If you are a reader who also follows my YouTube channels, you may know that last year, (2020) on the very first weekend of the “confinamiento” in Spain due to Covid 19, in March, I had a little accident.
I was washing my hair in the shower (one of those showers that go into a bath) and I slipped on some conditioner. fell. and banged my eye on the side of the bath.
I banged it so hard I gave myself a lovely big black eye that can be seen clearly on the videos I made around that time. I actually think I broke my nose as I have a little dent next to the eye socket. I have never washed my hair in the shower since!!
I did not go to the doctors or the hospital although I am sure I had concussion.
Covid was rife, hospitals were full, and what would they do anyway?
The black eye faded, I survived, and as time went on I practically forgot about it though as I say I was extra careful in the shower ever since. Time went on, and in September classroom classes restarted and things started to get a little more back to normal. I spent a lot of time on the computer finishing off a few book projects and updating my Break The Language Barrier series. My right eye started to feel a little tired, and I started to notice a slight blurriness of vision.
Being one of those people that is absolutely useless at going to the doctors, I put it down to eye strain and waited for it to improve, resting my eyes as often as possible.
It didn´t..
Increasingly I felt I was viewing the world from this eye through frosted glass, though luckily for me the vision in my other eye was very good so I could function perfectly well. As Christmas approached, I gave up thinking it would improve and contacted my doctor who immediately made me an appointment with the eye specialist. By now I was panicking as I suffer from high blood sugar which I was not controlling well, and I was starting to think maybe it was connected with this.
I also wondered about the bang I had given my eye, had I detached my retina or anything similar? As we know, Google is great in some ways but can also give you sleepless nights!! I turned up for my appointment very concerned.
The young girl I saw on the first appointment was lovely though seemed about 12. A sure sign of old age when doctors and policemen start to look like children. She started off by saying it was probably related to the fall, couldn´t be a cataract as they came on very slowly not so quickly, then on further investigation saw that, ah yes, it was a cataract in fact.
I was absolutely gobsmacked. Moi? A cataract? Only old people have cataracts. Ah hang on, I will be 60 soon, how the hell did that happen?
The nice girl told me that trauma to the eye can in fact cause or accelerate a cataract, but the good news was it was easy to remove. I was given another appointment where the cataract was confirmed and the process began leading to an operation.
Google was quite reassuring in success rate of cataract surgery so I duly went along for my blood test and cardiogram. Apart from the fact that my blood sugar was wildly out of control (that´s another story- now controlled) I was fit to go from February and told to wait for the call for a Covid test to be followed shortly by an operation date.
In the meantime Covid (are you as fed up as I am of that word?) had taken hold again here and we were again under restrictions, with hospitals full again. A couple of months rolled by with no news, but to be honest it was not getting any worse and I had learned to live with it. As my other eye was fine it really didn´t affect my normal life and I wasn´t looking forward to the prospect of surgery being a complete wuss.
The more I started to contemplate the fact that I was going to actually have surgery on my EYE the more terrified I became. Perhaps it would be better if they just forgot about me, what did I need two good eyes for when I was coping well one?
Eventually I did call as things started to open up again and was told yes, all good, wouldn´t be long. Bloody brilliant.
By then Spain was getting on with the vaccine rollout, so I was happy to wait as in my eyes ( pardon the pun) they had so many more important things to do. I put it to the back of my mind and just got on with enjoying our new freedoms as restrictions lifted bit by bit.
Then last week, it all happened…
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CONFESSIONS OF A SPANISH TEACHER 