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Liz'S JOURNAL May 2006 Black eyes. When I was young, I was fascinated, in middle school I was embarrassed, and in high school I thought they were so hard-core I would sometimes draw them on during the down time while doing cast makeup for school plays. My current feelings on black eyes are these: 1. There’s usually a good story behind them. 2. They say, “Don’t even think about messing with me.” 3. Everyone needs to look absolutely ridiculous for a few weeks every year. Other ways to accomplish that are bad haircuts, accidents with self-tanning lotion, and Sharpie marker tattoos you didn’t think through. I recently had a black eye of such epic proportions that no one, myself included, knew how to react to it. It was a monster, an appendage to my skull, a latch-on twin from the X-Files waiting for its moment to birth itself from my eye socket. I got the epic shiner from a particularly vicious elbow during a basketball game. I initially fell down, then realizing that my nose and mouth were fine, I got up to play again. A foul had been called on the sharp-elbowed 6-footer, and a girl on our team helped me up. When I looked at her, she immediately said, “Oh my God, Kolbe, you need to go out.” I shot my hand up to my eye, which was starting to feel a little pressure, and found a golf-ball sized bump growing from underneath my eye bridge. I sat on the bench scaring my fellow teammates by making my pupil disappear under the giant bulge. After the game I went out to dinner, where the waiter joked that I should have been cast in Million Dollar Baby. At this point Violet was just a large flesh-colored goose egg. I wasn’t until the next morning that the fate of my injury was apparent. To give some perspective on how shocking I looked, I will offer some examples of public exposure. In Rastall, I approached a good friend and took my glasses off; she screamed and took off running. Running in the dining hall is dangerous; hungry 20 year-old boys with trays of food are not to be messed with. The dining hall was not, unfortunately, my most public appearance with my new addition. I decided that my extra-large wraparound sunglasses would be sufficient to hide my eye during a trip to the mall, however, the bulge had grown so large that it was rubbing against the lens in my glasses, leaving a noticeable grease streak. Trying on clothes also was a problem. We were trying to make the mall trip quick, and were pulling sweaters over our heads by the display rack. Every time I’d try for a quick transition, I would lose my glasses in the thick wool and be left exposed, frantically searching for cover. If malls didn’t make me feel self-conscious before, the added embarrassment of appearing to be a young woman in an abusive relationship did. The shock and hilarity of my misfortune was not contained to the thousands of people at the mall. In a much more personal setting, I had an interesting experience at the optometrist. A few days after the accident, I went to the training room to let our trainer, Jason, evaluate my injury status. After a good laugh and a couple pictures, he decided I should go to the eye doctor to check if the pressure would affect my vision. As we drove to the office, I relished in making strangers uncomfortable at stoplights by taking off my sunglasses and smiling at them. Jason, who is still young enough to play immature jokes, also enjoyed the game. When we arrived at the optometrist, I tried to keep my sunglasses on, but in order to explain my injury I had to take them off. The poor woman behind the counter screamed. I seemed a perfectly nice girl accompanied by an athletic trainer when I came in, but my case was a bit uglier than the traditional scratched lens. After filling out forms (with difficulty), I was taken to a room to have my vision checked. After looking at my eye, an assistant asked if I could see. I gently lifted the bulge, tilted my head back, and replied that I could see a little. “I don’t know what to do with this,” she said. Another triumph for the bulge; we perplexed the medical community. The optometrist handled the situation well; I suspect she had been informed of my condition before coming in. She concluded that my eye was healthy, but would be black for several weeks. Jason and I left a little disappointed: I had hoped for a gruesome bulge-draining session. As the doctor predicted, the bulge turned black, then purple and blue as the swelling and color drooped below my eye. It was healing well, and by the time fifth block started, what had been a debilitating bulge had turned into a standard shiner. Nearly a month had passed, and the discoloration on my face had become familiar. People on campus stopped commenting on it, and before I knew it the color had completely faded. The only reminders I have of my epic shiner are a lingering calcium deposit on my eye bridge and a lovely piece of game film. I used to think any black eye looked tough, but now when someone claims to have a black eye, I raise an affected eyebrow and think to myself, “You have no idea.”
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Over the next few days the bulge turned from a simple frightening bump to an odd elliptical shape that drooped over my entire eye like a curtain made of purple flesh. The only way I could see anything on my right side was either to turn my head or to gently lift the bulge out of the way. I was hard for people to look at, and it was hard for me to look at them with one eye, so I took to wearing sunglasses at all times.