(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

Yesterday, I had more eye surgery. Today, I can hardly see anything. This was the entirely expected consequence of taking out the blob of oil that had been holding my retina in place and replacing it with a gas bubble. For the next week or so, all will be chaos as my vision will change all the time. On the far side of that, things should be better.

Sometimes healing is not linear at all. It seems to me that part of how we do medicine at the moment often involves things needing to be much worse before recovery becomes possible. Fixing human bodies is messy. Today I am groggy from the anaesthetic, and a bear of little brain, but I’m also hopeful. It will be some weeks before I’m fully recovered and we do not know what that will be like. I’ve probably lost the sight in my right eye, assuming no sudden medical advances come along to fix me. I face a future of shitty balance, and no depth perception, but so be it. I should get some of the things I care about back and that feels like a tremendous blessing. When this started back in February, I was entirely blind, and thought that was going to be the size of it for the rest of my life, so this amount of rescue seems pretty amazing. I’m very grateful to the NHS.