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Alabama special teams player Ryan Parris played in Saturday’s A-Game with an opponent that would cause most people to run scared.
The Madison, Ala. native turned Crimson Tide football walkon long-snapper is battling an eye-eating amoeba that may rob him of his vision before things are said and done.
So how did he even make it onto the field for two snaps on Saturday?
AL.com’s Joseph Goodman provides the answer:
Three reasons. One, he loves football. Two, he loves Alabama. Three, he’s really, really tough.
He also follows all of Nick Saban’s rules.
Goodman wrote one of those rules is not speaking to the media without permission, so his feature story on Parris went without quotes from the Crimson Tide football player.
But he was able to speak with Parris’ father, who shared some of the gruesome details of his son’s eye condition.
Essentially, there’s an amoeba living on Parris’ eye, and its food is his eye. That’s both gross and scary.
Goodman reports that doctors call this rare affliction Acanthamoeba keratitis, for those that are medically curious.
Parris’ vision has deteriorated to the point of being declared legally blind, according to his father.
Aggressively potent eye drops are only part of the remedy. Parris also has to take some pretty interesting measures in an effort to combat the amoeba:
The eye drops are nothing, really, when compared to one of Ryan’s other medical interventions. The transplantation of “amniotic membrane discs” is an interesting thing. We’ll let Ryan’s father explain: “They take shavings from the placenta after the birth of a woman who has had a C-section.”
And they drop it on the eye like a blanket.
“This is where medicine loses me,” Butch Parris said. “I’m not a dumb guy, but this is unbelievable what they do.”
Parris is hopeful to be able to suit up and play this fall, but there’s a chance that he may have seen his last snaps for the Crimson Tide at the spring game.
We wish him the best in his fight to overcome this affliction.
Nick Cole is a former print journalist with several years of experience covering the SEC. Born and raised in SEC country, he has taken in the game-day experience at all 14 stadiums.
