It is September of 1993. With three seasons under his belt, men's lacrosse player Blake Holden is at the Green Room in Durham one night. He's a few weeks away from being cleared to return to full contact lacrosse after having shoulder surgery earlier in the fall. While shooting a little pool, some guy says something to the girlfriend of one of his buddies. Holden decides to stick up for her.
Holden chose to come to Duke because he wanted to be sure of seeing four years of playing time. Now, a beer bottle to the face threatens to make sure that Holden never sees anything ever again.
"He broke it over my face when I wasn't looking," said Holden of the attack. "He caught me off guard."
Broken glass shattered into his right eye, scratching the cornea. And that was the luckier optical sensory organ of the two. The brunt of the glass hit and cleaved his left eye "like a bubble," Holden said.
On arriving at Duke Medical Center, the doctors told Holden that severe damage and risk of infection may force them to remove the eye. Instead, he woke up with both eyes still in place, held there by over 50 stitches--10 of which lay in a special spot.
"Those 10 stitches actually sewed my eyeball back together," Holden said. "It was cut right in half, across the cornea, everything. It was like if you cut a ball from one end to the other."
Both eyes were covered up with patches for several days. About two weeks after the initial surgery, the right eye had begun to heal naturally. The left eye required more help. Doctors had to go back into the eye to take out the shattered lens and to keep the retina in place by inserting a plastic loop, which remains there even today, Holden said.
"That was for my ability to see again," said Holden of the dual operation. "It was like having cataracts with my lens broken. I just couldn't see a thing."
Next up was a trip to a contact lens dealer. Holden received an extremely thick lens that now acts as the lens for his left eye. Holden used the words "sick" and "ridiculous" to describe the lens but he does value the service it provides.
"It's pretty uncomfortable," he said. "It's not one of these soft lenses, not like an `Accu-view'. You can see there are at least two lenses on top of each other.
"I wear it when I want to see. Without the lens, it's like a kalidescope. The light doesn't focus and the colors don't focus. It's one big blur without the lens."
Holden left the hospital after about a month-long stay. He returned twice more for surgery to move around his facial muscles when the eye wasn't aiming in the right direction.
Of course, he doesn't remember too many specifics of the operations. Holden was under anasthesia for all these procedures. "I just know this because of the bills," he said.
The cost of the multiple operations turned out to be well worth it to Holden. He knew that he needed all of the surgeries to give him the opportunity to play lacrosse again this fall. What he didn't realize is how well the surgery would turn out--successful to the point where he could read the 20/25-line with his left eye on the eyechart during one visit to the optometrist.
"You know how hard it is to get a doctor's attention in an office?" Holden asked. "You have to wait a half an hour, an hour? After I [read the chart], there was a line of like 15 doctors going out of the room. A couple of them talked about it being a one-in-a-million. The percentages for me seeing again were almost nil.
"It worked so well, I have to have a good attitude about the thing. It was a nightmare, but from the instant my eye was cut, everything that had to go right, did."
Holden made it all the way to this spring without needing another operation. His positive attitude developed after the good fortune with his eye helped him get through an appendectomy before the season. The operation left him rusty and out of shape for his final season, but he has still managed to contribute nicely for the 5-1 Blue Devils, leading the team in faceoffs won with 43.
"It's going pretty well," Holden said. "The past couple of weeks, I've just started to get my legs underneath me."
Now a fifth-year senior, Holden said he is "in the process" of looking for a job for next fall, when he will have put down his lacrosse sticks for good. Holden decided to return for his final season largely due to the talent returning from the 1994 squad, the most successful in school history. He hopes to end his career with a trip deep into the NCAA tournament.
"That's why I came back," Holden said. "When I look at the whole picture, we've got a pretty good chance. It's exciting."
Holden is wrong. His looking at any picture: Now that's exciting.
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