When someone whose eyes can pop out of their skull asks the internet to send them questions, there’s inevitably going to be a deluge.
Lauren Cook from North Carolina won $2,500 (£1,929) from Ripley’s Believe It or Not when she sent this picture into a funny face contest, and led with that for her reddit’s Ask Me Anything.
Lauren first realised she had the peculiar talent – officially known as globe luxation – in seventh grade (year eight), when she “absent-mindedly” stuck a pencil behind her eye in class.
“My friend saw me and freaked out. I didn’t even know it happened til she told me. So I took the pencil to the bathroom and did it in the mirror,” she explained.
“I know how this sounds. It was not contacting my eyeball at all though, I was pressing the eraser end against my eyelid, which was going behind my eyeball. It’s hard to explain.
“I don’t know why or how it started, I just marvelled at how far it went behind my eye.
“That first time looking in the mirror was definitely weird. It was very surreal and pretty frightening. It was a huge ‘oh no, well I definitely should not be doing that’ kind of vibe. Buuuut I was a kid and kept doing it because stubborn.”
Obviously, people had a lot of questions about Lauren’s vision. Can she see more when her eyes are popped out? Is her vision overly powerful?
“Yes, I still have full range of motion in both eyes when they are out,” she said. “Peripheral vision is the same. I can’t say for sure if I see ‘magnified’ for lack of better word because I wear glasses, things look a little blurry without them no matter what. It gives me sort of double vision as well.”
Obviously the next thing people needed answered was, how? How is this possible? HOW do you make your eyes pop out?
“I use my hands to open my eyelids wide enough and use my eye muscles to push them out,” she said. “To go back in I just relax the muscles and they slip back by themselves.
“It’s a unique feeling.”
Onto the worries – what if they never go back in?
“It would be a very bad day for me,” she said, somewhat understating things.
“I asked an optometrist one day when I was getting my prescription on my glasses redone and this is what he told me: ‘Your eye won’t fall out and roll across the floor. If it were to fall out, it would hang by the optic nerve and dangle by your cheek. If that ever happens, hold it in a glass of water so it remains moist and go to the emergency room’.
“I made the mistake of asking him what I should do if there were no glasses of water available to me and he told me if I wanted to keep my eye, put it in my mouth and go to the emergency room.”
Lauren said she believes the muscles that push out her eyeballs are strong enough to push her eye out all the way but, luckily, “I know just the point where they are bulging at maximum with no threat of popping all the way out.”
The AMA was definitely a learning experience for everyone, including Lauren.
When someone asked if she’d be using it for comedic or dramatic effect, she said: “No, but I’m beginning to think I should. What am I doing with my life? So much wasted opportunity!”
People of North Carolina, beware.
