Tag Archives: attitude

Is it a deal breaker?

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attitude

On my drive home from work I listened to Amanda Vanstone interview Philip Hensher, the author of the book, The Missing Link: The Lost Art of Handwriting. Hensher commented that in today’s world of text messages, tweets and emails that it could be entirely possible for someone to marry a person without ever seeing their handwriting until the moment they signed the marriage certificate.

He pondered, and this is probably more a query for the female readers but guys you can answer too, how would you feel if, having never seen your beloved sign his/her name previously, if once you were married you became aware that he signed his name with a little heart over his letter i, or finished his sentences with a smiley face?

The dilemma, if I can call it a dilemma, occupied me all the way home, and I still not sure of how I would react. Does gender equality extend to handwriting too?

One of life’s bigger questions, isn’t it?

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possibly the most socially acceptable form of egotism

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Mr FD is strutting through the house feeling quite hip and somewhat of a trend setter. He does indeed feel quite in demand.

For several months I have been asking Mr FD to take the old washing machine from the back patio, along with a rejected tyre and four old dining chairs to the garbage dump. To my mind we had grabbed the lead on the Ma and Pa Kettle of modern day times, but to Mr FD we were merely starting our found art collection.

My perception of our house and yard

Mr FD's vision of our yard

Last week, in our mail box, I found a notice from the city council telling us that there was to be a large item collection this week. I am quite sure that I only found the notice because Mr FD had neglected to clear the mail box that day and so I collected the letter when I came home from school. I suspect he would have hidden it had he been there first! To be honest I could scarcely contain my excitement as I walked into the house to share the joy. Oddly enough, Mr FD didn’t initially share my happy moment.

Sunday afternoon Son, Mr FD and Mr Boy, carried the washing machine out to the kerb, along with the wheel and trim, and four dining chairs that had been shredded by a long departed cat that we camouflaged for awhile by shrouding with fabric covers until we gave up the pretence and bought a new dining set.

It was about then that the bets started. Son felt that the wheel would be the first to go, but Mr FD put his money on the washing machine going before daybreak. My opinion was that they were both crazy, and  still stand by that.

Mr Fd won, as the washing machine was scavenged by 8pm that night. The tyre was gone by the time I left for school at 7 am the next morning. I felt sorry for the chairs sitting there neglected, but they went to a new home before I returned home that afternoon.

Three days later and the official collectors are yet to come, and out neighbours refuse is still sitting on their footpaths, but the FDs’ footpath is swept clean. Hence why Mr FD is strutting his stuff. He considers that our junk is of a higher class than our neighbours.

I guess it is the little things in life that do mean the most to some people, but I really do think Mr FD needs to get out more, preferably not with me! I also can’t help thinking that there is another wife out there, standing with her hands on her hips, declaring “What the hell have you brought home this time?” and wondering why she doesn’t have the divorce lawyer on short dial.

An eye on my world (10)

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When my mother had imparted the incident of my Grandmother and the eye under the bed I had assumed that Grandmother had merely dropped her eye during her morning ablutions and it had rolled away. I soon learned that there were many and varied ways a prosthetic eye can land under a bed. There were a few other lessons to learn along the way, however.

My first awakening was that prosthetic eyes are not round like a marble. My new eye was shaped like a shell, with a hand painted iris and even the addition of a few red veins for a little realism. I was handed a little rubber suction cone and told to use it to lift the eye in and out to clean (I have never found the right term, even when purchasing a new cone years later no one could tell me its name but seemed to understand “one of those little rubber suction things to lift eyes in and out with, please”. I have long since dispensed with its use and so may never know its official term, now).

Cleaning was equally technical – dishwashing liquid! Twice a day a good wash in dishwashing soap and shiny as new! And you thought it was only good for soaking fingernails in!

Now all this sounds so easy, but try it when you are confronted with your own empty socket in front of a mirror, that’s all I say! My hands trembled, I broke out in a dripping sweat and my heart beat so fast I thought I was going to pass out over the bathroom basin. Totally irrational probably to many of you, but I am the type of person who cringes watching television when a fictional character gets a splinter removed. I can feel that characters too real pain. I am not sure what I imagined would happen, my rational mind knew that it wasn’t going to hurt as the eye had already gone in and out a number of times in the fitting. (They actually grind the corners to perfection as they do with the crown of a tooth, and then give it a final polish before placing it into position and sending me back onto the street to live the rest of my life.

So, the first time it came to remove and clean was quite the dramatic event, but somehow I calmed the nerves and in time, I did indeed dispense with any little rubber aids. Lucky I did too, because my best trick came from popping it in and out at the strangest of times and oddest of places. I became quite the hand is faster than the eye artist along the way.

I soon learned that my eye sought a life of spontaneity and adventure, popping out at the most inconvenient moments for me though. A good sneeze would send it bouncing onto the floor. A couple of times I woke to find it lying on the pillow beside me. Rubbing an eyelid too enthusiastically would result in a quick palm movement to retrieve it from its decent and back into place before any shocked companion had taken a gasp.

One day at playgroup in the park, with our young daughters, I had to ask a nearby mother to hold my baby while I “just pick my eye up out of the dirt and pop it back in, dear”.

My most memorable moment was after the birth of our son when complications developed and I was in such severe pain, that when they brought my a basin and towel to “freshen up dear” I popped the eye in upside down so that the iris disappeared under my top lid and only the white of my eye could be seen. My specialist visited and two nurses came by, but not a one said a word. Mr FD had the joy of informing me that my eye had rolled back into my head when he came to visit late morning. I had wondered why the doctor had taken a slight step backwards when he first greeted me.

I do love the medical profession though, as they are among some of my favourite straight guys. The big moment is when they take their little light to look in my eyes and come up against a non dilating pupil. I have had more than one young doctor on the verge of hysterics before telling them it is artificial. Really fills one with confidence to know we have such bright sparks as doctors though!

In time, I found out that the original technician, the only one at that time in the entire state, hence why the woman who visited me in the hospital had to choose her eye from a shoe box, was actually a dental technician who eyed a gap in the market and filled it. (The puns are many with eyes. A family favourite is when I tell someone I will “keep an eye out for you.”) A real professional, who made my latest eye, (my third) declared that the original guy was a real hacker and my eye was too big for the socket hence some of my issues. I must say it has been a while since I sneezed and my eye set off for foreign shores, but I still have to be careful rubbing or wiping my eye as I can still have it make a soft landing in the palm of my hand.

And if you are wondering where old eyes go to rest, well in my bedside table drawer, of course. Some burglar is going to get a hell of a fright one night – finding a private eye!

An eye on my world (9)

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Waiting for my appointment with the technician who was to create my prosthetic, I watched a small boy, aged about two who was sitting playing at his father’s feet. His older brother, perhaps four years of age, sat beside his father. After they went in, the receptionist told me that the little boy had already had one eye removed due to cancer, and was in that day to allow the therapist to photograph his remaining eye as the eye was about to be removed due to another cancer. They wanted to ensure that his second prosthetic eye as a match to his natural eye colour as well.

Two years old and he was about to go blind. How would he remember colours, trees or his father’s face? The receptionist was close to tears as she continued to explain that the boys’ mother had deserted the family, and so the father was raising his sons alone.

At this time I had no guarantee that the exact same thing wouldn’t happen to me. My condition was so rare that they couldn’t say that I was clear from other complications for some years to come.

Over the years I have often wondered what happened to that small boy. Has he had a happy life? Has he had a life at all? Whenever I have felt sorry for myself and my less than perfect vision, the image of that small boy playing with his toy cars on the waiting room floor reminds me that I have much to be grateful for.

The process for creating a prosthetic eye is much the same process as they use to create a denture impression. The technician mixes a rubber cement mixture that is packed into the eye socket to set. A small dop stick is inserted and I had to sit quietly for a few minutes with the stick protruding from between my eyelids until the mould set, and it was removed from the eye socket.

I can’t say that it hurts, but it is not the most pleasant sensation. The first time, my eye socket was still a little tender, but I have to admit that it wasn’t the worst experience so far. I think I was more nervous because I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and I was so tired of being poked and prodded.

The technician then got paint and brushes and started to build up a green iris to match my remaining eye. He told me I had a very unusual green eye, but somehow it didn’t feel like a compliment.

As I mentioned much earlier in this tale, I had always been very vain about my eyes. I have very long dark eyelashes, and I frequently received compliments on my beautiful eyes. Now I felt as though God was punishing me for my vanity. I learnt the lesson not to be so vain and proud in what perhaps may have been a cruel way, but now I feel that it has made me a better person .

Humans are by nature curious creatures and in the weeks I sported my eye patch I had to tolerate many stares. I guess it was a little out of the ordinary to see a young woman sporting an eye patch, but I have never been able to understand why complete strangers think that they have the right to comment on anyone’s appearance.

Mr FD and I could not venture out anywhere without someone staring, and nine times out of ten making a comment. Poor Mr FD got accused of punching me on a regular basis usually by men.  I routinely replied that I had an eye operation and gave no further details  It wasn’t as though I looked grotesque. I was just a young woman with an eye patch. It wasn’t even a black eye patch, though a work colleague and I joked about creating a black eye patch and buying a parrot for my shoulder; it was a very discreet skin coloured patch, and as I had fairly long hair it wasn’t exactly a neon sign on my face.  I can’t help but feel empathy and sorrow for people who have major physical deformities, because people can be so cruel. You can see them stare and then turn to their companions and say something, or they make their thoughtless comments as though it is any of their business.

Mr FD was my support at this time. He never worried about my appearance, and he took the jibs, and he made me feel normal. Perhaps if he hadn’t been there I may not have handled things so well. It would have only been natural for an eighteen year old woman to feel that her attractiveness and desirability had been sorely diminished, but his comment was “I met a girl with two pretty eyes, and now I have a girl with one pretty eye.” But then again, I was Flamingo Dancer and I was comfortable in my own skin. I liked me and having one less eye was not going to make a difference to that!

In fact, the change in my appearance and the possibility of an uncertain future – would the same thing happen to the other eye was not known – worried him so little that one day when he was working on his final year project (he is an agronomist) in the college glasshouse, and I was sitting on an upturned bucket in the doorway, eye patch and all, he calmly dropped a marriage proposal into the conversation.

Life was changing in so many ways and in such a short time.

An eye on my world (8)

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I returned to the Specialist’s rooms to have my stitches removed. There were only a few stitches inside the empty eye socket, but they had actually become my major irritant, itching and becoming more uncomfortable as the days passed. It was not exactly a place I could scratch, even if I had wanted too, but I did find some relief from just pressing the dressing against the area.

Up to this point in time I had never experienced stitches. My tonsils had been removed the year before, but that was of little consequence compared to what I was experiencing now.

When the dressing was removed the doctor made the kind remark “that’s an eyebrow that needs taming”. A delightful comment to remind a young woman that a monobrow was forming behind her bandage!

While the doctor worked on my wound I was making a very low sound in my throat as I exhaled. It was like a deep sigh. Over the years I have realised I make this sound whenever I experience pain, as if it is some primal gut instinct (or should I say throat instinct!). At this time I was however unaware I was even making the sound, I guess I was just trying to find a happy place.

“What are you making that noise for?” he asked, uttered less as a question and more as an irritation.

I should have replied “I don’t know, but I am eighteen, I’ve just had my eye removed, maybe I am trying to comfort myself, because you sure aren’t helping.” Instead I fell silent, feeling embarrassed and ashamed as though I had failed some test.

After the procedure we settled down to talk. Time to deal with the elephant in the room. Time stopped while he shuffled papers and prepared his performance. Hurry up, speak.

NO CANCER.

No Cancer.

No sign of anything outside of the eye.

He actually said, “We didn’t know what we had until we sent the eye to London for examination.” In lay man’s terms, I had a growth on the nerve ending of the iris and it was rare. I was the thirteen recorded case in the English speaking world to that time. There was that number thirteen again.

In time the doctors would write up my case for publication and my primary doctor over the years, received phone calls from around the world asking for information about my case and that all important question: is she still alive?

The next step for me was to wait six weeks until everything healed and then the process of life with a prosthesis would begin; as well as living with the fear that something might happen to my remaining eye.

An eye on my world (7)

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A few days before I had entered hospital, I had been sitting on the back porch of our house, a favourite spot in the winter sun for our family, when I had started to cry. Between my tears I sobbed to my mother that I “don’t want a hole in my head”. She patted me on the back and made the helpless observation that “it’s not fair, is it.” Nothing in life is ever fair; it is just what it is, and especially when the God that I had trusted no longer worked for me.

What I saw beneath my bandage was not a hole as my eye lids were swollen shut and several times their usual size. The entire area from brow to the top of my cheek bone was not only swollen, but black and the darkest of blues. Frankenstein’s monster would have been horrified by the sight of what had once been my right eye.

I smoothed the bandage back into place and made my way back to my hospital bed. I couldn’t imagine looking normal and pulling the sheets up over my head seemed the only thing to do.

Most of the time I spent in hospital was a blur. Mr FD took a look at my medical chart one night and read the sizeable doses of morphine that I had been receiving on a very regular basis. No wonder I was feeling no pain! I can understand how people become addicted to morphine and other pain medications as I must admit that even over three decades since that time as I write these memories, my body tells me that it would have no problem with having another dose of that medication. Luckily I have no access to it, but I understand how people who do easily fall under its sway; something that makes the process of surgery and the loss of an eye merely a blur and leaves a slight craving for more is certainly not something to be handled lightly.

When I had taken my long look in the mirror I had also noticed that the eyebrow was thickening up already, and my hair really could do with a good shampoo – horrors for a young woman at any time, but worse when you have to deal with a major change in your appearance! So, the day I was discharged and arrived home, the first thing I asked my mother to do was shampoo my hair!

We didn’t have a bathroom with a shower, we only had a bathtub, so her solution to wash my hair and not wet my dressings in the process was to bring out an old garden sun lounger and by my lying flat on the lounger, she was able to wash my hair and allow me to feel more human. I also had a new boyfriend that despite all the recent events I still wanted to appear attractive to. Love is not only the best medicine, but a great motivator as well!

I think that my mother and sister’s expectations were that I would take to my bed as a recovering invalid for a few more days, but once my hair was washed and I had styled it back to its former glory, I had little intention of spending more time in bed! Maybe the morphine hadn’t worn off yet either!

Mr FD planned to go to the college library, the library where I worked as an assistant, for some books, so I chose to tag along. The team from the library had sent me flowers while I was in hospital and I wanted to thank them for their kind thoughts. I was weak, shaky and moving very slowly, but I think I needed to prove to myself that I was going to be all right. Some survival mechanism clicked in and I need to claw back normality. There was also the matter if someone told me I couldn’t do something that was just as likely to make me do it! I have always pushed back against people telling me what to do.

There had been so many people making decisions for me, formulating possibilities and opinions, that my need for self control had to break free and reinstate my independence. I think this is one of the benefits of being young also. At the age of eighteen I wasn’t about to sit at home for a moment more and let the world go on without me!

We parked just outside the library in the staff car park so that I didn’t have to walk very far, but even so, by the time I had walked the two short flights of stairs between the ground and first floor to the library I was already tired. Apparently I was very pale in the face as I walked towards the circulation desk to greet my colleagues. No doubt I made quite a sight with a large cotton eye dressing covering half my face, but the team made no comment. We didn’t stay long, and I did take to my sorely missed bed when we were home again, but I had proved that life would go on.

Well, hopefully it would, as I was yet to be told the pathology results.

An eye on my world (6)

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Several months earlier my school friend had undergone back surgery to have a steel rod placed along her spine to combat scoliosis. After her operation her mother said that  Mia had clasped her finger as she emerged from the anaesthetic and the pain. Now I was doing the same thing.

I remember hearing my mother’s voice, and felt that I had a large bandage wrapped around my head. I could see out from under the bandage, but only just, as the dressing almost covered what was now my one and only eye. I drifted in and out of consciousness all day, saying a few words before drifting off, and then continuing what I though was a continuous conversation, but was in fact a hour or two later.

All this time I clasped my mother’s middle finger. Not her hand, just her finger. I clung to it all day. I can remember raising my head once, only to vomit into the waste bin that my mother quickly grabbed as she called for a nurse.

I know Mr FD was by my bedside later in the day, but I really don’t remember anything much until well into the next day. The one good thing was that I experienced no pain, and did not throughout the entire hospital stay.

Late on the Saturday the ward sister came into the room accompanied by two student nurses. By coincidence one of the students was someone whom I vaguely knew, as her older sister worked with my Dad. Peeking out from under my head of bandages I could see the look of sympathy on her face.

Their intention was to remove my bandage and irrigate my eye. Eye socket. Over the years I have often been asked what it “feels like” to have only one eye and I have never really been able to explain. It feels like nothing. There is no darkness, no blackness. The closest I have ever been able to describe is that it is the same as if you held up your hand and expected it to see. There is just nothing. I only see one side of my nose though!

The bandages fell away easily and at last I had the sensation of being able to see unencumbered. The sister called the students closer and began to clean my wound. One of the students ran from the room, obviously unable to witness the sight before her. The nurse from my hometown stayed the course, but her look of sympathy, and I dare say, pity, remained.

A smaller bandage was substituted and I was propped up in bed. It wasn’t long before Mr FD arrived and found me a little more human. He was nice enough to flirt with me outrageously, to the point I had to talk to him sternly and tell him to behave himself before a nurse discovered us! Love is definitely the best medicine!

By Sunday I had a room mate; an elderly lady who was obviously in the last months, if not weeks of her life. The curtain between us was drawn most of the time. I can’t say that I minded as I was totally unprepared for a roomie who was facing the end of her life. It was more cruel to have her in a room with an eighteen year old.

Just after visiting hours on the Sunday, a minister of religion walked into the room. He was there to visit the woman in the next bed, but seeing me sitting in bed with a bandage over my eye he thought he would stop and have a joke.

“What happened to you, did you lose your eye on Friday the 13th?” he laughed, obviously pleased with his little joke for the day before had been Black Friday in more ways than one!

“Yes,” said I.

The very honourable reverend instantly turned on his heel and left the room without even speaking to his parishioner. He did not appear again until two nights later, when he sheepishly entered the room and apologised to me.

“I never thought a young girl would have lost her eye” was his excuse.

He wasn’t the only one. I never thought things like this happened to people like me either.

It was at this time that I realised that bad things happen. Bad things happen to people, and that person had to be someone. There was no reason why that person couldn’t be me. It was a philosophy that left God out of the picture.

I was kind of angry at God. I was very angry at God.  I had been a good little catholic girl. I went to church every Sunday; I went to confession and communion. I said my prayers at night. So why hadn’t I got the pay out?

It was to be many years before God and I resolved our issues. Eventually I came to the view that maybe God did hear some of those prayers. I am here all these years after all. It could have gone a whole different way, but it didn’t. The sceptics would say that either I was going to survive or I wouldn’t, which is utterly true.

Isn’t that how it works? If we are saved, or granted our desire, then we claim it as the hand of God, but if we are denied our hearts desire, the bad thing happens anyway, then we declare it the will of God and hope our suffering leads to a happiness in another time? So, if you are a gambling person, you would hedge your bets because either one or the other will happen!

It wasn’t until the fourth day after my operation that I crept into the bathroom and peeked beneath my dressings. It had never occurred to me to imagine what I saw

An eye on my world (5)

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The night before I was to be admitted to hospital I spent with Mr FD and his three housemates in their rented house. Mr FD shared a house on a farm with three student friends, one male and two females. The two girls circled me, checking out the female intruder. They were friendly, and though neither had ever been romantically involved with Mr FD (probably not due to his lack of trying!) obviously still considered him their property. It seems that nothing makes a man more interesting than the fact that another woman finds him attractive! I don’t want him, but you can’t have him either. 

Next morning I woke with a thumping head and a sore throat. We drove back to my house and I no sooner entered the kitchen when I felt the need to throw up, which I did promptly in the sink! It was a great day to be alive.

My mother, concerned about me undergoing surgery the next morning telephoned the doctor who was performing the surgery to discuss the fact that I was ill. I was to enter hospital later that day after all. The specialist decided he needed to see me, so a rushed trip to Toowoomba, a half hour’s drive away, delivered me to his surgery.

A quick examination and he decided that I was well enough to undergo the surgery. By now I think that I had suspended all thought and emotion and was just on automatic pilot. We returned home and I packed for hospital.

I don’t remember packing anything to read. I have been to hospital many times over the years and I have always packed at least two books, even when preparing to give birth, but I have absolutely no recollection of taking any reading material at all.

I also don’t remember having any thoughts about what life would be like after the surgery. No one explained what would happen post operatively, or even what to expect in the lead up to the surgery.

My parents were obviously distraught. My Dad had told Mr FD that he would give his own eyes if it would save me, but life doesn’t allow trade offs no matter how much parents wish it to be otherwise. They however stoically drove me to the hospital and followed me through the admission process.

I was shown into a two bed room. Luckily the first night the other bed was vacant. Once I was delivered my parents left. Their intention was to return the next day, after the surgery.

Now, as a parent myself, their behaviour seems very harsh to me. I know that if my child, even as the adults that they are now, were to be undergoing such radical life changing surgery there would be no way that I would just deliver them into a hospital bed and then leave them alone to face the long night. But at the time I thought nothing of it. It was just the way our family functioned. While there was always much love, there was also a certain hardness in that we often had to fend for ourselves in moments of most need.

It wasn’t neglect or punishment, I really think that my parents had been raised that way and that was therefore the parenting model that they had and so how we were raised. It was nothing for our mother to make us walk to the doctor’s surgery when we were ill, rather than spend the money on a taxi, even though we could have easily afforded the fare. Maybe it was being raised through a depression, surviving a war, but it was just the way our life was.

And so it was that way now. Luckily Mr FD arrived to visit me in the evening after his classes. Visiting hours were until 8 o’clock and he sat beside my bed, holding my hand until the nurses chased him out. Visiting hours were very strictly enforced and so he had no choice but to leave me.

Just after he left, the nurse brought a woman in to speak with me. The woman had undergone the same surgery, the removal of an eye, and the nurse thought that it would be helpful if I could speak with her and ask questions if I felt the need. This was the only person who ever understood how I might be feeling.

She was a woman in her forties, maybe fifties. Her medical condition was naturally different to mine, but she explained that she had recovered quickly and found her life had returned to normal in a very short time.

She asked me to pick which eye was artificial, obviously quite pleased with her appearance, so I think she was a little disappointed when I picked it right away. It did look fairly natural, but of course it didn’t move as her other eye did, so was a complete give away!

I am not sure that having her tell me that she had been shown a box of eyes and they had chosen one to match from the stock was a wise move either! I know telling me that twice a day she needed to take the eye out of the socket and wash it, much the same process as cleaning a set of dentures, was definitely not what I wanted to know right then! Luckily I had already learned that I would be having a custom made eye and so spared the sight of a box of glass eyes! Once she left, I tried not to think about the process of popping eyes in and out of sockets.

It was during the last few days that I had also learned that my paternal grandmother also had an artificial eye. A strange coincidence to have in the family! My Grandmother had died some 6 years before I was born and so I had never known her. I had only ever seen one small black and white photo of her and my Grandfather that someone had taken with a box brownie camera. My Grandfather, who had died when I was twelve was no less a stranger to me. I remember one visit, when I came home from school one afternoon and a big man in a very black suit was sitting have afternoon tea with my mother.

I had no idea who he was, but as I entered the room my mother said “Do you know who this is?” I was too shy to speak, and so she said “It’s your grandfather”. I remember my face being crushed into his suit pocket as he gave me a hug, but to this day I can’t remember his face. I don’t even know if I overcame my shyness enough to actually look at his face. So my only memory of my grandfather, who lived in the same small country town, is a black suit. The next time memory of my grandfather is standing at his funeral.

My father was the thirteenth child of a family of eighteen children and my father never spoke kindly of his own father. According to him he only knew how to drink and party, and was too lazy to even “put in a patch of potatoes to feed his family”. From the age of twelve my father fended for himself, often going hungry.

So it wasn’t surprising that I never knew my grandmother had an artificial eye. My mother said she only learned of it when as a young bride, Grandmother called her into the bedroom to look for her eye as it had popped out and rolled under the bed! It wasn’t quite the story I wanted to hear, but no one sugar coated things in our world!

Grandmother’s eye was due to complications following a cataract operation. The eye must have become infected and she had been forced to have the eye removed. The doctor was the very doctor who had been my specialist from the start and was performing my surgery! No one ever questioned his abilities. One did not ask a doctor questions either.

I was given a sleeping tablet and slept until I was awakened in the early hours of the morning to shower and prepare for the surgery.

I was an eighteen year old girl and despite my circumstances made sure I plucked my eyebrows and washed my hair. I even styled it with my blow dryer that I had made sure I packed!  I couldn’t think of a fate worse than having hair that was unstyled in those days! It was the era of the 1970s bob and I had it down to perfection! How silly we are at such times, adhering to small vanities, but maybe it is the small vanities that allow us to keep our sanity. This was not to be my only experience with possible life threatening medical conditions, and I have found that pretending to be normal is the best therapy in such moments.

Wheeled into the operating theatre the doctor patted my hand and said “This won’t take long; you are going to be just fine.” A needle was popped into my hand and that long tunnel of unconsciousness opened wide.

An eye on my world (4)

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Ron Mueck, "Angel", 1997

The god like eye specialist was a mountain of a man. He looked like he would have been more at home on the football field than an operating theatre. His size seemed to increase beside the tall string bean physique of his assistant.

He was kind though, and instinctively knew that we had undertaken a hard journey to reach his office. Once again I answered questions and underwent poking and prodding. It wasn’t long though before he delivered the verdict.

There was nothing he felt that he could do for me. He was honest enough to say that he would love to have a try at removing the tumour, but he knew that the damage such surgery would cause would result in not only a horrifically scarred eye, but most certainly also in chronic pain. I was too young to have to bear such a lasting legacy. The growth was too big to remove, maybe if he had been called in sooner… That is something I have wondered myself throughout the following years, as useless as such thoughts are.

It was before microsurgery, laser surgery and all the benefits that we enjoy today. I have no doubt in my mind that 21st century surgery would have offered me more alternatives, but in 1976 that was still a dream for most of us.

I was offered the choice of having my eye removed in Melbourne, but the specialist thought that as they could not offer me anything more than I could get from my doctor in Toowoomba, he advised that we should return home for the surgery so that I could have the comfort of family and friends.

It was a solemn little group that went back to the motel that afternoon. Numbness just filled my head and my body. I felt as though I was living someone else’s life. I also wondered how God could have deserted me so cruelly.My guardian angel had failed to do his job.  Even so, I maintained my nightly prayer ritual, with a slight twist.

Now I prayed that the tumour would be contained within the eye and no sign of it having spread would be found. I was no longer had faith that my prayers meant anything though.

Even so, I never really thought that the tumour had spread. I never feared that as much as I had feared the original growth of the tumour. Maybe I had faced my worst fear and now all the other fears diminished. Maybe I gained some strange confidence from facing my fear. Maybe I was just young and naïve; stupid.

It could have been a simple case of denial that things could get worse, but for the first time in my life I felt that I was on a roller coaster, events were out of my control, and all I could do was ride the roller coaster to the end. Then get on with my life.

What was that life going to be though?

By the time we returned home a couple days later versions of my future life were being unveiled for me, but those who knew nothing. One gossip said that I would have to give up my library job and become a child minder as I wouldn’t be able to cope with only one eye! Some vote of confidence!

Others filled the heads of my mother and sister with horror stories of the experiences of other people. Chinese whispers of terrible pain and tragic outcomes. From these good intentions my family were to find ways to comfort me. Somehow , thankfully, they kept all this from me.

My surgery was scheduled for Friday 13th August 1976. Friday the 13th.

It was also exactly one month since my first date with the man who was to be my husband.

An eye on my world (3)

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Our first date was a Monday night. I was born on a Monday. Perhaps Mondays are when life changing events happen.

Toowoomba was classified as a city, but acted more like a large country town. On a Monday night in the 1970s there was little to do and few places open. I suspect little has changed to this day.

The first thing we did was call into his parents’ house. How about that for a spectacular opening to a first date?  He needed to collect something, so I found myself making small talk with his father. His mother, a nurse at the time, was on duty and not home. That was the best break of the night. Luckily, we didn’t linger.

We pulled up outside a hotel (a pub, or bar), where we intended going in for a drink.

He was by the car one minute and gone the next.

I walked around the side of the car and found him sitting in the gutter. He said that an ankle broken playing football was weak and had given out. I like to think that he was just bowled over by my magnificence. In reality it was probably the fashion for platform shoes at the time! Elton John has a lot to answer for.

Often, since, I have thought that maybe I should have taken that as a warning and just kept on walking, but youth and romance prevailed. I wonder if he has thought that maybe he was being told something too?  No, of course not.

We found a table and had just settled down with a drink when one of his classmates appeared. It seems that he had been stood up by his date, and so, not knowing it was our first date, took refuge for the evening with us. The two men made conversation and I sat on the periphery. I must say it took the stress out of the evening in some ways! We never did tell him that he came with us on our first date!

Eventually the classmate called it a night, and we got to talk and get to know each other a little. He asked me my age. I said eighteen. He was twenty-six. His reply was, “What will Mum say!”  His mother, not mine. Well, she had a lot to say, and has continued to say it ever since, but to no real avail.

I am not sure that you could say it was love at first sight, but from that first night we knew we would probably be together forever. It just felt right.

The issue was that the eye thing was unresolved. In 10 days time I was flying to Melbourne and goodness knows what was going to be the outcome. It was not the time to start a romance, but one can never really choose the moment for romance. And maybe it was the gift sent to get me through the future. Life is what it is.

I told him that first night what might lay ahead. He appeared unconcerned. He did say I had beautiful eyes.

After that we saw each other every day, and before long he was spending more time at our house than he was at his shared house. He often slept in the spare bed. He was there the morning we left to fly out for my next medical appointment,

My mother, my aunt and I flew to Melbourne in early August. It was winter, and Melbourne was grey and cold. At that time we have a state Premier, Joh Bjelke Peterson  who was ultra conservative, bigoted and as history proved, corrupt. His parochial opinions made any one from Queensland the butt of jokes by our sister states. Anytime, it was mentioned that we were from Queensland, we had to take some good natured ribbing. I didn’t mind, but I was becoming more politically aware, and my dislike of the man was about to peak.

We settled into our motel the night we arrived. I slept fitfully that night and we were off early to make my doctor’s appointment. We were met by the specialist’s assistant, who started the examination and asked me a few questions. I was so nervous that I found it hard to settle and sit as required, but somehow managed to sit long enough for the now routine poking and prodding The assistant tried to reassure us by saying that I was about to see the best eye specialist in Australia. He spoke with awe in his voice.

Now I didn’t know what made me more nervous. The possible outcome of my examination, or the medial specialist about to conduct it!