Shot in the head, sees bright light above him

It was a hot August day, a couple of weeks before school started. I was starting 5th grade at a new Catholic school. My friend at the end of our dead-end dirt road had just been given a pellet rifle for his birthday. He wanted my brothers and I to come see it, but my father had us helping him while he remodeled our furnace room with drywall. We would hand him nails while he hammered on the ladder. I had 4 brothers at the time and each of us took turns running down to our friend's house to see him shoot his gun. It was my turn to go. Then my identical twin brother would go next.

When I got to my friend's house, he was shooting at blue jays in the tree across the field. We were standing on a covered deck and he decided he wanted to play draw. I had a toy pistol and he had the rifle with the safety on. A few minutes later, he took the safety off to shoot at the birds again. He forgot to put the safety lever back on when he turned, aimed the gun at me and said, 'right between the eyes' as he pulled the trigger.

Everything went black. Then I saw bright light above me and I headed towards it. I heard noise below me and realized I was on top of the ceiling of the deck. I turned to look down and saw my body lying on the deck. Then my friend's grandfather walked out and exclaimed, 'Look what you did! You killed him!'

My friend let out a saddened, scared moan and ran off to hide in the creek by the house. I did not think I was dead. I floated back into my body instantly. I said, 'I think the bullet bounced off'. He said he was glad to hear that. Not about the bullet but the fact that I wasn't dead.

I had heard my glasses hitting the deck as I fell. I wore thick frame glasses to correct my vision and my twin did not. The doctors said that is what saved the bullet from going too deep into my brain. It had gone through the frames, through my eye socket, scraped my retina and lodged about an inch into my brain. My friend's grandfather called for an ambulance and it seemed to take a long time. I felt the broken glass from my lens up against my eye. I was afraid to open my eyes because I didn't want to damage them. I felt the dried blood on my face as they brought me on a stretcher down to the ambulance.

They patched me up as best they could and referred me to a hospital where they would perform surgery that night.  

NDERF.org 9256