In honor of Halloween, I wanted to share a case that came into Charity Hospital when I was resident there. It is one of the most bizarre cases I ever came across and impossible for me to explain.

A woman in her twenties was brought in by ambulance. She was almost comatose because of a combination of drugs and alcohol. She had been found by her roommate naked in bed with “something wrong with her eye.” What we saw was that someone had taken a scalpel and dissected her eye. The lids had both been cut off in a circle around the boney edge of her eye socket. The fatty tissue, eye muscles and everything else around her eyeball had been carefully removed without damaging the eyeball itself. It was clean and the bleeding had been controlled just as it might have been in the operating room. All that was left was her eyeball, still hooked on by the nerve running back into her skull. Her pupil reacted normally, so the assumption was that when she woke up she would have normal vision. However, she would not be able to move her eye or keep it moist by blinking. The specialists said that nothing could be done to save the eye. She would have to have a perfectly good eye removed and some sort of a skin graft placed over the open tissue.

I never heard if they ever found any suspects or more clarification of why or how this happened. Another item to add to your list of reasons to not get smashed on drugs and alcohol.

Shari found this in a magazine while waiting to get her hair cut.

Recipe By:

Martha Stewart

Ingredients:

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1½  cups packed light-brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
¾ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
2 large eggs, room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
24 caramels, such as Kraft, halved *SEE NOTE

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 375 degrees, with racks in top and middle.

2. In the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat together flour, both sugars, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

3. Add butter. Beat on medium speed until combined but some pea-size butter chunks remain.

4. Add chocolate chips. Beat until combined.

5. Beat in eggs, one at a time, and vanilla.

6. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment. Scoop dough into 4-ounce balls (each about 1/3 cup.) Bake a deep, wide hollow in each center. Enclose 3 pieces of caramel in each. Roll back into a ball. Place 6 balls on each sheet. Freeze 15 minutes.

7. Bake, with one sheet on each rack, 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees. Swap sheet positions and rotate each sheet 180 degrees. Bake until centers are almost but not completely set (press gently on tops with your fingers to check), about 7 minutes more. Remove from oven. Bang sheets on a counter a few times to create cracks in tops of cookies. Place sheets on a wire rack. Let cool completely.

Notes:

I don’t like Kraft caramels so replaced them with 15 grams of Peter’s caramel in each cookie.

My daughter and son-in-law gave me some teal-colored straps. I decided to make a Sharks bag. I looked at hundreds of Sharks images on the internet, trying to get inspired. I was not happy with how it first turned out so I also bought some white straps and figured out how to make teeth. I am quite pleased, actually, with how it turned out.

I put the obligatory buckle down the side.