For Alison Brie, falling down on the playground almost changed everything.
During the May 11 episode of HypochondriActor podcast, the 37-year-old recalled experiencing a freak accident at age 7 when she fell and hit the back of her head on concrete.
"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," the Community alum recalled, adding that her older sister Lauren was there and assisted to her to the nurse's office, "Thank God."
"As I'm walking up to the nurse's office, I just feel a little out of it," she continued. "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."
Since the nurse was already out of office for the day, Allison explained that staff came up with an alternative solution.
"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.'"
As podcast host Dr. Priyanka Wali (who co-hosts with actor Sean Hayes) noted, that move was quite risky. "After someone has a head injury, depending on the type of injury you want to keep the person awake because if they lose consciousness, it could be a sign that there's more serious underlying bleeding," the physician shared. "If you put them to sleep, you don't know at what point did they start to lose consciousness."
And as Alison explained, after her dad picks her and her sister up to take Alison to the hospital, things took a scarier turn from there.
"My dad arrives and I sort of don't remember anything," she recalled. "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."
She continued, "I was hysterical. 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?'"
In the midst of this realization, Alison's dad also gets into a small car accident with his kids in the car, which launches the actress on the floor of the vehicle. After a family friend drives her and her sister to the hospital, they perform a CAT scan. "And they told my parents, if her vision doesn't come back in 12 hours," she shared. "She'll likely be blind for the rest of her life."
But after waking up almost 10 hours after arriving, Alison said she had "no recollection" at that point and her vision was back to normal. The Promising Young Woman star—who hasn't had an issue since and has almost perfect vision—explained how the instance made all the difference in her life.
"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--tty apartments?' I was like, ‘Yeah but they're beautiful in their own way.'"