When my younger daughter was three months old, I woke up one morning to notice my sight in my right eye had become blurry. If I shut my left eye and relied on the right one, I couldn’t see where the curtains began or ended, couldn’t tell what that fuzzy white thing on the mantelpiece was. After I got up and pulled on my outsize maternity trousers, the picture of a delicate French coffee cup on the kitchen wall had become a blurry purple mess that refused to come into focus. Blinking and rubbing my eyes didn’t help. Panic rose in my chest, paralysing me. I tried to focus on my breathing, to stop spiralling into terror. Breathing in for five, breathing out for four. . . Feeling a little calmer, I decided to go the local doctor’s surgery in Stockbridge, I would push my little daughter in her pram.
Vision loss
After double-locking the door, I dropped my keys, which clattered noisily down onto the stone stairwell, my grip too weak to keep hold of them. I was feeling even clumsier than normal. Never mind. The doctor would explain it all, or so I stupidly thought. The vision loss was probably connected to the exhaustion of caring for my beautiful daughter, I tried to tell myself. I’d just overdone it. We’d started slowly winding down breastfeeding, maybe it was linked with that?
It wasn’t difficult to get an appointment at the doctor; anyone with a new baby got bumped to the head of the queue. It wasn’t like in 2026, when you have the 8am battle in which you ring the surgery more than 100 times only to find the slots have all gone.
What’s wrong with me?
Stepping out extra carefully, aware I couldn’t see too well, I wheeled my daughter past terraces of beautiful Georgian houses and lines of mews cottages in cobbled lanes that were once stables. I was too upset to notice the beauty of the area, too frightened to sing Wheels on the Bus to my daughter like I might normally have done. What was wrong with my eye? Would the sight come back?
Eventually, we saw the doctor. He didn’t waste time. After looking at my eye with various optical instruments, he put them down and turned to me. Looking grim, he announced:
“I’m sending you to the Eye Pavillion. I don’t have the equipment here to see far enough into your eye to see what’s happening .” He leant forward and scribbled something on a pad. When he wished me good luck, in a dour, serious way, I knew things were looking bad.
Frightening
Edinburgh’s Eye Pavillion doesn’t scare people in the city as much as the Western, the place that looks after cancer patients and strikes a chill into everyone’s heart. But it’s still frightening, still a place where you’d never actually want to be hanging out. Of course, none of us had much choice in the matter.
I’ve had the worst headache of my life for the past two weeks, my head pounding with this incessant agony. The headache has thankfully stopped, but now my sight is going. I’m terrified.
I phone my husband, tearfully, from the doctor’s and explain what’s happening. He says: “This sounds serious. Stay where you are, I’ll come and find you.” He hops in a taxi and comes over to us at the GP. It’s a relief to see him when he gets here; the cavalry has arrived.
Together, we all three head over to the Eye Pavillion in a taxi to find out more about my eye.
Helen Fowler Writer 