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Daily Mail
28 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Woman left BLIND after performing 13 cartwheels in a row
A fun day at the beach turned into a months-long medical ordeal for a Seattle teenager who went temporarily blind after doing cartwheels with friends. Deborah Cobb, now 42, was just 19 when she decided to see how many cartwheels she could perform in a row while having fun with her friends on a summer day in 2002. But after completing 13 consecutive cartwheels, the young woman fell over feeling 'super dizzy' and quickly realized something was terribly wrong with her eyesight. 'I decided to see how many cartwheels I could do in a row just for fun,' Cobb told Newsweek in a recent interview. 'So I started doing them and got to 13 and fell over super dizzy. My eyes were kind of spinning so it took a moment to realize that my eyes weren't focusing.' At first, she thought she was just dizzy but panic quickly ensued when she realized she could no longer see anything clearly. 'Looking at her [friend's] face, it was a giant orange blur. My eyes wouldn't fully focus,' she said. 'There was no pain, and my peripheral vision was fine, but everything I looked directly at was blocked by an orange blur.' Cobb first tried to play it cool and didn't immediately tell her friends how scared she was. 'I was panicking inside, but not outwardly so my friends didn't think anything of it,' she said. But her vision has not improved by morning. That's when she went to the hospital. 'My central vision was completely gone... I couldn't drive, I couldn't read, I couldn't see myself in the mirror... which meant I couldn't put on makeup... I couldn't even watch TV,' she said. At the hospital, doctors initially thought she had simply 'sunburned' her retinas. But when she saw a retinal specialist, she got a far more serious and rare diagnosis. 'I had hemorrhaged in both of my maculas and it was going to take three to six months to fully heal,' she said. Experts say the condition is extremely unusual in someone so young. 'In healthy individuals, especially young people, this occurrence is quite rare,' Dr. Rajesh C. Rao, an ophthalmologist who specializes in surgery of the retina, told the outlet. 'The head being upside down abruptly or repeatedly can also increase pressure in veins in the retina, and some at-risk individuals can be prone to macular hemorrhage.' Cobb said it took a while for reality to truly hit her. 'I started sobbing,' she told the outlet. It was the first time it fully hit me how limited I was and how dependent I was on other people for simple things like reading—which I had completely taken for granted.' While her vision did return after about three months, the bizarre injury still causes issues. Even decades later, Cobb still suffers flashes of light and dark floaters caused by retinal jelly detachment. 'The only option is surgery,' she said, 'but surgery almost always causes cataracts, which would only mean another surgery. So I'm okay to just live with it.' Despite the traumatic ordeal, Cobb remains grateful for all the joys in her life. 'We so often focus on what's going wrong in our lives, that we miss all of the things that are going right. 'There are so many simple gifts that could be bringing us joy every day, if we just learned to appreciate them. That's what this experience taught me: never stop being grateful.'


Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
California woman, 18, is disfigured in freak accident involving s'mores on a tabletop firepit
A California woman's been left disfigured after flames 'exploded' in her face while making s'mores over an outdoor firepit. Viana Poggi, 18, was enjoying a fun summer night on July 6 with her cousin Alaina Arbiso when chaos unfolded before their eyes. While using a cement tabletop firepit, flames suddenly blew toward Poggi, leaving her with blistering burns on her face and arms. Her cousin Arbiso said all she could remember was how fast everything happened in that terrifying moment, before she pushed her relative into a nearby pool. Arbiso said: 'Within, like, a millisecond, you don't even see it coming - you have no time to react. It just happened.' After pushing Poggi into the water, Arbiso then grabbed a hose and sprayed down the flames spreading on the table. Another family member was also hit by the dangerous flames, but only Poggi was severely injured. When she got to a local burns center, staff asked Poggi about what was used to fuel the firepit. Poggi said: 'Even when I got to the ER, I just said I got hit by fire, and they asked me, "Was it rubbing alcohol?" Because it's so common for people to be burned that way.' A friend of hers Alexandra Welsh, who's a trauma nurse in the emergency room, was shocked after seeing someone she knew arrive with such intense injuries. Welsh said: 'I work at a trauma center, so I see a lot of traumatic injuries come in, but it is so different when it is someone who you think of as a little sister.' Despite the freak accident impacting her life, Poggi, who's been left with scars and burn marks, decided to make the best of it. She documented her recovery on TikTok, where she showed herself wearing a hospital gown when she was still covered in bandages. Poggi said: 'I always remember it could have been worse. I try to keep a good attitude.' The teen's due to start college soon at the University of San Francisco but, because of the burns, she's also preparing for several procedures to help with her recover. A GoFundMe page was set up by Arbiso to help her cousin with medical expenses while she embarked on the next chapter of her life. Arbiso wrote about Poggi: 'With the big move coming, multiple reconstruction surgeries, and a long emotional/physical recovery in her foreseeable future, [she's] going to need all the help she can get.' Poggi hoped that her unfortunate experience would make other people think twice before they used specific types of firepits. She said: 'I really want people to know the danger of using an alcohol-fueled pit because they are so common. We owned, I think, three of them.' There were several types of tabletop alcohol-fueled firepit available to buy online and in stores. Some were fueled by gel fuel, wood, wood pellets, and propane. Last year, multiple types of the vessel were recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The recall on the popular brand Colsen's pits warned that 'alcohol flames can be invisible and lead to flame jetting when refilling the firepit reservoir'.


The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Two injured after Southwest plane plummets to avoid potential collision
Two Southwest Airlines flight attendants are being treated for injuries after a passenger jet heading to Las Vegas from southern California took a dramatic plunge shortly after takeoff on Friday, the airline and passengers said. Southwest flight 1496, headed from Burbank to Las Vegas, received two alerts that made the plane climb and then descend, according to a statement from Southwest. Reported by ABC and according to flight trackers FlightRadar24 and AirNavRadar, the plane avoided a collision with a Hawker Hunter jet, currently registered to a 'Non-Citizen Corporation', according to FAA registration logs. Southwest said that the flight continued to Las Vegas, where it landed 'uneventfully', and that the airline is working with the FAA to 'further understand the circumstances of the event'. 'We are aware of an incident involving Southwest Airlines flight 1496. The FAA is in contact with Southwest and we are investigating. Ensuring the safety of everyone in the national airspace system remains our top priority,' the FAA said in a statement. A post on social media showed the path that the two planes took in a simulation video. The good news is your 737 got an automated alert, your crew did what they were supposed to do and so your aircraft didn't get dangerously close to the other (a Hawker Hunter jet fighter registered to a defense contractor). A passenger, Caitlin Burdi, likened the experience to the 'Tower of Terror' theme park ride during an interview with Fox News. 'About 10 minutes into the flight, we plummeted pretty far, and I looked around, and everyone was like, 'OK, that's normal,'' Burdi told Fox. 'Then, within two seconds, it felt like the ride Tower of Terror, where we fell 20 to 30 feet in the air. The screaming, it was terrifying. We really thought we were plummeting to a plane crash.' YouTube personality Jimmy Dore posted on social media from the flight. 'Myself and plenty of people flew out of their seats and bumped heads on ceiling, a flight attendant needed medical attention,' Dore wrote. 'Pilot said his collision warning went off and he needed to avoid plane coming at us.' This was at least the second near-miss for a midair collision in the US this week, after a Delta plane headed from Minneapolis to Minot, North Dakota, nearly collided with a B-52 bomber. In March, a passenger jet nearly collided with a military plane at Ronald Reagan Washington National airport, where a collision between an American Airlines flight and a military helicopter had killed at least 67 people just months before.