An eye for an eye...
My gran’s dear departed sister, Annie, was a lovely woman. Mad as cheese, but sweet and kind and tough as old boots. By the time she reached the age of 85, she’d survived breast cancer, cervical cancer, pneumonia, and she’d gone totally blind. The reason for her blindness was her refusal to have her cataracts treated. She was a bit old-school and didn’t like going to the doctors, so she left it until it was too late.
She ended up in hospital, shortly before she died; her son, my mum’s cousin, came round for lunch to tell us that she wasn’t too good physically, but mentally she was in good spirits. But he warned us that should we decide to go see her, we should be prepared that there had been some, well, complications pertaining to her blindness. Ed, mum’s cousin, is nothing if not generous with detail (we’d already been treated to the problems his wife had been having with her chest drain after breast reconstruction surgery), so I should have known…

It seemed that because she’d not had her cataracts removed, an infection had built up behind her eye. This, in the way that infections do, had built up pus and bacterial detritus over a period of time, which hadn’t been spotted. Ed told us he’d turned up for visiting as usual to find that there was a bit of commotion going on and they wouldn’t let him see her. Eventually when they let him in, she had a patch over her right eye. He asked what had happened. It turned out that the pressure due to the build up of pus behind her eye had got so great that her eye had, literally, exploded. The nurse had come in to find the remnants of Annie’s eye ball hanging halfway down her cheek by her occular nerve.

It was at this point that I put down the cherry tomato that I had been eating and went to be quietly sick in the bathroom.
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Thu 6 Sep 2007, 14:01, Reply)