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 so that it wasn’t just a flat oval shape covering his missing eye. But he was determined and figured it out pretty easily. Next came colors. He learned to dye the leather so he could wear different colors on special occasions like St. Patrick’s Day or Christmas etc.
What next? Well, snakeskin of course! Brian knew he couldn’t just run out and buy snakeskin. He wanted genuine skin from an actual snake, not some artificial snake-like” material. After finding a website he could buy from he was like a kid in a candy store. The first order was a Cobra, I think. Then came a black and white Python, and 2 sea snakes, one yellow and one green. The python skin is his “formal” patch. He only wears that one for very special occasions.
THEN came the rattlesnake. My brother-in-law had killed a couple of rattlesnakes on his ranch, skinned them and mailed them to Benny. He told him they would make a really cool eye patch, which they did! The rattlesnake skin patch was the last patch Brian made and that was 2014, but then guess what he got for Christmas in 2019?
Yep! A 3-D printer and you know what he learned to make with his 3-D printer? Eye patches! His man cave has its own little corner, like a woman’s closet, with all his different colors of printed eye patches.
I really was impressed that he learned how to do this on his own. His very first attempt though was supposed to be like “Thor’s” patch and just stick there. He tried different methods of tape to try, but that didn’t work, so he had to come up with one that was going to require the strap, just like all the others. That did work and he gets compliments everywhere he goes, no matter if he’s wearing a snakeskin or a 3-D printed one.
As much as I’ve tried to convince him that he could really make a successful business out of this, he just refuses to be convinced. However, this doesn’t mean that he hasn’t made some exceptions for a couple of special people.
For example, for our anniversary a few years ago we were in a restaurant having dinner. This particular restaurant had booths that were a little too close for comfort where you could hear every word of the people sitting next to you, however, this turned into a blessing.
There was a young couple sitting close to us and after eating our meals the gentleman leaned over to Benny and asked him where he got his eye patch. I can’t even remember which one he was wearing at the time, but Benny told him he made it himself. The man was so fascinated and impressed and wanted to know everything about it.
He said that he and his fiancé were getting married in just a few weeks and how he wished he had a special patch for his eye. He still had his eye, but you could tell he had been in an accident because it was a little disfigured. I believe he told us it had been a motorcycle accident. Well, my Pirate, being the sweet man that he is, offered to make this kid a patch to wear in his wedding. He even hand-delivered it to the young man just in time for his wedding and would not let the young man pay him a dime.
Another time he made a patch, maybe more than one, was for a personal friend of ours from our hometown. And he wouldn’t take any money for that one either.
This particular accident with Benny’s eye occurred on July 5, 1980, but he had another accident on another July the 5th of the very next year when his best friend shot him in the hand.
The two of them had decided to go frog hunting at night. Usually, when you do this, you use gigs, which are basically spears. If you shine a spotlight in the frogs’ eyes, they freeze, and you can gig them. Well, this night, the two of them decided to shoot the frogs instead. Benny would spotlight the frog; Jerry Max would shoot it, and Benny would pick it up. Well, on the last frog of the night, Benny spotlighted, Jerry Max shot, and Benny reached down at the same time. Jerry Max shot him in the hand! So, the two of them took off to the ER.
This was in the middle of the night, and I was at home asleep. My father-in-law called me. He didn’t first say, “Everything is okay, but….. (which is what you should always do if you have to deliver some bad news). Instead, the first thing he says is “Paula, Benny’s been shot, and then paused! It freaked me out so much at first, but eventually, he told me the details, and I knew Benny was okay and alive.
When I got to the ER and found Benny, his hand was in a large bowl of bloody water, and he was in a lot of pain. He said this was worse than the knife in the eye. The bullet had broken a few bones, and he was going to have to have surgery. It took him a little while to get full use back in his hand with some physical therapy and pain pills. His pinky on that hand was crooked from then on, but at least he wasn’t shot with a hollow-point bullet, which they had been using earlier that night.
Thankfully, this accident wasn’t any worse or my Pirate may have ended up with a hook for a hand!