Three months on
It's been a quarter of a year since a lampost attacked my head.
Three months ago today, I tripped up a kerb while crossing a roundabout, and smashed my head on a lamppost. The time since has been something of a journey, from the initial stay in hospital, to my initial recuperation in Bristol, to eye surgery, and now working with the optician to get my sight as close to it was before the accident as they can.
It has not been an easy process. Having surgery on a traumatised eye is tricky. The sort of laser surgery I had is normally done with only a topical anaesthetic and a lens pressed onto the eyeball — but my traumatised eye couldn’t tolerate that. So, oil the end, oral sedation and local anaesthetic were needed.
Although I’ve been discharged from the care of the eye hospital, my left eye will never be quite the same again, and is at a (very) slightly increased risk of retinal detachment. We’re experimenting with contacts lens power to find out what will give me the best vision they can. And, of course, I will always have very visible scars on my forehead.
Scenes from a recovery
I’ve kept working through it all as best as I can. No workshops for clients were cancelled – I’ve done three in the last few weeks – and the worst that happened at City St George’s is that some marking was a week late (with approval).
I suspect that this is the last time I’ll write about this. I’m accepting the scars and the eye issues as my new normal. Sometimes I forget about the eye problems, as my brain gets better at editing out the floaters, and sometimes I can see them clearly. Sometimes I forget about the scars, and sometimes they feel uncomfortably tight, or I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and do a double take.
But most of all, it has me thinking about how fragile our existences are. I could easily have been brain-damaged, split my skull or lost an eye. It has me thinking a lot about what I want to accomplish in how many years I have left. I wouldn’t say I had an encounter with mortality, as much as caught its eye across the street, and was reminded of an imprecise appointment in the future.
Change has happened, change is coming.
That’s been the lesson of the last three months. Onwards!
