De-Piratisation

Imagine. Just imagine.

You wake up one day, about 18 months ago, with a smudge on your eye and your eye doctor tells you, you have a fast evolving cataract.

That cataract evolves and encompasses your whole eye, and even somehow manages to infect your other eye and your smudge grows, not just in size, but from one smudge into two and you rub and rub, but no matter how much you try to clear the blurriness from your eyes, your eyes become a fog and you really are the “Gorilla in the Mist.” Except you’re not actually a gorilla, and the mist is of your own body’s making.

Things start to disappear. Letters. Road signs. Your dog. Steps. Whole buildings.

So you go to your cataract operation in all faith. Repeatedly having been told that the procedure is so routine, it’s a doddle. As simple as removing a bogey from your nose in the morning. So you merrily allow a doctor to stab a needle into your face and tap, tap, tap on your cataract, until it breaks. Hoover it up and replace your damaged lens with a shiny new one.

He piratises you with an appropriate eye patch and shouts, ‘Next!’ while you shuffle out of the building.

Imagine you return to your eye doctor and discover, actually you still can’t see steps, or number plates, or loved ones’ faces or buses or almost anything at all because your simple eye operation has gone absolutely sideways.

So, you go to a different hospital, try to save your sight, get a gas bubble purposely inserted into your eye and realise everyone is in a slight panic about what to do with your other foggy eye.

Months go by and your first eye attempts to heal, but can’t quite get there, and you discover, the charlatan first doctor replaced your old dodgy lens with a new completely wrongly calculated lens (not by a single dioptre, or a mere couple of dioptres but by 8.5 dioptres).

So, you go to your new, competent, awesome doctor, with your very dodgy lens and your somewhat damaged retina and your other by now white eye, and he takes you in his capable hands. Tells you to be brave and doesn’t give you a shot in your eye or even a chill pill to help you along your journey. Instead, he decides, on what seems an impulse, to operate on both wayward eyes simultaneously through your clenched teeth and fists and buttocks.

He doesn’t tap, but he cuts and pulls and he pokes. And you feel more than slightly nauseous.

Imagine, the next day when he tells you, bandage removed, with a light pair of glasses you’ll be back to 100% vision in your now ‘good’ eye and 80 in your ‘bad’ one.

Imagine the elation, the joy, the tears, the ranting thanks, the unclenching of buttocks as you float back to your room.

Then imagine: you re-enter your room, go into the bathroom and glance up towards the mirror where you are greeted by the face that you haven’t actually properly seen for 18 months.

Just imagine the shrieks, the “oh my fucking gods”, the shock, the despair as you discover wrinkle after wrinkle, grey hair after grey hair.
Including a wiry fucker growing out of the centre of your face.