.
The kid eventually scored a cornea transplant, and his flight school slot went to whoever was next on the list. I’m sure that person was just over the moon. For his part, our hero had the rest of his life to remember that one epic party.
