And that’s how my fake eye ended up in the Cedar Point lost and found

So, I feel like I should have started by saying “spoiler alert”, but even knowing how this story ends doesn’t really make any of the events leading up to that fateful night at Cedar Point any less funny. Plus, there’s so much more to tell about all of the things that happened along the way, so let’s just go back to the beginning.

If you have read any of my previous posts you know that I have a prosthetic left eye. What you probably don’t know, is that artificial eye technology has come along way from the days of glass eye balls and pirate eye patches. That’s not to say that there aren’t people walking around right now with glass eyes, I’m sure there are, and I wouldn’t ever be critical of anyone who wears an eye patch, it’s a bitchin’ look that most of us only wish we could pull off. It’s just that neither of these even closely resemble what I went through with my prosthetic eye.

The technical term for removing an eye is enucleation, and at least in my case, they didn’t even remove the entire eye, well, so to speak. I wasn’t there, well I was there, but you know, under general anesthesia. So, I can only explain it to you the way it was explained to me – and I had enough other crap to worry about, like making sure they marked the correct side of my face with a Sharpie marker before the surgery, a somewhat primitive practice that they still use in today’s day and age to make sure they don’t take out the wrong eye, so you’ll understand if my recollection is a little fuzzy. The way I understand it, is that there are six main muscles attached to the eye which provide for its normal range of motion. During my enucleation, the optic nerve was severed and most of the stuff you would think of as the biologic eye was removed, and was replaced by a small piece of sea coral which served as the ocular implant around which some of the remaining tissues were sutured, which in turn, remained attached to four of these six eye muscles. The idea behind using sea coral as an orbital implant is that, over time, the porous coral, which itself is a living organism, will sort of fuse with the other eye tissues, and form a new foundation on which the prosthetic eye will rest. And unlike the fake eyes of the past, this newer ocular implant technique actually allows the patient to be able to move their prosthetic eye, not a lot, but some, because four of those six muscles are still attached and partially operable.

Following the surgery I was sent home to allow the tissues to heal and for the swelling in the eye cavity to dissipate. Probably the worst part of the recovery was that they sent me home with this little plastic half-shell shaped spacer thing in my eye socket, which – not to be gross – had two small holes that allowed for all of the nasty discharge to seep out. After a few days things started to quiet down, and within weeks I was ready for the next step in the process, which involved a consultation with the ocularist.

What the Hell is an Ocularist?

Like you, I had no idea what an ocularist was, or would have imagined that I would ever be utilizing their highly specialized services. But, there I was, meeting with Terry Bulgarelli at Custom Eye Prosthetics in Warren, Michigan, (this sounds weird even saying, but if you are ever in the market for a fake eye, I would highly recommend going to see Terry!)

A few things about my prosthetic eye that will probably surprise you. My prosthetic eye isn’t round like a marble, its more flat, disc shaped, sort of like a giant chunky contact lens, but one that does the exact opposite of helping you see better. Also, my prosthetic eye isn’t glass, its actually made of plastic. Creating the prosthetic eye is a two-day process. The first day the ocularist makes a mold of your eye socket to determine the basic size and shape of the eye for casting the finished prosthetic. On the second day, the ocularist fits and reshapes the prosthetic as necessary, and then determines the direction of your gaze before actually painting on the pupil, iris and even using small pieces of red thread to add blood vessels, all to match the natural appearance of your other eye. Which brings us to our next fun fact, the work of an ocularist is as much art as it is science. I don’t mean to insinuate that ocularist is some sort of pseudo medical profession. On the contrary, Terry has told me enough stories about having to be in the operating room to consult with the surgeons as they reconstruct a patient’s orbital bone to know that’s not the case, but it’s just that a good ocularist is a true artisan, which is something that a patient of any good ocularist can attest to, and can certainly appreciate. Finally, it’s worth noting that the average life span of a prosthetic eye is about five years, not because they wear down (although they do require periodic cleaning and polishing), but because as you age, and as you add or gain weight, the changes to the structure of your face can affect the appearance of how the prosthetic sits in your eye socket, which is why they recommend that you have a new eye made about every five years. Unless of course you lose your eye, which brings us back to our story.

There are plenty of reasons why you would take your prosthetic eye out, most are not good reasons, and even fewer are things that you actually plan for. The most common reason I take my prosthetic eye out is to clean it, usually because it has shifted in the eye socket and the irritation to the surrounding tissues is creating a bunch of eye mucous, which is unfortunately something that anyone with a prosthetic eye has to contend with on an ongoing basis. Now the second reason I’m less proud of. Terry, my ocularist once told me about a trick that you can do to people at bars which involves betting them a round of drinks if you can lick your eye ball. Like I said, not one of my proudest moments, especially because there are multiple times that I have actually pulled this stunt (even once at a family wedding that didn’t even have a cash bar!) The other reasons that this can happen, which are much more infrequent (thank god), is when your eye can just pop out without any warning. I should stop and clarify that its not like your eye just pops out all the time, like when you’re standing in the checkout line at Meijer or walking through the airport or whatever, it’s usually caused by some sort of external factor. Like the time I was sitting in my cubicle at Capital Area Michigan Works! and I gently tugged at my eyelid with my finger and my fake eye flew out and took about four bounces on my desk before I could scoop it up (luckily nobody was nearby to witness this). Or it could be other external forces, like water, which I think about every single time I go to dive into a pool (a good rule of thumb is not to dive in a pool with a deep end more than eight or nine feet, just in case I have to swim down to the bottom to retrieve my fake eye sitting by the drain). And of course, there’s wind, lots of wind. The kind of wind you experience, say, on a roller coaster. That sort of wind can also make your prosthetic eye pop out. 

Getting Back on the Horse: First Trip Back to Cedar Point in Over 20 Years

In the summer of 2011, my wife Teresa and I decided to do a day trip to Cedar Point. At that time both of our boys were still very young, and I’ll be honest – both of us were really looking forward to getting away, even if it was just for the day. I hadn’t been to Cedar Point since I was a teenager, so I had been campaigning for this “adult only” trip to Cedar Point for several years. When the day finally arrived, Teresa and I made plans to be on the road by 5:30 a.m. so we could have breakfast in Maumee, Ohio, and arrive at the park as soon as it opened. Now so much time had passed that everything was practically brand new to me, rides like the Millennium Force, Maverick and Wicked Twister hadn’t existed the last time I had been there, and sadly, some rides like the Demon Drop had been shuttered to make way for other new attractions. Luckily, the one person who loves roller coasters more than me is my wife Teresa, so she is by far the best roller coaster riding companion! Our plan was to literally ride non-stop from the time the park opened until they shut things down at 10pm that night. And that’s pretty much what we did.

We started with the classics: Blue Streak, Gemini, Magnum. With each new ride, we sort of fell into this system where Teresa would describe to me, while we were still standing in line, what to expect when we would go to board the roller coaster, things like, “okay, when you get in you’re going to click your seat belt and then there’s a bar in front of you that you’ll pull down over your lap”, or “there’s a harness that you pull down over your head and shoulders that clicks into the seat belt”, stuff like that. 

This continued throughout the day, and then at some point in the late afternoon we decided to ride the Corkscrew, which incidentally, is a ride that I had ridden many times before. Well, maybe because fatigue had started to set in, or maybe because she just got distracted, but for whatever reason, Teresa didn’t give me her little run through of the Corkscrew prior to us boarding the ride. When the train pulled up we were standing in the second to last line, and as we approached the car we were to ride in, I noticed a lap bar sticking straight up in front of me, so I assumed that this must be the bar/harness thingy that we pull down over us once we got seated. What I didn’t realize was that what I was seeing was the shoulder harness for the car in front of us which had been left in the up position by the previous rider. When I went to sit down, unbeknownst to me, my bar was already in the down position, waiting to be released (by me. When I tried to  sit down, I was wedged down in front of it, my legs smashed up against the front of our car, and my immediate reaction was one of panic, as I frantically twisted around in my ultra cramped seat saying, “Teresa, I can’t fit, I can’t fit.”

Now Teresa had been so occupied getting herself situated with her own harness that she hadn’t seen any of what I was dealing with over on my side of the car, she just saw my panic, which was made worse because she had just gotten her bar to lock into place and was worried that the train was going to pull away before we could figure out what to do. She started to slap at her locked harness while trying to get the attention of one of the attendants standing on the platform. While all of this was going on I finally realized what was happening, turned behind me and released my harness, lifted it up out of my way, sat down and pulled it down over my shoulders and locked it into place. By this time the attendant was standing over Teresa trying to calm her down, so when I just matter-of-factly said, “I’m good” she looked over to see me sitting there as if nothing had happened, which she just wasn’t able to process. As the train lurched forward and rolled toward the first big hill, confused, and more than a little bit embarrassed, she quietly asked me “what the hell was that all about?” The humor in the situation wasn’t lost on me, as I realized how idiotic the whole thing must have looked to other people waiting in line to board the ride, not to mention the workers who had a first-row seat to the entire spectacle. We hadn’t even peaked the summit of that first hill and we were both laughing hysterically, both of us crying from laughing so hard. When the train pulled back and came to a stop we quietly made our exit, and needless to say, we steered clear of the Corkscrew for the rest of the day because we couldn’t bear the thought of having to face our teenage attendants again. 

The rest of the day went off without a hitch, and as closing time approached, we enjoyed a few last rides on the Sky Swings near the front of the park before getting in the car for the long drive back to Michigan.

HalloWeekends 

It wouldn’t be long before we returned to Cedar Point, and the next time we visited we did so with our boys. When my oldest son Carson, who’s birthday is in September, turned nine years old, we decided to surprise him by getting a deal on a HalloWeekends package which included access to the park on Friday night from 6 p.m. to midnight, passes for either Saturday or Sunday and wristbands to the pirate-themed hotel/water park where we were staying. The boys were relatively young and not tall enough to ride a lot of the suspension type coasters, but for the most part, they were troopers, starting with riding the Millennium Force as their first roller coaster, and even inadvertently getting on the Maverick and riding it, when technically my youngest son Ryan wasn’t tall enough to be on it. 

After the boys insisted on riding the Blue Streak back to back to back to back to back at the end of the first night (it hadn’t been running when we had first arrived at the park earlier that evening,) we returned to the hotel and went to the water park for a couple of hours, before retiring to our room to order pizza. We didn’t tell the kids, but we had another surprise planned for them. The next day Teresa’s cousin Scott and his wife Danielle, along with the boys’ cousins Emma and Colin were going to meet us at the park to spend the day with us. It was perfect because the younger and older kids naturally paired up, and of course us two couples, before we all set off into the park to enjoy the rides.

Emma and Colin were not quite as adventurous as our kids, and after a few hours, Danielle wasn’t tolerating the roller coasters like she had earlier in the day, so inevitably our buddy system started to get shuffled around based on whatever attraction we were checking out, as some of the kids weren’t interested in, or weren’t tall enough to ride some of the more intense roller coasters. It got to a point where my wife Teresa would volunteer to sit out every third or fourth ride so that Scott and I could ride together, because like me, Scott hadn’t been to Cedar Point in close to twenty years so there were a lot of rides he still hadn’t got a chance to experience. 

As the night wound down, we found ourselves on the back side of the park  casually strolling through one of the “scare zones” they set up for HalloWeekends, which are these dark, spooky areas where they have staff dressed up in costumes that try to sneak up on you or jump out of the shadows to startle you. We had just gotten done laughing about how this worker who was dressed up as an evil sort of Rumpelstiltskin character had tried to sneak up on my left, which is my blind side, so of course I hadn’t  noticed him, even as he walked along side of me with his prosthetic rubber nose practically sticking in my face, which must have been disappointing, and more than a little baffling to him. As we started to make our way back toward the front entrance of the park, Teresa said that we had about a half hour before the park closed, and suggested that Scott and I split off and go ride the Top Thrill Dragster, which was the last major attraction that he hadn’t gotten a chance to ride. 

When Scott and I got in line there was a sign that said it would be a half hour wait, but we quickly proceeded through the turnstiles, and in just a few minutes we were up to the part of the line where you empty out of the main line and into smaller corrals adjacent to the platform where you stand and wait to board the different cars. Well, we had made such good time working our way through the main part of the line, Scott suggested that we stand and wait a few extra minutes to be able to ride in the front car, which I of course agreed to. We had already made it that far, might as well get the full experience.

Now I had actually ridden the Top Thrill Dragster several times before, but that didn’t make me any less nervous. When it was finally our time to load into the front car, I recall sitting down and strapping myself in, and as the ride’s dragster sound effects started up, I remember pinning my head back against the headrest and not wanting to be caught between breaths, because when the ride’s magnetic catapult finally launches, you literally go from zero to 120 MPH in like, three seconds.

The very last thing I remember before we launched was hearing Scott nervously laughing next to me. Then, we shot off. It happens so fast that it actually takes a few seconds for your brain to register that you’re moving, and then its abundantly clear that you are being propelled forward at such a rapid rate of acceleration, that all you can do is try to look off into the distance for the vertical track in front of you, so you can at least try to prepare for being shot straight up into the air 420 feet before doing a hairpin turn at the apex of the climb and returning back down to earth. The whole ride only lasts about 15 seconds, but it is totally exhilarating and probably the closest thing that you can experience to getting launched off of an aircraft carrier in a F18. 

So, I don’t know if any of you have read the Tom Clancy novel, “Sum of All Fears” about this terrorist cell that manages to set off a nuclear device at the Super Bowl. Well, there is an entire chapter where Clancy meticulously goes through all of these different events that happen in the span of a few nanoseconds following the detonation of the nuclear blast. I only bring this up, because that’s exactly how the 15 seconds of the events I’m about to describe felt like at the time.

So, recall that the train had just been launched and we were barreling toward the giant vertical hill off in the distance. The dry evening air, made more intense by the fact that we were strapped to a patented Wyle E. Coyote rocket, made it feel as if we were in our own personal wind tunnel. But I still struggled to look ahead, with what little sight I have, to try and spot, and more importantly, anticipate the hill as we approached it.

Somewhere on that straight away, between stationary and “Houston, we have lift off!”, I first felt it, just a little something that wasn’t quite right. As I forced myself to keep my eyes open against the wind, the eyelid of my left eye felt unusually dry, the kind of dry that can cause the eyelid to peel back and sometimes get caught on the edge of my prosthetic eye. In a split second I went from thinking, “well that feels weird” to “hey, usually bad things happen when my eye gets this dry” to “crap, I need to force my eyelids shut until I can get out of this predicament”.

Just before we started into our vertical climb I had a sensation that the friction in my eye had somehow resolved itself, which could only mean one of two things. Either my eyelids were able to close back over my prosthetic eye and were acting as a buffer against the wind, or the guy behind me just got a surprise snack, the way that one of those “no helmet” bikers swallows a June bug going 80 MPH down the highway on a summer night. Still, I couldn’t be certain which of the two possibilities it was, so I fought against the extreme G forces and wind to lift my hand up to my face so that I could confirm, by feel, whether my fake eye was still in there. About halfway up the vertical climb I finally managed to lift my hand to my face, which, with all of the forces working against me, amounted to me roughly slapping myself across the eyes. But while my hand was stuck there to my cheek, like a hot dog wrapper that gets pasted to the grill of a NASCAR speeding along at 200 MPH, I could sense a void where my prosthetic eye had once been.

I won’t say the four-letter word that went through my head at that moment, but you can probably guess, it’s a very versatile one that aptly summed up everything that was happening at that split second in time. But we hadn’t even reached the apex of the hill at this point, so the hairpin turn 420 feet up in the air sufficiently jerked my attention back to the moment, and reminded me that the ride wasn’t even half way over.

As we turned and started to shoot straight down, plummeting  back toward earth and reality, I caught myself wondering exactly when it was that my eye would have flown out. Was it on the initial straight away? Or was it working itself out as we started our vertical climb, and was finally ripped free from my skull and flung far into the night sky as we banked hard through the hairpin turn 420 feet up in the air? I guess we’ll never know.

My very next thought, as we were coming out of the hill and leveling off back at ground level, was whether it could have impaled someone sitting in one of the cars behind us, because after all, we had to sit in the very first car. Knowing my luck, the state of Ohio would have some sort of obscure felony for involuntarily killing someone with lethal use of a prosthetic. Well, I didn’t want to find out, I just wanted to get the hell out of there and regroup.

Now at this point Teresa’s cousin Scott still had no idea any of this had happened, as far as he was concerned, we had just had a blast riding the most kick-ass roller coaster on the planet. I decided I would wait to tell him until after we had gotten off the ride, you know, get clear of the paramedics hovering around the guy three cars back slumped over with the mysterious eye sized bullet hole in his chest. Instead, I just gave him a cryptic, “Hey, I got something I need to tell you”, and then turned my attention toward trying not to make eye contact with the attendants back at the platform where we had to exit the ride, while subtly placing my left hand up near my empty eye socket to shield it from people’s view, without making it too obvious. When we finally got out into the main park, I told Scott that my eye had flown out. He just said, “Oh shit, do we need to go back to try and find it?” to which I just replied that there was no point in going back to look for it, that it was gone. He let that sink in for a moment, laughed heartily, and just said, “I can’t wait to tell Jeff.” (Teresa’s brother) which pretty much sums up how immature the three of us can be.

As we walked along I was still very conscious of what I imagined to be a gaping hole in my head where my fake eye had been just a half hour earlier, but like Scott had pointed out, it was HalloWeekends after all, so I’m sure nobody would have thought twice about it if some random patron happened to see my face. Nonetheless, Scott and I shifted our focus to figuring out how best to handle damage control. I remember joking that if we were back at the hotel, I could just take an eye patch off one of the pirate mannequins displayed in the lobby. Instead, we ended up finding a souvenir stand near the main entrance of the park that had a small display of sunglasses. The young girl that was working the stand must have thought we were so weird, when at 11:45pm we asked whether we could buy a pair of sunglasses.

Donning my new, extremely overpriced sunglasses, we walked toward the attraction where Teresa and Danielle had told us to meet them and the kids. Teresa told me afterwards, that she was still a good 50 feet away from me when she first noticed me standing there. She said her very first thought was “Is that Chris?” which she said was immediately followed by “Why is he wearing sunglasses?” and “oh my god, he lost his eye.” The only thing that made the whole thing even more embarrassing, was the fact that Scott had unknowingly picked me out a pair of sunglasses sporting the Wonder Woman logo, which of course, both of the girls had picked up on almost immediately. 

I spent the following day sitting on a lounge chair in the hotel’s water park, wearing my Wonder Woman sunglasses of shame, biding my time until I could return to Lansing and grab my “spare” eye that I kept in an old 35MM film canister in the bottom of my sock drawer (which reminds me of another funny story that I’ll have to share in a future blog post), at least until I could get down to Custom Eye Prosthetics and have Terry make me a new eye – a little mistake that would end up costing me about $800 in insurance deductibles and co-payments by the time it was all said and done.

Probably one of my favorite parts of this story is my son Carson’s reaction. After we got back into town he stopped over to my buddy Matt’s house. When my friend asked him how our trip was, Carson just gave the best deadpan response. “Well, my dad lost his eye on a roller coaster” he said before promptly walking out of the room to go and find his friend Riley without any further explanation, something that was made 10 times funnier when my friend recounted the story to me later and talked about all of the questions that were going through his mind at the time.

Epilogue

Chris wearing Army paratrooper goggles during Cedar Point visit with wife’s cousin Scott.

I have since returned to Cedar Point, even the trauma and my suppressed memories of that fateful autumn night couldn’t keep me away from the park, but now I am a little bit older, and a little more cautious. Against the wishes of my wife and kids, I insisted on wearing a pair of Army paratrooper goggles (yeah, those ones in the photo) that we had picked up from Foxhole PX in Lansing a few years back for one of the kids Halloween costumes. I got quite the strange look from the guy at the main gate, when we had to place our personal belongings into one of those little plastic bins to pass through security. I just matched the intensity of his odd stare with one of my own and just said, “I lost my fake eye on the Top Thrill Dragster the last time I was here.” That told him all he needed to know.

Part of me wondered if there was more going on in his head than what he was letting on, like he was recalling having heard some urban legend about the fake eye that the corndog guy had found in the shrubs out behind the Top Thrill Dragster, and just put two and two together to figure out that I was that guy. But I know that’s unlikely, I doubt they ever found the eye. Even if they did, I would never know at this point.

I almost called Cedar Point lost & found that spring after the whole incident had happened, I figured enough time had elapsed that the statue of limitations had run out, or worst case, the authorities in Ohio wouldn’t be able to extradite me since I was safely back home in Michigan. But I never called, not because I didn’t want to know, or that I didn’t want my eye back. No, I resisted the temptation to call mostly because the mystery of it all just makes for a better story.

Its December, and the park is dormant right now, but before long we’ll be talking about making another trip back for HalloWeekends. So, if you happen to end up on the Top Thrill Dragster, think back to my story, and who knows, maybe I’ll be sitting in the car in front of you. Don’t worry, I doubt I’ll ever go back to Cedar Point without wearing my goggles. But whatever you do, just remember to keep an eye out for me.