I got a tree in the face while biking...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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with a an extra helping of 3" stubby branch right in the eye. Last Friday I was following my biking buddy (who is provably shorter than I am) through some paths in the river valley; a small but quite solid overhanging tree branch went just under my helmet visor, and a stub of a branch sticking out of it got my left eyebrow and mashed my glasses against my face, knocking me off my bike.

I dislodged my helmet from the foliage, and spent some quiet time to myself laying on the ground murmuring “Aaaaa!” “Fffffff… un!” “Gaaah!” before my friend rejoined me and let me know I wasn’t bleeding uncontrollably and should get up.

My face felt funky and my left eye didn’t seem to want to point the same direction or plane as usual, so my friend called an ambulance and we went to the E.R.
(Ha! I bet some of the ladies believed that!) No actually we biked back to his place where I got an icepack and some beer. After carefully driving back home, I spent the weekend wearing impromptu eyepatches and being annoyed at my optometrist’s hours.

Anyhow, while my eye merely disagreed with extreme angles on Monday, my face was still feeling like a mad dentist had frozen it, so I went to a clinic where the word of the day was neuropraxia. So I keep doing what I was doing while a nerve (don’t know which one) grows back at 1mm/day.
Anyhow, I’d have posted "Ow, my *$&%damn eye! :smack: " earlier, but lots of people know why I didn’t. And I just felt like explaining to the world that I’m drinking beer with half-numb lips not looking around a lot. Oh, and that you should wear eye protection while doing cross-country (like glasses or wrap-arounds) 'cause not having them would have sucked way worse.

:rolleyes: OW! :smack:

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Ow!

Get better soon!

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Dang! That’s rough! I hope you heal quickly!

4

No more tree branch in face.

Feel better soon!

5

This happened to me many years ago. Only it was a metal utility pole instead of a tree. And I wasn’t wearing a helmet.

After I picked myself up and went home, I looked in the mirror. “Hey!” I thought, “It looks like I dented my face! Nahhhhh! You can’t dent a face!”
But I couldn’t feel anything on that side of my face. And I couldn’t chew anything harder than applesauce.

So I went to the Emergency Room, where they looked and probed and took x-rays and couldn’t find anything.
Until they called the Plastic Surgeon.

He took one look and announced that i had fractured my malar bone (cheekbone), the flimsy support for which constitutes, in my opinion, an eloquent case against Intelligent Design. It had broken off and slid down my face, pinching the InfraOrbital Nerve and making that side of my face feel like it had a permanent Novocaine shot.

We scheduled surgery for later in the week, before it had a chance to start building up repair bone that would have to be rebroken (eww!). Aftyer the surgery, my face felt normal. I looked like the Frankendstein Menter for a few weeks while it healed (green skin, huge stitches, and all), and after it healed, I still looked like me.

So it coulda been worse.

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Slid down your face? Aarrghyearch!