Bright Light!

Long standing readers of this blog (who really should pull up a chair and rest their tired legs) may recall that I went for an eye test back in August and that the optician said that my retinas looked a bit dodgy. After taking the letter to my gp (who, in a supreme moment of irony, struggled to read the optician's hand writing) I got a referral to the eye clinic. What a kerfuffle.

As previously mentioned in the blog that dare not speak its name, the parking around the hospital is a nuggering nightmare and today was no exception. We left home at half past two, with Mrs Dogwood on driving duties, and got to the clinic at five past three with five minutes to spare.

I went up to the clinic reception desk and waited patiently (ho ho - pun intended, they always are). The receptionist was organising a file full of notes which she did by leafing backwards and forwards to the right place, un clipping the binders, inserting the page, carefully reclipping the binders and starting again. Why it didn't occur to her to take all of the pages out of the binder, sort them with the new pages and then put them all back at the same time is beyond me. She spent a good couple of minutes at this task, studiously ignoring me, whilst the queue steadily increased behind me. She finally closed the binder with a snap and put it in the shopping trolley behind her. Before I could wave my appointment letter at her and say 'excuse me' she vanished out of the side door for another couple of minutes, eventually returning only to send me round to the other side of the clinic following the large arrows pointed on the floor.

A twenty minute wait, and then my name was called for my vision to be checked, which just involved reading the traditional letters off a chart. The nurse then put two lots of eyedrops in my eyes, warning me that they would sting, and by jimminy they did. She told me that the drops would take twenty minutes to work, and that I would be called to see the consultant after that.

This was technically true, but it actually turned out to be more like an hour after before the consultant actually shone an excrutiatingly bright light into the back of my eyes and pronounced them to be fine, apart from a little degeneration around the edge of the retinas which was perfectly normal for somebody as short sighted as me.

We finally left the clinic at twenty to five, just in time to hit the evening rush hour and the road works by the university. The eye drops had caused my pupils to dilate making the lights of the cars almost unbearable to look at, but I did retain enough vision to spot a 37 coming the other way whilst we crawled along, so the day wasn't a complete dead loss.