I rang my optician and got an appointment. It was
for a couple of hours after my cancer surveillance CT scan. So I drove to the
Cancer Centre and went through the routine: drinking the contrast (iodine, I believe)
and lying down inside the big whirring scanner. I’d been through this dozens of
times; the scan itself is not a problem, waiting for the results is. Although,
I had more pressing matters on my mind as I walked into town to the optician. T
joined me there and we looked at new spectacle frames to distract ourselves for
a while.
My optician is a techie. His consulting room is full
of eye examining machines. He heard my story, dilated my pupils with eye drops
and then put me through his suite of machines. This included retinal and
macular scans, and culminated in him looking into my eye with a large
microscope that he proudly told me that he had just bought for £12,000. All of
the time he was doing the examination he was cracking jokes. Then he gave me
the verdict. He thought I had a tear in my retina because he’d seen pigment
cells in my vitreous (the jelly-like substance that fills your eyeball). As
this could lead to permanent loss of eyesight, he recommended that we went to
the Eye Hospital. Since it was 4.30pm, he suggested we went the next morning.
Outside, the bright
sunshine hurt my dilated eyes and the world seemed very distorted. We took a cab direct to the Eye Hospital and got
there just before the reception closed. We were ushered into a very small
waiting room already full of people. There was an enormous flat screen TV on
the wall. The sound was up very loud. Pointless was on. Nobody spoke. We waited and waited. Very
slowly, people were called. T told me that beside the TV was sign saying that
nobody was allowed to touch it or try to change channels. It was stuck on BBC 1,
all I got was the sound and distorted visuals. Sometime during the tedium of
the One Show I was called to see the
Triage Nurse. She took my details and put some more dilating eye-drops into my
already dilated eyes. T said I looked like a frightened rabbit.
Back in the TV waiting room, Eastenders was on and there were still plenty of people. I recalled
A Clockwork Orange, where Alex’s eyes
are held open and he is forced to watch footage of concentration camps and war to
cure him of his violence. I wondered what an enforced diet of bland BBC1 primetime
is likely to cure me of? Holby City
came and thankfully went, it didn’t remind me of any of the different hospitals
that I’d spent time in. As Years and
Years began I was called to see the doctor. He began by putting more
dilating eye-drops in and then looked into my eyes with a microscope. He did
this for a while, getting me to look through all of the points of the compass.
Then he got me to lie down on a couch and put a portable microscope on his head. He switched on a bright light, pressed my eyelids wide open with probes (T
said it they were like extra-long cotton buds) and looked deeply into my
eyeball.
He told me that my vitreous had partially detached
from my retina. Adding that we should not be concerned as this was a normal
part of ageing. The incident with the branch had precipitated something that
would have happened in time anyway. I asked him about the optician’s diagnosis.
He said he could find no tear in the retina but this was still a possibility as
the remainder of the vitreous would also detach sometime. The small spots that
the optician thought were pigment cells, he thought were specks of blood. He said
that the floaters and blurring should slowly clear over the coming months and booked
me into a clinic in four weeks time. We sighed with relief. I was glad I didn’t
have to watch the Ten O’Clock News.
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