PART 1 of MY STORY OF GOING BLIND

“Hi Lorraine,” came the voice from across the corridor in the hospital.

“Who is it? I asked.

“It’s Mandy,” came back the voice.

I am not sure who was the most bewildered, me or her. I knew Mandy well. She it was who had wheeled me out of the hospital to our waiting car in the hospitel car park on the day that I was told I had cancer. As she wheeled me down the corridor I burst into tears. It was the one and only time that I cried.

“We get people better in here,” she had said. I was in too much shock to take it in. I could not believe I could get better. I had just been handed a death sentence. Following that, she it was who took my blood pressure and did all the observations every time I arrived at the chemotherapy ward for my treatment.

Though I could see a blurry figure, I was unable to see who it was. I felt a shock wave go through me as I realised the seriousness of the decline in my eyesight. I had been aware that I was becoming unable to recognise the faces of the nurses in the chemotherapy ward of recent days, but had put it down to needing new glasses. It had seemed unimportant in the general scheme of things. I was busy dealing with cancer, not knowing whether would I live or die.

“Will it kill me?” I had asked the haematologist after he had delivered the news to me that I had cancer. I had expected him to say that they would cure me. I got the shock of my life when he replied,

“i don’t know,” and then said, ominously, “I will always tell you the truth.”

He had no bedside manner at all. He was a very quick, business like man. He did not attempt to soften the blow. He had spoken about daisy chains, and of how our lymph nodes are like them, with one lymph node being linked to another going right round your body. The cancer had thus been able to spread from one lymph node to another, then the next and then the next, and so on. I had pictured myself at my grandparents’ farm as a little girl making daisy chains. But these daisy chains that I was being told about were not the daisy chains of my childhood. They were far from beautiful, and far from innocent.

As the battle to deal with the cancer raged, my failing eyesight seemed to be the least of my problems. And yet it was with shock that I responded to not recognising the nurse whom I knew so well that day.