At the request of Randy Kahn in the Southwest SRA, Will Carlin was asked to write an open letter to their membership two years after he suffered a devastating eye injury in court. Below is an edited (for length) reprint of that letter:
October 20, 1994
As many of you know, in May 1992, I was playing in the semi-finals of an MSRA tournament when I was hit in the left eye by a squash ball. I suffered a torn and detached retina which required emergency surgery to repair.
I was playing without eyeguards. This will surprise some of you, for many know me to be a strong advocate of protective eyewear. Rest assured, it was not by plan, but rather only because I was using a different bag than I normally do, and I had forgotten to transfer the goggles.
Let me begin by explaining my injury a bit more completely than I did two years ago. Imagine, for a moment, your eye as a basketball. The retina—which contains the rods and the cones you may remember from high school biology and is the “movie screen” onto which the images you look at are projected—is like a layer of Saran Wrap lining the inside surface of the basketball. (Actually, the retina is even thinner than Saran Wrap, but the analogy is a good one, I’m told.) When torn, the fluid in the eye (called the vitreous humor) can actually get between the “Saran Wrap” and the “basketball” and start to lift the plastic-wrap-like retina away from the eye; when it actually becomes separated, it is called “detached.” If the retina becomes too detached, the eye is no longer able to process the things it looks at and blindness ensues.
My retina was torn and partially detached. The operation to fix it consists of sewing a small piece of metal to the outside of the eye to indent the “basketball” so that the edges of the torn “Saran Wrap” are able to overlap. Shortly after this physical surgery, laser surgery then ‘’burns’’ the edges together—gluing the edges, in a way, through the formation of scar tissue. Does all of this sound painful? The post-surgical pain was the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced. For about a week after the surgery, I had to lie still; I was not able to read, to watch TV, or to move about. I could listen to the radio, the TV, or cassettes, but that was it—and I was either in terrible pain or I was nauseous from the pain-killers.
From there, it was another two months or so before I was able to start exercising at all vigorously, and another few months after that before I was able to play squash competitively at all.
Making matters even worse, Will learned a year later that he would have to endure the same surgery again because another part of the retina had finally torn. His recovery the second time around was rife with complications and, at one point, there was real concern that he may lose sight in that eye permanently. Thankfully, he did recover and can see, though “floaters” are a part of daily life.
