I have owned an AR ever since i was discharged from the corps.
I fired a lot of rounds, as most fellas.
Last friday i was practicing, and took a kneeling shot. The brass ricocheted off an object, i believe my well house cover, and struck my left eye instantly splitting my globe. I was rushed to the ER and underwent emergency surgery. Then monday on follow up checkup i was told i needed another emergency surgery to remove a fragment, which i could see at the time.
SO after all that i had a torn globe at six o clock with stitches, detached retina and a 6mm piece of brass behind my cornea and more stitches in top of eye.
Im on a long rode to recovery with certainty i will regain my eye site.
I was just wondering if anyone has had, or heard, of anything like this?
Damn. That sux. Hope your road to recovery goes smooth and fast.
What kind of eye protection were you wearing? Sounds like all the planets were aligned just right to screw you that day. I’ve had brass ding off barricades and come back at me but thankfully all I’ve had were burns from one or two going down my shirt.
Bummer. I hope all turns out well for you.
Lesson learned, I presume. Eye & ear pro are automatic for me. There are times where eye pro becomes bothersome, if there’s fogging or other issues, but one has to accept the risk should something happen if they’re removed.
Hope you heal up, OP. Please take this as a serious lesson to wear eye protection when shooting from now on, and always. I’ve had to learn the painful way, also. Some of us hard-headed types just don’t think it’s important until we’re looking at serious eye injury, and then it can be too late.
Not going to lie, I have forgone eye protection in the past, by pure laziness. But if there is one thing I can do, it’s learn from the pain of others. I will wear it from now on, I can’t imagine the pain, but I wish you a speedy recovery. I know it won’t make you feel any better, but this is one guy who has changed from your picture.
Sorry to hear about your bad luck. I hope your recovery goes well. I would have taken a piece of brass in the eye in a class recently but my Oakleys saved me. It still put a little cut on the bridge of my nose, but could have been sooooo much worse.
That’s the closest I’ve come to being injured besides the occasional burn from a hot barrel or a wayward piece of brass landing in a less than ideal location.
At least I can help the one fella.
Honestly never thought about eye pro, I assume you mean just safety glasses. But this is a hard lesson I wouldn’t wish on anyone .
I trust it’ll heal with many weeks progress. Worse part is keeping your head down, constantly, to keep a bubble pressing against my retina.
That and my parts coming in for upgrades on my rifle
Have I been injured by ARs? Sure, closed a bolt on my thumb, slapped myself in the balls when I was playing with a single point, but that no, but I where my Oakleys when I am shooting. Now, other people’s ARs, that’s a different story, been burned, bruised, and had my brain pan rattled by a good friend running a muzzle brake.
Hope all heals up okay! Eyes and ears when I am shooting… No, not when I hunt, it’ll only be one shot, I’ll take the chance, but I did have a similar freak incident last winter with my eye.
I was splitting firewood… it was kinda warm, sweaty and no, I wasn’t wearing any kind of eye protection (heck, even a pair of cheap sunglasses will stop a lot of debris!) and as I laid into a fairly large round with the splitting maul, I instantly saw/felt a piece of wood or bark hitting my eye. Lucky for me it just cut the sclera conjuntiva and not quite enough to get it stitched back up (or so the doc told me when I went to see him a couple days later. It had already started to heal back up). He of course asked me that very question… ‘you were wearing eye protection while splitting wood, right???’… :help:
Lesson learned… the hard way. Yes, I still have a small piece of debris (probaby a grain of sand) that didn’t get cleaned out when I went to the Opthamologist, so I will remember it for a looooong time to come… lol
