It’s all gum and games … until someone almost loses an eye

Donna really wanted some attention from her siblings.

Her teenaged sister, talking to a friend on the phone and listening to Partridge Family records, didn’t want Donna in her room.

So, the five-year-old went to her older brothers’ room. They didn’t want her there either.

Like any child looking for brother or sisterly love, she wouldn’t take no for an answer and went back to her sister’s room.

To appease Donna and get her out of sight, the 16 or 17-year-old offered up a full pack of Hubba Bubba.

Delighted, Donna marched happily to the living room … and proceeded to put the FULL pack in her mouth.

“And for some unknown reason, stuck it in my left eye,” Donna recalls.

That certainly got her sister’s attention.

And while Donna cried with the wad of gum her in eye, that same sister pleaded to keep it from her parents.

She also didn’t want them to know where Donna got the gum and why.

“She was like, ‘Don’t tell Mom and Dad! Don’t tell Mom and Dad!’ My brothers were like, ‘I think they’ll notice, she has a pack of gum stuck in her eye.’”

The situation turned out to be pretty serious.

Donna almost lost her eye. “My eye had to be frozen and the gum slowly removed so I wouldn’t lose my eyesight,” she says.

Thankfully, doctors saved it.

Unfortunately for Donna’s siblings, her parents found out what had gone down.

“They were in a lot of trouble,” she says.

The story has stuck — pun intended — with Donna for more than four decades.

It has come up regularly for the past four decades, one of those embarrassing mishaps, missteps or misspeaks of youth that haunt and heckle people forever.

“Every time I see gum I think about it and I bust out laughing,” she says. “Or if I hear anything to do with the Partridge Family, because I can picture my sister in her bedroom with the album and talking on the phone to her friend, saying ‘Get out, get out.’ The typical teenager who didn’t want their little sister in the room bugging them.”

The bubble gum incident crops up often with her family.

“Like if we’re all in a room and someone says, ‘Do you have any gum?’ They’ll say, ‘I don’t check with Donna, she might have some. Oh, no, her eye looks good.’ I’m always the butt of a joke when it’s gum.”

Church hasn’t always provided sanctuary either.

One Sunday, a message centred around not judging others, a verse from Matthew that, I believe, reads, “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?’

As that was being discussed, Donna’s husband leaned in close to her and whispered that this applies to gum, too.