It started last weekend, when the sky was filled with little black pinprick dots, like those old style monochrome newspaper photographs. By Sunday, there was a big black spot in the middle vision of my right eye, which kept floating about as if there was a large spider hanging on a thread from my eyebrow. Though I’ve had this kind of thing often enough before, it seemed worse because by Monday there was a blurring all around and I was feeling pretty anxious about it.
Alison said, “Have you looked it up in the medical book?” (Good old family standby.) This was a big mistake, as it turned out. When I looked it up in the medical book, it was obvious that what I had was a detached retina. OK, the key symptom - flashes of light - was missing, but as I was to learn, some forms of retinal detachment can be completely asymptomatic. (In the classic words of Victor Meldrew, “My God! That’s exactly what I’ve got!”)
So I phoned the Eye Hospital. I don’t know if this is generally true, but here in Oxford you can phone the Eye Hospital and talk to a nurse who triages you by phone. She gave me an appointment for Friday afternoon. “Thanks,” I said, “and could you just tell me where the Eye Hospital is?” (Readers with local knowledge of Oxford will understand that this is necessary as they have recently moved several of the hospitals around the city; and indeed, the Eye Hospital is no longer in Walton Street, but has been subsumed into the new West Wing of the JR.)
“And don’t drive here,” she added, “because we will need to dilate your eyes.”
So I showed up at the appointed time to do battle with the labyrinth that is the West Wing. You can see who are the newbies: they pass in through the automatic doors and stand there bewildered by the plethora of signs and directions. In front of me was the escalator going up to the next floor, and somewhere nearby a sign saying, USE THE STAIRS FOR THE OXFORD EYE HOSPITAL. So I obediently crossed the foyer, entered the stairwell, climbed the stairs, walked along the passage, and came out at the top of the escalator. Perhaps this is NHS policy to encourage patients to take more exercise?
I got in quite quickly to see the nurse, and get various drops in the eyes to anaesthetise them while she tested pressure in them, and then added the dilating drops. Then followed a long wait as the doctor was over an hour late arriving from the emergency he’d been attending to. This meant a shortage of seating in the second stage waiting area; they don’t seem to have allowed for the fact that if patients can’t drive there, they need to provide twice as many seats - for the patient and for the chauffeur. And you’re sitting there not able to read, ’cause your eyes are pumped full of drops, and not really able to study your fellow patients for similar reasons. You only hope you don’t look as dopey as you feel. They don’t, so maybe you don’t look that bad either.
At last the doctor arrives and so does the second on-call doctor, to help clear the backlog. I’m told it was right to ask for an appointment, and the eye is weak because of my short-sightedness, but prophylactic laser treatment has no better statistics of helping than doing nothing for the present. A phobia of eye surgery makes doing nothing the more attractive option under those circumstances.
Then they proceed to take photos of my eye, shining bright lights into a pupil enlarged to more than twice its usual diameter. This involves the indignity of having the photographer’s colleague hold my eye open with his fingers (since they’d run out of matchsticks). Then they send me home. It turns out to be good advice not to drive: there’s no way I could have done. But they might have added: And bring the blackest dark glasses you can get hold of, because daylight will be painfully bright to you and you will have to go home with your eyes shut. Fortunately it is only about a mile and a quarter from the West Wing to my front door, and I know the road well enough that I can walk it, well, pretty much with my eyes shut.
So far the spider’s still there, though I’m getting more used to having him hanging around. Think I’ll call him Ollie.