East Fife midfielder Alan Trouten says he nearly died in a bizarre dental accident, and insists the only drill he wants to see from now on is the ball hitting the back of the net.
Trouten, 39, from Cambuslang, says his cheek was accidentally slashed during a dental visit,and lost several pints of blood.
He said: “It was a weird one. In October or November, I went to the dentist, there was a bit of an accident and I ended up with the inside of my cheek slashed, and ended up in hospital, losing five pints of blood.
“I genuinely thought I was dead at one point. On the way to hospital I nearly passed out and couldn’t get my mouth to stop bleeding.
“I thought that was the end, so I had a scary couple of days.
“Recovery took three or four weeks to get back to training, and just with the amount of blood I had lost, my iron levels were down, my haemoglobin levels were down. I had no energy.
“I had to build all of that back up, but I’m back fighting fit now and managed to survive that.
“It was a scary time. I was in with the dentist for just over an hour, trying to stop the bleeding. Eventually they got it to stop, said it could be doing with a couple of stitches, for some reason decided not to, and sent me up the road.
“An hour later my mouth started bleeding, and it was like a tap, I couldn’t get it to stop, so I got a wee bit of a fright.”
Trouten is back fighting fit, and bagged his 19th goal of the season in Saturday’s 3-0 win over Clyde, which is also his sixth in four games.
The former Alloa, Airdrie and Clyde star intends to keep playing as long as he can, and feels like he can go on for years.
Trouten said: “It’s a good run, I think that’s me got six goals in my last four, so I need to keep it up.
“If I can keep chipping in, and we can keep winning games, then great.
“I feel I can keep going for a while. For the last few years as I got older, I had it in my head that I wanted to keep playing in the leagues until I hit 40, but I’m 40 in November and the closer I get… I still feel good.
“We’re in a good position. We know we under-performed for the majority of the second quarter of the season, but we had a lot of injuries.
“We’ve still got a couple of boys out, but we’ve managed to hit a bit of form. We’re five points clear, but teams have a game in hand over us, so hopefully we can keep going.”