An Ailing And Much Loved Family Member

I went to get my eyes tested last week. Nothing much to report on the general eyesight front - I'm getting some proper reading glasses but my distance sight is still fine, courtesy of the decade old laser surgery. Being me I managed to choose  a woundingly expensive pair of frames - Oakley don't you know, to go with my precious shades. The shades, as any fule kno, make me run faster so presumably this new pair will make me read more quickly. All good then.

Well not quite all good as it turned out. I mentioned to the optician (a very brisk and efficient young lady) that I had been suffering from a 'floater' in my right eye which had first appeared three weeks beforehand. So she had a a jolly good look and was concerned enough to write me a letter of referral and to despatch me post-haste to the Midland Eye Hospital at Dudley Road, there possibly being a retinal tear. And this is where the title of my piece today comes in - I'm not talking of myself but rather, figuratively, of the National Health Service. I read somewhere (I don't think it was me who coined it, but I have pilfered the phrase) that The dear old NHS is the nearest we thing we now have in this country to a shared religion. Now, let me be clear, my experience of dealing professionally with the NHS was often disspiriting - it has the nimbleness of an oil tanker (a bloody big one with a wonky rudder at that ) and I don't buy all that guff about its every employee being an angel. However it has safely delivered two children to us and it was there for me when I was at my lowest ebb. For all the inefficiency and waste it rather preferred that I should not harm myself when I was ambivalent (to say the least) on the subject. So God bless it.

My longish afternoon at the Eye Hospital confirmed that the service is creaking under the burden of demands but in the final anlaysis it just about got by. Despite the problem of patient numbers, the problem of multiple languages being spoken by patients and staff and the organisational demands consequent upon Covid, I was warned that it would take four hours for me to be diagnosed and that transpired to be spot on. I had expected as much and had a book with me, but this proved a false comfort once I had been triaged and had eye drops put in to dilate my pupils because I couldn't read a bloody thing. Anyway you will be relieved to know (well I am at least) that after a thorough examination (including with a rather creepy strong lens that actually skims the surface of the eye) I don't have a retinal tear. What I have is a posterior vitreous detachment which has stirred up the jelly in my eye. Time is the cure. So I felt relieved as I left the hospital and grateful to that much loved relative, for all its manifest faults. It remains a magnificent conception, though possibly one that can never be perfectly realised.