Seeing through Rose-colored glasses: QND baseball product overcomes freak accident to thrive playing game he loves

QUINCY — The afternoon sun hung high in a cloudless sky above an empty parking lot, making it impossible to escape just how luminous it can be.

Ethan Rose didn’t shy away from it, even when brightness is his nemesis.

“There’s nothing like having your eyesight,” he said. “It’s something you take for granted. Like right now, I look around and appreciate everything. You don’t know how much of a gift it is until it gets taken away for the time I had it taken away. There’s nothing like it.”

And no way to replace it.

“That’s scary,” Rose said.

He knows how such trepidation feels. For weeks on end during the spring of 2023, the former Quincy Notre Dame baseball player sat in the darkness of his family’s home with his swollen right eye covered wondering if he’d ever see again. His world had been reduced to sounds, smells and feels by a freak injury during an off-day workout.

Rose constantly fidgeted with a baseball throughout the recovery process, wondering if his career was over before it ever really got started.

“For a little bit, I was like, ‘How the heck am I going to do this if I can’t even see?’” Rose said. “Thank God I was able to play again.”

He has thrived, too.

A little more than a year after doctors expressed concern he might lose his right eye, Rose is an all-star and will represent QND on the Illinois squad in the Missouri vs. Illinois All-Star Game being played at 7 p.m. Saturday at Veterans Field in Hannibal, Mo.

“It’s an honor to get this opportunity,” Rose said.

And a lesson in perseverance for everyone else.

‘My eye was full of blood’

About six weeks prior to the start of the 2023 season, Rose was running a high fever with no discernible reason why until doctors discovered an inflamed appendix. They performed an emergency appendectomy that sidelined him for four weeks, but it gave him enough time to recuperate and be ready to contribute out of the Raiders’ bullpen or as a mid-week starter.

He took the mound twice, throwing 1.2 innings as a starter against Arlington Heights Hersey on March 27 and throwing two hitless innings of relief against Pittsfeld on April 12.

Shortly thereafter, the lights went out.

Rose was prepping to pitch in a weekend tournament at Beardstown and was using Jaeger bands to stretch when the band popped loose and smacked him across the face. The clip caught his right eye, while the band connected with his left eye.

The pain was immediate, but the severity of the injury wasn’t initially clear.

Even when Rose’s father, Jeremy, took him to see an optometrist the next day, they were forced into a wait-and-see approach, needing to be evaluated by ophthalmologist Dr. Eric Sieck. In the meantime, the amount of swelling around the right eye raised concerns the right eye may not be salvageable.

“It hurt pretty bad,” Rose said. “The eye was so swollen shut they couldn’t see it, so we didn’t know if we were going to have to have it removed.”

The reality of that didn’t hit home right away. 

“I will be real with you, I was puking the whole time because the pressure and trauma in the eye was causing me to feel sick,” Rose said. “I really didn’t have much clue as to what was going on. When I figured out what was happening and what could have happened, I was terrified. I didn’t want to lose my eye.”

It’s a concern his parents were trying to grasp as well.

“It was extremely scary,” said Rose’s mother, Christina. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. We just knew his body was having a serious reaction to the trauma to his eye. Luckily, Dr. Sieck knew exactly what to do for him.”

First, the swelling had to subside, which meant protecting the eye from any further trauma. So Rose limited his activity and sat in dark rooms void of any light if possible.

“He had to have a blindfold on if he was around any amount of light,” Christina said.

It took five or six days for the swelling to subside enough to allow doctors to examine the eye, and that’s when the Roses learned Ethan had suffered a torn pupil.

“My eye was full of blood,” he said. “And they told me that it looked like I was going to be able to keep the eye, but I was going to have a torn pupil for the rest of my life. It basically means I can’t perceive light.

“For a while, I couldn’t see out of the eye and I was thinking I may never see out of it again. That was pretty scary, too.”

For everyone.

“It was incredibly scary,” said Rose’s father, Jeremy. “But he fought through it all. He never gave in.”

That wasn’t easy. Everything a teenager does was taken away at that moment. Rose couldn’t text or look at TikToks or watch movies. He couldn’t go to school or play baseball. In fact, he couldn’t even eat dinner at the family table if lights were on.

“They had to turn the lights off,” Rose said. “I mostly ate up in my room. I kept it dark in there and just rotted.”

But never alone.

“I sat in there with him,” Christina said.

That helped him stay mentally sharp and spirited.

“My family did a really good job of keeping me from losing my mind,” Rose said.

The key was staying busy.

“I played a lot of solitaire, kind of hung out and listened to the radio,” Rose said. “Sometimes I would just turn the TV on and just listen.”

It meant no homework or busy work either.

“I really couldn’t do anything until I came back to school,” he said.

Yet, he managed to finish the semester with a 3.8 grade point average despite going five or more weeks without being able to do anything.

“His teachers just had to give him grace because he couldn’t get on his iPad,” Christina said. “We literally would sit in our living room in complete darkness and listen to audio books because he couldn’t be around any light.”

Yet, never once did he find himself completely discouraged.

“The chips always seem to stack up against him, but he’s willing to fight through it and hopefully that will take him far in life beyond baseball,” Jeremy said.

‘I never did get too down about it’

The Raiders continued their drive toward history during the 2023 season while Rose recovered. They strung together a school-record 32 consecutive victories and made the third state tournament appearance in program history, finishing third in Class 2A with a 36-2 record.

He was there in the dugout every step of the way in the postseason.

“I missed baseball in general,” Rose said. “I like playing so much. I like throwing every day. I like the little stuff. I missed going to practice and BSing with the fellas, throwing and working on stuff. I missed the sport and the team and the guys.”

But he never lost the feel for it.

The entire time he was sidelined at home, Rose had a baseball in his hands.

“I played around with grips and sat there thinking about things,” Rose said.

It didn’t matter which room in the Rose house he sat.

“Everywhere he sits there’s a baseball,” Christina said. “There’s one on the coffee table, the end table. I find them on the couch and I find them in his bed. He always has a baseball in his hands.”

The desire to make it back was equally as strong.

“I never did get too down about it,” Rose said. “I knew there was light at the end of the tunnel. I stayed resilient. It happened and now I have to move forward and be the best version of me. That’s all I could do.”

Seven weeks after the injury, he was cleared to stretch and do limited workouts. Eight weeks after the injury, he began throwing again.

“I had to have somebody catch the ball for me,” Rose said. “My depth perception was so off.”

Although willing to lend a helping hand, his teammates used him as a target for some friendly smack talk as well.

“They kept me laughing,” Rose said. “I got it from them for sure with no punches pulled. They didn’t hold back, but I needed it. I was just so glad to be back around everybody.”

Their presence throughout the entire ordeal helped.

“They checked on me pretty regularly,” Rose said.

By the summer of 2023, he was back throwing with velocity. By the fall, he had impressed the William Woods University coaching enough to receive a scholarship offer, which he accepted and will join the Owls’ program when he heads to the Fulton, Mo., campus on August 17.

He didn’t pitch for the Raiders this past spring as he dealt with a pinched nerve in his neck, but he found a role as a first baseman and a designated hitter. Rose earned All-West Central Conference honors as he hit .400 in conference play and finished the season with 12 runs scored, 11 RBIs and four doubles.

He did it all while wearing shades in good light and bad.

“Everything is fairly back to normal,” Rose said. “I had to get non-reflective sunglasses for it to be legal. I just have to wear shades everywhere and look a little goofy, but I’m OK with that.”

The all-star nod signified it was worth it.

“I worked crazy hard on the things I could do when I was being told I couldn’t play,” Rose said. “I couldn’t be a part of this great team and play with my friends, but I worked really hard to get back to where I could play and could do this.

“It meant a little more to me. I wanted to prove to people I can play.”

His parents’ pride in seeing the determination and results is immeasurable.

“He has a toughness I probably don’t even have today,” Jeremy said. “He’s been inspirational for me to watch him grind through everything he’s had to grind through. He didn’t even know if he was going to keep his eye, let alone play again or even dream he would hit again. And then to hit as well as he did, it’s amazing.

“To go from being a normal kid to having to sit up in our rec room in the dark because the light made him want to vomit, as a parent, that’s just gut-wrenching to watch. But I’m so proud of him for wanting to just grind and grind and grind and grind and fight his way back.”

Tears fill his mom’s eyes at the mention of her son’s strength.

“I get emotional just thinking about everything that he had to have grit and resilience to get through,” Christina said. “I get emotional that he has something like that in him, that he dug down deep. He relied on his faith a lot, too.”

With that, she knows nothing will keep him down.

“The silver lining in this is he’s going to be able to say if I got through 2023 I can get through anything,” Christina said.

The challenge is to look ahead and never back.

“With my luck and all these weird injuries, you kind of think, ‘What’s next?’” Rose said. “But you can’t dwell on it. You keep moving forward.”

Rose will do so with eyes wide open.

“It’s a blessing,” he said. “They didn’t think I was going to be able to see again, but I can. God is good.”