‘Community’ Star Alison Brie Reveals How She Experienced Temporary Blindness

Actress Alison Brie just shared a unique and harrowing medical experience that almost changed the course of her life. She was interviewed by actor Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali on their podcast HypochondriActor where she revealed that she suffered a serious head injury at age 7. The impact left her temporarily blind, and the effects could have been even worse.

Brie explained that she fell backward on a playground and hit her head on concrete when she was 7 years old. She said: “I was a really petite kid [and] I was just running across the playground and not looking, and I bumped into another little girl in my class, who was like four times bigger than me.” She said that after she fell she had trouble even walking to the nurse’s office, and that her older sister Lauren was able to help her — “Thank God.” At first, she said that her vision was generally unaffected, making it all the eerier when that symptom set in later on.

“As I’m walking up to the nurse’s office, I just feel a little out of it,” she recalled. She explained that the nurse was actually out of the office that day, and the office staffers handled her care somewhat questionably. “I clearly had a concussion. But I don’t know this at seven or eight, but I just feel out of it and foggy, but I can still see. The women in the office are like, ‘Just go lay her down and have her close her eyes,’ which by the way, you’re not supposed to do…They put us in a dark room. These women in the office [are like], ‘Oh, she hit her head. We’ll just lay her down and have her close her eyes.’”

Wari interjected that this was a serious misstep and advised anyone dealing with a head injury not to try and sleep it off in this manner. Meanwhile, Brie continued: “My dad arrives and I sort of don’t remember anything. Like, the next part of my memory is, I’m in the backseat of my dad’s car and boom-I can’t see a thing. It’s sort of like how, when you close your eyes, it’s black, but you can a little bit see light and shadows.”

“I was hysterical, she continued bluntly. “I start hysterically crying because I could feel myself trying to open my eyes as wide as possible… It wasn’t computing. And I think that was part of the hystericalness too, was like, ‘Oh my God.’ Like realizing that I was blind. And then sort of just being like, ‘Now I’m just blind?’”

To top it off, Brie said that her father got into a small car accident in the midst of this realization which sent her sprawling on the floor of the vehicle. She and her sister needed to be picked up by a family friend who took them to the hospital while their father dealt with the car accident. Upon arrival, doctors performed a CAT scan on Brie and did not like their findings.

“They told my parents, ‘if her vision doesn’t come back in 12 hours, she’ll likely be blind for the rest of her life,” she said. Brie almost ran out that time limit but said that about 10 hours later she woke up in the hospital and her vision was back to normal. She said that she hasn’t had any issues with her vision since then, but she cherishes her sense of sight more because of the experience.

“It sounds so lame,” she said. “But I do think like I’m constantly taking visuals of things all the time, like I’m shooting this movie, and somebody kept making fun of me because I was like, ‘The clouds behind you. They look incredible. It’s so beautiful here.’ And he turns around and he was like, ‘You mean there by those like, s-ty apartments?’ I was like, ‘Yeah but they’re beautiful in their own way.’”