It always puzzles me how I can remember certain events from my childhood perfectly, but not what I had for dinner two nights ago. When I was in fifth grade, a scary thing happened to me and I almost went blind. I can remember this day perfectly and I know it is something that I will never forget. It was at field day, which is one of the last days of school in June where there are a bunch of games set up outside and we play games all day instead of having class. My class was playing a game where there were three slingshots set up and we had to take tennis balls and try to make them hit a target. I was standing at the middle slingshot ready to hit the five point target, when the parent chaperon asked me to move back because they didn't want all three slingshots going at the same time and for someone to get hurt. After I had moved back, the person who was to the right of me was pulling back their slingshot back very far in order to fling the tennis ball really hard and the slingshot snapped and immediately hit me in the face, at my eyes. At first I was in shock, and had not realized what had happened. A few moments later I realized I could not open my eyes and had my teacher and other parents and kids surrounding me. Luckily the school nurse was at the game next to where I was, and escorted me inside to the nurse's office. My mom was at work downtown when this happened, and they immediately contacted her and told her what happened. My dad was at work as well and so my mom called my grandpa to come pick me up and take me to the eye doctor. My family friend is an eye doctor, so my mom called him and they said they would take me right away.
When I was at the eye doctor my grandpa had to fill out a bunch of papers and we sat in the waiting room for a while. Once I was taken, they dilated my eyes and gave me a bunch of tests to make sure I could see okay. After it was determined that my eyesight was perfect, they brought me into a room with a machine three times the size of me to check the inside of my eyes and make sure nothing was damaged. A bunch of bright lights were shined at me for about ten minutes, and they told me to wait in a room so they could read the results. It was determined that my eyes were in great condition, and there was not any damage to the inside of my eyes, and my eyesight was unaffected. They did figure out, although that the slingshot hit my face 1/4 of an inch away from my right eye. If it had hit my eye however, my perfect eyesight would have been ruined for sure and there was a good chance that I would have gone blind. My face hurt and my eyes were sore for the rest of the day, but after that I had gone back to normal. At an elementary school with about 500 kids, this story had spread around the school in five minutes. My sisters came home from school freaking out because they had heard that my eyes had popped out. It turns out that my sisters weren't the only ones who had heard this, at school the next day I had about fifty kids come up to me asking if my eyes had popped out. In fact, two of my former teachers and told me that their classes had asked them about it because they heard the same time. I am so thankful that I was okay after this incident, and learned how fast rumors spread and also how inaccurate they can be.
