Pages

Tuesday 22 January 2013

The best laid plans...

I started this blog with high hopes and good intentions in November, and spent most of that month collecting snippets and ideas for creating an info-rich blog. After all, that’s what it’s all about! But all these fine plans came to a crashing halt in early December. 

One evening I was in one of my favourite coffee haunts, working on the second book of the Trastamara Chronicles, and I noticed something floating across the screen–or so I thought. I tried to brush it away, to no avail. I concluded the problem was my glasses and tried several times to clean those. No luck. Finally it dawned on me that the problem was my eyes. Now, I’d had eye issues before so I didn’t panic. It just looked like an odd floater. I tweaked my screen and font settings in Scrivener and carried on working, hoping that the strange floatery obstruction in my vision would go away. 

It didn’t. When it was still present the following day, I made an emergency appointment at the optician’s. By this time I was starting to freak out a bit, but tried to tell myself it was probably all symptoms of an oncoming migraine and toddled off to my appointment. It wasn’t good, but it could have been worse. He wasn’t happy with the condition of the retina in my left eye, so we ended up in eye casualty that night, and they confirmed a probable detached retina. I was sent home to my mother’s for total bed rest (it was either there or be admitted). The next day I had a bleed in that eye which delayed things badly; when we returned to the hospital a few days later the retinal specialist said there was so much blood he couldn’t see the retina at all! So I was once again despatched home to Mum’s for another fortnight of lying flat. This included Christmas and New Year. Then back again to the hospital… and the consultant starting humming and hahhing. I have something called retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) which means that basically my eyes are abnormal in terms of how they’re structured, and the consultant wasn’t happy about just rushing in for surgery. He wanted a second opinion. 

So we made a private appointment with another retinal specialist who was lovely. Absolutely lovely. He confirmed both the ROP and the detached retina, but said that as there was evidence of a healed retinal detachment in the other eye he was happy to wait-and-see… and in the meantime I could return to normal. That was a fortnight ago and over that time I’ve been building up my reading, writing and internet time, so I hope it won’t be too long before I can continue with A House Divided in a disciplined manner.