Thankfully the RN are a pretty good employer in that regard, so long as I could meet the medical standard required (e.g. deny the floater existed!) I'd be able to carry on, recovery time wouldn't be an issue either. There are people I know who have been off work or on light duties with injuries for literally years waiting to be back to 100%.
Oh I expected they would be for people wounded/injured on the job, but not so much for an accident in civvies. I think there are a lot of employers who would worry about their on site insurance if they employed someone whose eyesight may be compromised and that person's job involved anyone else's safety though. I'm sorry but i've pretty much forgotten what you actually do - fettling helicopters for ops kinda rings a bell... and if so it's an alarm bell, mate :lol: !
Stupid mistake back in 2002, me and a couple of mates were shooting targets in a corridor in our accommodation at university (no eyepro for us either) and at the end of the corridor was a locked door. We didn't hear the lock open and my friend Alex walked through the door at the exact moment I fired a BB and it hit him square in the centre of his eye. Queue panicked phone calls to ambulances and armed police arriving (several minutes after the ambulance had already taken him away!). 3 days in the eye infirmary for Alex, followed by a cataract operation. He's regained full sight in that eye, but has to wear glasses now.
Wow, you must have felt fucking terrible! I accidentally broke a mate's nose at uni - we were dicking around light contact Shotokan (me) vs Shukokai (turns out to be the weaker karate) sparring while we were waiting for some people to finish plugging a stage-full into the FoH desk and, even though i was pulling the punch, he was stepping forward right at that moment - instant Steven Fry off to his right. I felt soooo guilty...
But it got worse when it turned out that he was secretly more than a bit vain, so when we got in front of a mirror, just the 2 of us, he started crying and trying to make out like it was just the pain making his eyes water again. But even that isn't the worst of it as I had to persuade him to let me manipulate it so it would start to set straight, because i had had experience with my own after my step-dad butted me in the face when i was about 14 but i didn't want to go to the hospital because my mum was working there in A&E and if she found out that it'd actually come to blows between him and I, while she was at work, it would have been just too bad to contemplate, so even though i did get a Dr. to look at it the next day it was already too late to get it completely straight unless he broke it some more.
You see my mate (who shall remain nameless in light of the severely unmanly blubbing over a wonky konk) was refusing to go to the hospital also, mainly because we had an assessment of a multi-media live performance coming up and he didn't want to leave me in the lurch building sets & then trying to run video at the same time as i had the front of house live mixing of a few bands one after another to do (and during 1 song all the members of 1 large band except the drummer and bassist stopped playing their instruments and pulled out kazoos, so they all had to have a vocal mike as well, which created a potential mare for feedback) so if the show was going to go on, i totally did need him, although TBH i was willing to just fuck the talent off, take a referral and go for a C grade at a later date - that's how bad i felt about it. I lost touch with him when he moved back to Germany, but a few years after the event I got one more twist of the dagger: he had come over to the UK for a mutual friend's wedding and it turned out that he was about to have surgery because although it had healed pretty straight, his breathing through 1 nostril had never been the same and it made him not only snore like a chainsaw but prone to infections in the sinuses :blink:
Somehow i think i'd have felt worse if i shot somebody in the eye though (and that's totally not me telling you how you should feel btw, i mean it was an accident, i just know i'd have been horrified at myself if it were me).
I now take my eyepro pretty seriously, but not so much as to think that only full-seal meets the safety requirement for airsoft skirmishing.
See now that i just don't get... you've seen the evidence: you know ricochets do hit people in the eyeball past shooting glasses and you have a pair of Profile Turbofans, ffs!
I think my son thinks I'm a nagging dad but he listens to me & does what I ask.
Well that is something to be grateful for. If airsoft had been around when either my father or step-wanker and I had been around each other i'd have spent the entire skirmish days looking for ways to shoot either of 'em in the most painful place i could manage :lol: i say "lol" mind: i'm not really joking...
By the way Ian I'm also a dental phobic & feel your pain bruv. I am still struggling with my own phobia I'm glad I'm not alone in this
Dunno how old you are, but take this as consolation if you're not yet in your mid 40's - since being about 44 when pieces of my teeth come apart now they don't hurt much: the nerves are pretty much all dead. I haven't actually been to a dentist since '99 when at the very end of what had turned into prolonged maxillofacial surgery to sort out problems which had developed over the previous decade or so, I needed a simple filling and what with all the psych, tranquilisers to get me through the door, sedation during the treatment, and mates supporting me, I had gained a degree of confidence. The dentist who had undertaken most of the work on my teeth, as opposed to the surgeon who did the work on my broken roots, gums, bones, etc., was the head of the practice and on the day I was due to have this last little thing sorted he had to deal with an emergency patient...
So, feeling this newfound quantum of confidence, I allowed myself to be persuaded to let another dentist who had just joined the practice do it and without sedating me. Thankfully the mate who was with me at the time is an ex-marine and sometime bouncer, because i would need to be held down in the chair or i think i may have killed this dentist - during the work, and bear in mind that i was physically trembling the whole way through and just concentrating like mad on not pissing my pants, the head of the drill came off in my mouth and rattled round the inside taking a couple of, albeit small but nonetheless actual, chips off other teeth and making my tongue bleed. TBH i really should have sued, but after Mark had sorted my head out, I just ran out of the place and never went back (strangely that tooth with the 1/2 finished hole in it is 1 of the few i have left).
Turns out he was left handed and there is such a thing as a left handed dentist rig, but since he was new to the pracice his hadn't yet been delivered from wherever it had been previously, so he went ahead and used the rig that the previous bloke had left behind in the room he was taking over. I mean what an absolute cunt, right? Anyway, since i haven't seen a dentist i don't know if the reason for the nerve death is damage due to various abscesses I've had over the years (which do still hurt on the odd occasion i get one btw but i get antibiotics from my GP), or something which we can all look forward to as a consolation for old age. I'm pretty sure it's not the result of the peripheral neuropathy i suffer from though, because mouths are hardly peripheral, eh :lol: so you may get lucky.
Wow it's all coming out this evening :lol:
But no problem 
