Confessions of a hypochondriac

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.

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.