On July 5, 1980, 44 years ago this year, we were a newly married couple of only one year enjoying the fruits of a new home and a new motorcycle that he had bought. Benny had been out in the garage working on his motorcycle and I was in the back bedroom ironing some clothes. I heard the door and knew Benny had come in the house but was not prepared for what came next. He walked into the room where I was with his hand covering his right eye. There was blood gushing through his finger and down his face. He said, rather matter of fact like, “I think I need to go to the hospital.” Ya think!!! (Benny had been working on his motorcycle and made the grave mistake of NOT cutting away from his face. He was attempting to slice a wire and the knife he was using was much sharper than he anticipated and when he cut the wire his hand came up too quickly and the knife went directly into his eye.) We jumped into the car, and I flew like a crazy person to the ER at Altus. Benny’s eye beginning to be in a lot of pain. They cleaned his eye and dressed it and proceeded to contact the ophthalmologist in town. After what seemed like forever the ER physician finally came in and informed us that BOTH ophthalmic surgeons in town were out of town and that he would have to be sent to OKC by ambulance. They allowed me to ride in the ambulance with him, which is usually not policy, but since he wasn’t in any immediate medical danger he didn’t have to have a medical team go with him and I didn’t want him to be alone, so they allowed me to go.I thought I would just ride up front with the ambulance driver since Brian was conked out. That was not a good experience. People don’t know what to do when an ambulance comes up behind them. Some people just stop right where they are in the middle of the road without moving over to the side. The driver told me that the percentage of ambulance accidents was quite high simply because people don’t know what to do. I sat up front halfway through the trip but had to move to the back because seeing how people were responding to the ambulance was scaring me to death. When we arrived at Dean McGee Eye Institute, they immediately took him into surgery to have his eye sutured. However, the doctor informed us that his vision loss was permanent. Adjusting to vision with just one eye took him quite some time, especially with depth perception, but he did adjust extremely well. He was able to keep his actual eye until the summer of 1982. At this time the eye began to bleed internally and had to be removed. For the next 18 years he wore prosthetic eyes. He had adjusted so well during these years that he had a lot of fun with his “eye” playing jokes on people and he now gets a big kick out of little kids thinking he is a pirate. I have a couple of funny stories about his artificial eye that are my favorites. The first was when he was writing a check at a convenience store. He had leaned over the counter to write the check and when he did, his artificial eye fell out, landed on the counter, looking straight up and the girl at the register. She screamed and Benny just laughed, picked up the eye, popped it back in place and says, “Man, I hate it when that happens.” The second story was when Benny was racing. Way back in the day he used to do mini stock car racing on a dirt track. During one of the races, he was rear ended so hard that it caused his prosthetic eye to go flying out of his eye socket and into the floorboard of his car. There wasn’t a special caution flag for lost eyeballs, but they had to pause the race anyway so that Benny could find his eyeball. In the year 2001, after moving to Tulsa, his ophthalmic surgeon wanted to try one last prosthetic eye. This one was going to be “the best” they said. It was supposed to fit onto a peg that would be attached to the muscles in the eye orbit, and this would allow the eye to move like a real eye. The first procedure with this process was surgery to place the peg into the muscles. The surgery itself was a success, but the recovery was not. He ended up with a very severe staph infection in the orbit and the peg had to be removed. After this, Benny had just had enough. Back then when you wore prosthetic eyes they would have to be refitted now and then because they would wear down and a new eye would have to be re-made. So, when this last incident occurred with the infection, he simply decided he was finished wearing a prosthetic at all. He told me that if I didn’t mind him wearing an eye patch instead, that he would much prefer to just do that. It really didn’t bother me at all, in fact I told him a patch was kinda sexy. That was 23 years ago and since then, Benny and his eyepatches have taken on a story of their own. When he first began wearing a patch, they were those flimsy little black ones you could get at Walmart or a pharmacy. Those wore out too quick, plus those were just not cool enough if you were going to be a Pirate. So, Benny decided he wanted to try and make his own out of leather. Finding leather was easy, making it pliable was easy, the challenge came with trying to mold an “eye” shape into the leather
