Eyeballs and Body Parts
‘I don’t gamble as such, but I am willing to roll the dice on
this one,’ I said. ‘I would like you to do it, please.’
Twenty-four hours later I was walking back to my hotel with
a clear plastic shield over my face that looked like a small version
of the mask Anthony Hopkins wears in the film The Silence of
the Lambs. I squinted through the holes in it with my new, clear
lens in my left eye. Two days later my eye started to settle a little
bit and I could see the time on my watch. Impressed, I was keen
to go in for my right-eye operation later that day.
Right eye operated on, I again walked back to my hotel with
my Anthony Hopkins mask. But something didn’t quite seem
right. I felt like a small stone was in my eye. It wasn’t happy and
streamed water. I tried to go out to get some street food, but the
vendors’ fluorescent lights were just too bright and it was all very
blurry and painful. The next day I went back to the clinic for
my check-up and it wasn’t looking good. I was told that the laser
that ‘seals’ the eye did not do too good a job and I had what they
call a leak. Which to me is the equivalent of a puncture in a tyre
– my eye was flat. I called English Paul and told him that I had
to delay our fishing trip due to my flat eyeball.
At the clinic we waited to see if it would self-inflate, which it
refused to do, so before nightfall the puncture was being fixed
with some micro stitches to my eyeball.
Phew! I thought to myself, that’s fixed. I’ll soon be able to
quickly tie flies on my clients’ fishing lines and I’ll be able to see
my willy!
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