Having been referred to Sheffield eye hospital, it was a long old wait before my appointment last Thursday (7th March) but in reality I couldn’t have asked for a quicker referral. I fully expected to head to Sheffield on my own, thought it would be a quick appointment and I would spend the rest of the day having a mooch around the shops…. there is a really good vintage and second hand shop there that I have wanted to visit for ages, I think i’ll have to stick to browsing their website for now!http://www.freshmansgroupcom.wixsite.com
In reality, they day was pretty intense and I was there all day and so I was super grateful that Mr me-myself-and-eye decided to take a day off and take me down.
The actual ins and outs of the day are pretty boring, the aspects that stood out for me are:
- I brought the average age down in the waiting room by approximately 30 years.
- Taking a book to read was (in hindsight) an error as I was pretty much blind from 0920 until i went home (lesson learnt!)
- Trying to crack some jokes with the very serious Dr is like trying to make a rock cry….
- Just because a Dr wears ‘jazzy socks’ does not mean that they have a ‘jazzy’ sense of humour.
- Who knew that when you have anaesthetic gel in your eye, you can have an ultrasound probe put on your actual eyeball without it hurting….the strangest feeling in the world…
- The NHS staff, and the bloody wonderful team at Sheffield Hallam Ocular department are out of this world. – http://www.sheffieldocularoncology.org.uk
So in a nutshell I was officially diagnosed with a Ciliary Body Melanoma in my left eye. The tumour is pretty big and it is about to grow through the white of my eye (blugh) and i have ‘tobacco dust’ floating around also…. Apparently this has nothing to do with smoking but some kind of strange Dr speak for parts of the tumour floating around my eye…. which is a nice thought… The recommended treatment for this *cancer* is total removal of the eye and a prosthetic put in it’s place with a specialist lens put in which eventually matches my other eye.
So many questions, so many tears, so much snot…..Fortunately after having my liver, kidneys, gall bladder scanned, it hadn’t spread anywhere else so in the grand scheme of things, losing my eye is nothing compared to what some people have to go through.
The first couple of questions that came into my head when I had had the official news were:
- When can i run again? – bloody runners, one track mind
- What happens if i’m sick, will my eye fly out?
- Will i end up being like a lizard with one eye looking one way and the other one going the other way?
Rhona (my cancer nurse) is unbelievably wonderful and answered my questions without even batting an eyelid (‘scuse the pun) and gently asked if I had any slightly more serious questions, which obviously I didn’t at that point and left them for Mr me-myself-and-eye to ask.
So here we are, I am booked in for eye extraction (i think that makes me sound bionic) on the 20th March…. it’s all a bit surreal to be honest… I am having major lows combined with ‘i’m fine, i’m fine’ which is quite frankly exhausting. I have a last ditched attempt at a sub 20 5km for a while on Thursday and i am overwhelmed by the reaction of my friends, family and community who have quite frankly been awesome and I am forever indebted to all of them.
Over and out for now peeps!
Hx
Me, myself and eye 