Alison Brie Talks About Childhood Accident That Left Her Temporarily Blind

Alison Brie is opening up about a freak accident that happened during her childhood, which left her temporarily blind.

The 37-year-old Community and Mad Men actress appeared on this week’s episode of the HypochondriActor podcast with co-hosts Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali.

Alison revealed that when she was seven, she fell and hit the back of her head on concrete while playing at school.

“I was a really petite kid [and] I was just running across the playground and not looking, and I bumped into another little girl in my class, who was like four times bigger than me,” Alison said, adding that her older sister Lauren was thankfully there and brought her to the nurse’s office.

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“As I’m walking up to the nurse’s office, I just feel a little out of it. I clearly had a concussion. But I don’t know this at seven or eight, but I just feel out of it and foggy, but I can still see,” Alison said. “The women in the office are like, ‘Just go lay her down and have her close her eyes,’ which by the way, you’re not supposed to do…They put us in a dark room. These women in the office [are like], ‘Oh, she hit her head. We’ll just lay her down and have her close her eyes.’”

The actual nurse had already left for the day and podcast host Wali pointed out that the people who assisted Alison made a terrible mistake.

“After someone has a head injury, depending on the type of injury you want to keep the person awake because if they lose consciousness, it could be a sign that there’s more serious underlying bleeding. If you put them to sleep, you don’t know at what point did they start to lose consciousness,” Wali said.

Alison continued the story by revealing her dad picked her up at school to bring her to the hospital… and then they got into a car accident.

“My dad arrives and I sort of don’t remember anything,” she said. “Like the next part of my memory is, I’m in the backseat of my dad’s car and boom—I can’t see a thing. It’s sort of like how, when you close your eyes, it’s black, but you can a little bit see light and shadows. I was hysterical. I start hysterically crying because I could feel myself trying to open my eyes as wide as possible … It wasn’t computing. And I think that was part of the hystericalness too, was like, ‘Oh my God.’ Like realizing that I was blind. And then sort of just being like, ‘Now I’m just blind?’”

Eventually, Alison received a CAT scan when she finally got to the hospital.

“They told my parents, if her vision doesn’t come back in 12 hours, she’ll likely be blind for the rest of her life,” she said. Thankfully, she woke up in 10 hours and has had almost perfect vision since then.

Alison talked about how the accident affected the rest of her life, saying, “It sounds so lame, but I do think like I’m constantly taking visuals of things all the time, like I’m shooting this movie, and somebody kept making fun of me because I was like, ‘The clouds behind you. They look incredible. It’s so beautiful here.’ And he turns around and he was like, ‘You mean there by those like, s–tty apartments?’ I was like, ‘Yeah but they’re beautiful in their own way.’”

In another recent interview, Alison discussed the key to her relationship with husband Dave Franco.