The curious incident of the vase in the ballroom
“When I come back, I have some questions about your post today,” said Matt as he walked out of the room to help one of his kids. It took me a minute to register what he was talking about, because my Substack exists in a compartmentalized part of my brain that doesn’t always interact with the real world. I also didn’t know that Matt, our friend/community group leader/neighbor/meat supplier, read my Substack. When Matt came back, his first question was about the “traumatic eye injury” I apparently just breezed past in my post about how Christian and I first met.
This is for you, Matt. (Actually, it’s for everyone else, because I already told Matt the whole story over dinner at community group.)
As I have in other stories of the past, I’ve changed some of the names of people in this retelling.
In May 2004, I was on top of the world. I had graduated from high school at the top of my class with an almost perfect SAT score. I was a Presidential Scholar, an award bestowed by the U.S. Department of Education to only two high school seniors from each state each year. This award meant I got to spend several days in Washington, D.C. that summer. Part of the visit involved a tour of the White House, which ended with all of us getting to meet First Lady Laura Bush, shaking her hand, and taking a group picture with her.
I had been accepted to several universities, but I ultimately chose the University of South Carolina, partly because it was a good school and mostly because they were literally going to pay me to go to college. I had so many different scholarships and financial awards that the total amounted to more than the cost of tuition, room, and board, and so I would receive the overage in a check each semester. It was a deal too good to pass up. I lived on campus, with my family living about 25 minutes away in the suburbs of the city. It was my first time being on my own, and I loved it. My home was close enough to go home and do laundry, but I almost immediately plunged into college life. I met some people in my dorm, which was just for freshmen in the Honors College, and I started trying to find my place.
It was a co-ed dorm, and fairly soon after getting settled in my dorm, I met a guy who lived across the hall. His name was Charlie. I discovered that he was a Christian, too, and he went to a large church in downtown Columbia. It had a thriving college ministry, so I went to church with him a few times. (I may also have had a bit of a crush on him.)
About a month after school started, Charlie invited me to come to an event that his church was helping to host on-campus. It was essentially going to be a Christian version of Saturday Night Live. A few different churches had joined together to put it on and it would be held in the student union in one of the large meeting spaces. He was helping to run sound, so he wouldn’t be performing, but he kept encouraging me and several other people from our dorm to go.
As providence would have it, one of my high school friends also lived in my dorm, so I asked her and two other friends to go with me. That Sunday night, we walked across the beautiful center of campus known as the Horseshoe and made our way into the ballroom of the Russell House, USC’s student union.
The show was called Sunday Night Alive, and its first event was widely attended. I don’t know how many people can fit in the ballroom, but I later found out there were over 300 people there that night. There weren’t many empty seats left, so my three friends and I filed into an aisle pretty close to the door. My friend stepped aside to let me go first, but I told her to go ahead so I could sit between her and another friend.
I don’t remember anything about the first skit. The production was well done, with music and lighting and sound effects and decent acting by amateur college students. The second skit was a spoof of Antiques Roadshow. The basic premise was that the main character, played by a guy who in real life was named Simon, had this big vase that he was sure was worth something.
He kept going around to different booths and getting told that it was worthless. Finally, at the end, he found out it was actually worth millions. The punch line of the skit was that in his excitement, he would hold the vase up in the air in triumph, but then the lights would go out, and the audience would be made to think that the vase had flown out of his hands and broken.
That’s almost what happened. He did fling the vase up while holding onto the handle. And the lights did go out. And then a few moments passed. And then I started to feel strange. Had something hit me in the face? I hadn’t seen anything, of course, because the lights were out. But my face felt weird, especially my right eye. There was a lot of commotion going on around me, but the lights were still out, so I couldn’t tell what was going on. I leaned over to my friend.
“I think something hit me in the eye,” I said.
“What?” she responded. “Let’s go out into the hallway where there’s light so we can see better.”
I stood up, and right at that moment, the lights came on, and my friend started screaming.
I remember looking down and kind of seeing the green skirt I was wearing, but also feeling like I couldn’t see very well, and just closing my eyes. Someone, or several people, took me the arms and gently lead me into the hallway. There were seating areas outside the ballroom, and they had me sit down in one of the chairs. As I am writing this I am thinking about how grateful I am that this happened before smartphones existed, because if they had, I am sure there would have been people taking pictures of me and the situation. I don’t know what I looked like, and I don’t want to know. I later threw away the clothes I was wearing because they were covered in blood, and that was all I needed to know about how serious the situation was.
I had my eyes closed the whole time and was likely in shock, but the people around me began to piece together what had happened. When Simon had flung the vase up, the body of the vase separated from the handle. He was left holding the handle, and the vase itself went hurtling into the audience, hitting me directly on the right side of my face. When the vase hit me, it shattered. At least one person behind me had gotten cut on her arms by the shards of the vase, but my face had taken the worst of the impact.
I don’t remember crying. I don’t remember talking much, although I am sure I talked to my friend. There was talk of calling an ambulance, and the paramedics did come. Someone called my mom. At this point I truly didn’t know what my injury was or how bad it was. I just knew I couldn’t open my eyes.
And then, as if there were a God who is sovereign over all things, something very unexpected happened. Because they wanted to support their son’s debut performance, Simon’s parents were in the audience. He was one of the first people to know something bad had happened because he was left holding the handle of the vase. I don’t know if he knew exactly where the vase had gone or that anyone had been hurt, but by the time the paramedics got to the Russell House, Simon had found his parents and they had all pieced together that someone had been injured, and they had found me. Simon’s dad, Dr. Mason was one of the most esteemed eye doctors in Columbia at the time. The fact that he was not just a doctor, but an eye doctor, was a detail that the Lord would later use greatly in my life.
Dr. Mason took charge of the situation. He spoke to me directly, close to my ear. He told me that he was Simon’s dad, that he was an eye doctor, and that he thought I needed medical attention related to my eye. He said he could drive me directly to his office, which wasn’t far from campus. Not in much of a position to argue or advocate for myself, I agreed to go with him and declined the ambulance. He led me to his truck, put me in the front seat, and rushed me to his office. Someone called my mom and told her to meet us at the office.
I think the first thing he did was to clean my eye. It was during this process that I discovered that the reason I couldn’t see was because blood was pooling in my eye from the cuts in my face.
I did not see my eye until after he put the stitches in, but based on where the scars were later, here is an approximate depiction of where the pieces of the vase landed in my face.
After cleaning my eye, he put more than 30 stitches under my eye, on my eyelid, above my eye, and through my eyebrow. After I could open my eye again, he had me take an eye exam. I had always had 20/20 vision and didn’t wear glasses or contact lenses. He walked me through the eye exam, and my vision was still 20/20. He then told me that if even one of the shards of glass had gone a millimeter deeper into the area under my eye, I would likely have had vision loss, if not permanent blindness.
When I was all stitched up, I walked independently out into the waiting room. My mom was there, as well as two other people. One was another college student who I think I had met already. The other was older, an intern with the campus ministry Reformed University Fellowship. The girl behind me who had been cut by the vase was involved with RUF, and she had told the intern, Kristie, what had happened. I’m not sure if Kristie had been at the show, but when she found out that a freshman had been hurt badly, she and the other girl had followed Dr. Mason to the office.
My mom asked me if I wanted to go home to my parents’ house, but I wanted to go back to my dorm. By the time I got back to my dorm, Charlie had organized a welcome party. Knowing that I loved (and still love) school supplies, he had meticulously attached string to tons of markers and pens and hung them from the ceiling outside my room. There were balloons and people waiting for me. I remember feeling weirdly honored. I felt a great affection for Charlie, who felt partly to blame for inviting me to the show only for it to end in horror.
In the coming days, I’d go back to Dr. Mason’s office for follow-up appointments, until several weeks later when he removed all the stitches. I don’t think I ever looked in the mirror. I have no memory of what my face looked like with the stitches. I think that I got a note that allowed me to miss class for a few days. A girl in my dorm offered to help me wash my hair, because I couldn’t get the stitches wet and keeping my face dry in the shower while washing my hair was impossible. Another guy on my hall helped me changed the dressing and clean around my eye for the first few days. When I got the stitches out, my face was still looking a bit wonky, but I was physically OK and passed an eye exam with flying colors.
The incident also made it into the student newspaper, The Daily Gamecock. After much searching, I was able to find the newspaper online at a digital archive that records “Historic Newspapers of South Carolina.” It was only 2004, OK?
About a month after the accident, I was coming out of my calculus class and saw something on the bulletin board. It was that headline— “Comedy show suffers mishap” — cut out and taped to a flyer for an upcoming student comedy show by a rival group. They were essentially saying, “If you come to our show, you won’t get hurt.”
I felt for a moment like my body was coming undone. (Future Chelsey would be able to identify this as a trauma response.) This other comedy group, though I’m sure not meaning to be malicious, was poking fun at something that was very much not funny to me. My response was to write to The Daily Gamecock about it, and my letter was published.
Here’s what it said:
While talking with friends in Leconte Monday, I noticed a flyer with a familiar headline copied onto the top: "Comedy show suffers mishap." The reason this headline is familiar to me is because I cut out that article from The Gamecock when it was printed on Sept. 20. The reason I cut it out was because I was "the woman" referred to in the article. On Sept. 19, I was in the audience of Sunday Night Alive when, purely by accident, the handle of a ceramic vase broke off which sent the vase into the audience, hitting me directly on and around my right eye. Miraculously, an eye doctor was in the audience and I was taken immediately to his office where I received approximately 30 stitches. It was a totally random incident, and while I wish that it had never happened. My vision is fine and five weeks later the scars are barely visible. I have no hard feelings toward anyone on the cast of SNA. In fact, I have attended every show since and proudly support the cast for the clean yet hilarious comedy show they present every Sunday night. Therefore, it was extremely offensive to me that a group would make light of the situation and use that particular headline to advertise for their auditions. I cannot put into words the anger that I felt when I saw this flyer and continued to see others around campus. Not only am I offended because I was the one who was hurt in the incident, but also I am offended on behalf of the cast of SNA. I would hate for anyone to be discouraged from attending SNA simply because of seeing that flyer on which the headline and accompanying comments were placed completely out of context. I do wish that whoever is in charge of their advertising would try to be more tasteful in their method of grabbing attention in the future, instead of exploiting for their own benefit an event that was indeed misfortunate, but that had no serious consequences. I feel that if anyone truly does have the right to mock SNA, I do, and I have no desire whatsoever to do so. Whoever came up with the idea for this flyer should be ashamed.
CHELSEY KARNS, First-year English student
After digging up that letter two decades later, I have three responses to my own opinion. First, they really needed someone to copy edit those letters. Second, wow, I sound really self-righteous and kind of like a butt-head. I’m not sure what I expected to accomplish by writing this letter and don’t know that it would have won anyone over to the Christian side of things. It’s kind of the same energy I had a year later when I decided I knew enough to argue with a pastor about theology.
But the other thing I see in the letter, that I could not see at the time, are subtle signs that all was not well with me.
“…while I wish that it had never happened..my vision is fine and five weeks later the scars are barely visible…”
“…an event that was indeed misfortunate, but that had no serious consequences…”
It had been 40 days since the vase hit me, and yet I appeared to have put it all behind me. In reality, that was not what was happening.
I was struggling in one of my classes for the first time in my entire life because I had missed a week of lectures after the vase hit me. In the weeks after the accident, I sequestered myself in my dorm, spending almost all of my time with Charlie, the guy who had invited me to the show. He was funny and kind, but I was clingy and needy and, in retrospect, consuming his life. One night, while I was crying in the stairwell of our dorm because I felt like he was ignoring me, I heard him tell another girl on our floor that I was crazy.
The invincible Chelsey who had arrived at college in August was slowly unraveling, and it was not pretty. I’d made it to age 18 physically and emotionally unscathed for the most part, seeing hard things happen to other people. But the vase had happened to me. I had been the one sitting in that particular seat. If I had gone first instead of my friend, the vase would have hit her. If I had chosen to be anywhere else that night, it wouldn’t have happened.
As the days passed, I kept thinking back to what Dr. Mason had said in his office. How close I had come to being blind. It was as if an unseen hand had controlled the impact of the vase, protecting me from further injury. After a while, though, this supposedly comforting thought began to nag at me. If I was willing to concede that God was holding the vase and kept it from causing blindness, I still had to accept the fact that God let a vase smash into pieces on my face.
I now look back and see the violence of that Sunday night as not merely an injury to my face. The Lord intended to do something radical in my heart, something akin to what C.S. Lewis describes in Mere Christianity.
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
The actual incident of the vase was the demolition of the house that was my heart at that time. I was faced with my own human limitations. Just because I worked hard didn’t mean I was going to get good grades. I began to see my brain, which had always been my superpower, couldn’t always be trusted when it came to emotions and relationships. I had overstepped the bounds with Charlie, and our friendship never really recovered.
The vase incident also led me to start going to the campus ministry RUF. The intern, Kristie, who had come to the doctor’s office that night, kept checking on me. She persuaded me to go on the RUF fall retreat, where I made some new friends. She invited me to a freshman Bible study where I was confronted with the truth of God’s sovereignty for the first time in my life.
John Piper once said that God is always doing a million things at once, and we see maybe three of them. I began to see some of the things God was doing at the time, and yet the Lord still surprises me. As I sat next to Christian while telling our friend Matt this whole saga at community group last week, I got to the end and Christian pointed out that my involvement in RUF was what led me to start reading more about theology. Which led to talking to my friend Elizabeth at a party about what I was reading. Which, through many dangers, toils, and snares, ultimately led to Christian and I meeting.
Probably the funniest outcome of the whole thing was years later, talking with a friend who hadn’t even gone to USC but who had known people who went there. She mentioned Sunday Night Alive and began to tell me a story about this freak accident that happened years ago where a girl in the audience was injured by a vase flying into the crowd.
“Really?” I said. “Tell me more.”
What a wild story! It’s pretty awful when the illusion of invincibility and power comes crashing down on us as young folks. Now what I want to know is why is Dr Mason being an eye doc important later in your life? Did I miss something?
Thanks for sharing this. I love you so much. I can't believe how the Lord works- I was backstage helping with SNA and could never have imagined the fruit that God would produce from this difficult night. He turns our mourning into dancing.