alwaysperfectlywrite

Yesterday had a salutary lesson in how to comport myself.

Yesterday I had an appointment at The Spire Hospital, Whalley Range, South Manchester where I learned from a quiet,  courteous - and quite courageous -  nurse how it feels to have major eye surgery.

Ms X works late into the evening despite having had a corneal transplant and is yet to have the first of 16 stitches removed - one a month during a 16 month period. She explained that it is towards the end of a day - about the time she and her colleagues treated me with such unflustered professionalism - that the stitches begin irritate like crazy and she has to fight the desire to scratch.

All this emerged because I remarked that the treatment I had received for the macular degeneration in my left eye was painless bar the side-effects following an avastin injection - when I begin ‘dancing on the ceiling’.

She empathised completely but after chatting to her, I decided to shut up and put my dancing shoes away.

But this does not mean I’ll not be back here and all over a hundred other places highlighting eye disease, especially macular degeneration, which can attack even young people in their 20s and should not and must not be associated with decrepitude.

Ms X remarked, inter alia, that she was ‘lucky’ to have received a cornea relatively quickly as eyes are rarely left by donors. She couldn’t tell me why. I was left to wonder whether there’s a philosophical reason - and it’s because eyes are regarded as ‘the windows of the soul’. Anyone else out there with ideas about this?

msniw

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