Ireland striker Sean Maguire feared he would not see properly out of his eye again after a freak injury.
The 25-year-old has been dogged with injury woes since making the move to Lancashire from Cork City in 2017.
But he couldn't believe his luck when a bizarre training ground incident saw him being shipped off to hospital.
“I went to take a shot during training and it hit a couple of players,” he told the Lancashire Evening Post.
“I didn’t have chance to react and close my eyes, the ball bounced up and hit me in the left eye, straight in the eyeball. I got up off the ground and Daniel Johnson was around me.
“DJ was talking to me and I couldn’t see him, at that point I got the fright of my life.
“My right eye started to come back but when I put my hand over it, I couldn’t see out of the left one. I walked over to our physio Matt Jackson who took a look and knew that something was wrong.
The striker continued: “He said I needed to go straight to hospital and that is when I started to panic and worry. Jacko wouldn’t have said we needed to go to the hospital straight away if it wasn’t serious.
“He was right, the blood pressure was four times higher in the left eye than it was in the right. Being hit by the ball had burst a few of the blood vessels.
“I just about had time to take my boots off and I was off to A&E at hospital. For the next five or six days I was sat at home and couldn’t really see out of my left eye.
“I was over-thinking it probably but there was the possibility of me not being able to see out of that eye properly again.”
Maguire, fortunately, has made a full recovery and scored for Preston in their 2-0 victory over Brentford last week.
He added: “Fortunately it was a mild case and I was able to train in the middle of last week.
“I went to see a couple of specialists in Preston and then went to see one in Manchester. She checked me out and said I was fine to start training, that everything was back to normal.
“That was nice to hear I must say. Things are fine now, I’m still putting eye drops in but I stop those at the weekend.”
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