My neighbour had a surgical procedure and keeps telling me about it. Every time she starts, I shout ‘No! Please stop!’, because I’m squeamish.
At the risk of distressing anyone else who is squeamish, I do need to say that she had her eyeball injected, because of what followed.
Three people in four days – so having your eyeball injected must be no more unusual than having your hair cut
A day after visiting my neighbour and having to cover my ears as she explained her eye op, I bumped into a lady I know outside church and when I asked after her husband she said he was going into hospital because: ‘He’s having his eye injected.’
Two days after that, a reader emailed me to say a piece I wrote cheered him up after ‘getting an injection into my eye yesterday morning’.
I’m not a statistician, obviously, and I don’t understand the mathematical odds of having three eyeball-injecting conversations with three different people in four days. But it feels like for that to happen, having your eyeball injected must be no more unusual than, say, having your hair cut.
Out of interest, I asked, what necessitated this procedure? And he mentioned ischemia, which is a condition in which blood flow is restricted.
He was of the opinion there was nothing untoward about it. And so was my seventy-something neighbour who said hers was obviously because she banged her eye as a child – so all in all, a good run had been had out of it, and she was more satisfied than, say, I would be with the idea of my eyeball needing injecting 65 years after I banged it.
The other lady I didn’t get the chance to ask, but I assume she was sanguine about her husband’s eyeball because she laughed when she was telling me about it – unless, of course, this was nervous laughter. Always one eyeball, by the way, not both.
My mother has something wrong with one of her eyes, a cobweb similar to what my neighbour describes, but I’m not counting her because she hasn’t had her eyeball injected. She had it lasered a few weeks ago.
Aside from observing that odd eyeballs belonging to various people I know are having to be injected, I’m not drawing any conclusions. I wouldn’t know how to, and anyway, I can’t be bothered.
All I want to say is that as a hypochondriac, I’m struggling.
I’m triggered, to use a fashionable term, by people talking about such things, and saying how normal and expected they are. The prevalence of detailed, illness-based conversations appears to me to have gone up, and for a hypochondriac, that is a serious matter.
I dread meeting people, I dread the phone ringing. Not just because it’s going to be someone telling me they’re ill, but because they’re going to tell me they’re ill and they’re not the least bit bothered about it.
My father, for example, is covered in an all-over-body rash that looks like shingles or sepsis to me, and cellulitis to a friend I’ve shown the pictures to who is a retired nurse, and who herself has what she calls ‘an interesting little collection of auto-immune conditions’. (I’m glad she finds them interesting because I find them horrifying.)
My father’s GP says the rash is nothing to worry about, just an outbreak of head-to- foot eczema. He’s only just got over a heart attack from a blood clot. But he insists he’s fine with it.
My mother has vascular dementia, a tumour in her neck, a knee replacement in one leg, and one eye not working, despite the lasering.
She went all out not to get ill from Covid barely a few years ago (although eventually she did get it), but now she says having almost every bit of her body going wrong is entirely to be expected in her eighties. And my friend the nurse, in her sixties, says the same thing.
All right then, if you’re all so happy with your illnesses can you please go the whole hog and not tell me about them?
Keep it to yourself if it’s all so expected and routine, because while you might be philosophical about it, I want to scream like it’s a horror film.
I feel tight in my chest. I’ve got a piercing tension headache. ‘My eyes have gone blurred!’ I run into the yard screaming at the builder boyfriend.
‘My eyes! What’s wrong with my eyes!’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your eyes,’ he says, ignoring me almost totally as he’s unloading hay. ‘Oh yes… I’ve forgotten to put my contact lenses in.’
I got two small insect bites on my leg and started wailing inconsolably (as I slathered myself in Sudocrem) about a woman in the news who got two small bites that went to ulcers then they chopped both her legs off.
Sepsis, a quarter of a million people a year… shingles, one in three… the farmer next door, my age, brain tumour… I’ve got a funny twinge in my head.
‘Shut up,’ says the BB, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you.’
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