‘So what you need to do,’ says the kindly consultant ophthalmologist, ‘is throw away your gas permeable lenses and wear your glasses until the eye is healed. It’ll take about three months.’ Three months! ‘What’s the matter?’ he smiles, seeing my shocked face. ‘I love my glasses and, if I may say so, you look perfectly all right in yours.’ For the second time this year , a consultant has proved me wrong. Good job I didn’t go into medicine then. The joke horror eyeball with a scarlet cornea and swollen eyelid I’ve been squirting with antibiotic for the last week, is not, after all, a complication of a suspected blocked tear duct after my sinusitis, but has been caused by my eye quietly rejecting a very old contact lens. Despite being a very careful user of contact lenses (of anything, really), the lens has built up protein deposits which have sandpapered my cornea and caused all sorts of havoc. There’s nothing to be done other than to apply eye drops and wait...
Christine Stovell, author and freelance writer, on living and writing in West Wales