You hear about surfers going against doctors orders all the time, it’s pretty common to see little grommies paddling out into the lineup with a plastic bag strapped over their broken arm, or burnt to a crisp old blokes, still paddling around with no shirt on. But when this 61 year old guy was having trouble with a pterygium, he not only kept surfing, but proceeded to treat his condition with a course of treatment known as Waimea Bay.

Check out the picture adjacent to see it, but in what looks like a standard Waimea Bay drop in, the guy doing the deed is actually undergoing some pretty complex surgery to his eye. By that we mean putting his face in the water and ripping his pterygium off.

"He momentarily dipped his face into the water while travelling at top speed, but was able to recover his balance and continue surfing the wave," Dr. Thomas Campbell, a medical officer at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Queensland, wrote in the report published March 26 in the journal BMJ Case Reports. "This impressive manoeuver resulted in the pterygium being ripped off his eye surface," Campbell wrote.

The condition is caused by a band of fibrous tissue growing over the outer layers of the eye, usually found in people who spend lots of time outside in the sun. It’s so common among surfers that it is dubbed "surfer's eye." When a pterygium becomes irritating, or is likely to harm vision, doctors usually remove it with surgery. Not a wave in the face, but hey, if it worked, who can argue!

Not we of course don’t recommend this as a course of action, we barely believe it’s true. So don’t try this at home!

#News #Surfing #Paddling