Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

‘My first reaction was, oh my God, my eye is gone,’ says Detroit’s Miller

MillerFace2

After taking a skate to the face early in Tuesday’s loss to Ottawa, Detroit forward Drew Miller -- sporting 60 stitches across his face -- said that in the immediate aftermath of the incident, he feared the damage was catastrophic.

“When it happened, my first reaction was, ‘Oh my God, my eye is gone,’” per the Red Wings website. “It hit so hard … there was so much blood that I wasn’t sure if it had clipped my eyeball or what had happened. I wasn’t sure.”

The incident:

Amazingly, the skate cut almost everything but Miller’s eye. He has a four-inch long jagged cut that runs diagonally from the side of his face diagonally toward the bottom of the right eye, and there’s another cut above the eye. The 31-year-old didn’t experience any vision issues.

“I definitely feel very blessed that the skate didn’t hit my eye,” he said. “I was very lucky. Right now it’s just dealing with the cut, the stitches and the soreness. Other than that my eye’s good and I got on the ice today and felt pretty good.”

Miller, who currently holds Detroit’s ironman streak with 159 consecutive games played, tried to get back into the Ottawa game -- before ultimately staying out -- and wants to get back in against the Bruins on Thursday, so long as he’s cleared medically.

“I think we have to talk to some more doctors and see how my face reacts,” Miller said. “I guess maybe it takes the next 24 hours to see if the swelling gets worse or how that is with skating. I don’t know how that will react. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow and see how things kind of hopefully get better.”