The other day I read that a famous surgeon has asked some famous writers to tell their stories of the NHS. He didn’t ask me so I thought I’d put my eye surgery story here instead. I love being able to see as well as I do and I feel very lucky to live near such a great hospital. Here it is, don’t read it if you have retinal detachment!
I have been waiting all morning on the ward at the eye hospital. I am wearing a gown over my normal clothes and I have a big arrow drawn on my forehead pointing down to my right eye. I don’t think I need this as I’m going to be awake during the operation. None of the other patients has been drawn on.
A doctor summons me to a side room and tells me that they will probably be ready for me by 2.30. She explains what they are going to do: drain my eyeball, repair my retina with a laser and then fill my eye with gas to hold the retina in place while my eye recovers. She says that it won’t be the most pleasant experience that I’ve ever had but that it probably won’t be the worst either. I’m not really reassured by this (how does she know what I’ve experienced?) but I know that it has to be done so I go back to my chair and wait. I try not to think about the impending operation.
An extremely old woman is in the chair next to me. She’s very thin and fragile looking. She’s wearing a beautiful 1950’s floral skirt and a mustard cable knit cardigan. She looks very stylish. Her daughter, a middle aged woman who is not nearly as well dressed as her mother, is with her. They barely speak. I sense that they are both so nervous that they have been rendered dumb. The old lady is removed by the nurse and walks back about half an hour later looking absolutely fine. I assume she’s had a cataract removed.
Eventually they call me and take me into the theatre. I look at all the big machines and they show me a table that has a hollow at one end for me to put my head in and tell me to lie down there. Under the machine. I get very scared and start crying, I had assumed that they would sedate me but apparently not. The nurse says that I seem worried, obviously I’m worried, I’m about to have my eye cut open.
I feel better for admitting that I’m nervous so I lie on the table and the doctor starts to explain the procedure to me. They cover me completely with a blue cloth with a gap for my right eye and tell me not to move. A nurse is going to hold my hand for the duration of the operation and I can squeeze her hand if I need to. This hand holding turns out to be absolutely fantastic and makes everything bearable.
The doctor clamps my eyelids open somehow, this hurts quite a bit and reminds me of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, I try not to think about that and the doctor comes right up to me holding a syringe and says: “Don’t worry it’s not a needle, just a hollow cannula” I still have no idea why being stabbed in the eye with a needle might be worse than with a hollow cannula. She applies a lot of pressure to my eye which is suddenly released in quite a gross way. I can’t see anything at all now which is actually a blessing. Now the machines start to talk, they mainly say numbers with decimal points but rather more terrifyingly “cutter on, cutter off”. I would advise whoever programmes that machine to make it say something a little more tactful.
The next part is where they make three incisions in my eyeball and I feel the fluid running down my cheek and neck. I try to put my mind elsewhere, there’s a radio playing music and I focus on that and imagine a warm beach, a cliche I know but it’s the only coping strategy I can think of right now. I have no idea how long this is going to take or how much time has passed so far. I lie completely still and tell myself to be calm.
Eventually my eye is lasered and stitched, it amazes me that the doctor can stitch an eyeball, and it’s time to fill it with gas. The gas machine has a voice that tells us the pressure and it seems to take an eternity to fill my eyeball up. I refuse to think about how my collapsed eye must look. Then I’m all cleaned and patched and wheeled back to the ward. I have to keep my eyes parallel to the floor to give the retina the best chance of staying in place. I will have to do this for 50 minutes out of every hour for the next 72 hours.
The hospital gives me a strange green doughnut to clamp to the table and put my head in. This doughnut proved to be a hard and uncomfortable thing and became the focus of all I hated about “posturing” (medical term for keeping your head in one position, even at night 😦 ). You can see the doughnut monster in the after picture (to the left of the before picture!) at the top of this page.
Just in case you accidentally read this with retinal detachment something I learnt that I wish I’d known before the operation is that you can’t see through the gas bubble in your eye. So when I took the bandage off the next day and couldn’t see a thing I thought the operation had failed. It was OK, the gas gradually gets replaced by eyeball fluid and you walk around with your own personal spirit level in your eye while that’s happening. I could see it sloshing around and gradually filling up as the weeks went by, I recovered my sight from top to bottom.
idrathereatgrass 