Cliff Buchler (email)
Now I can appreciate how an old maid feels when she’s left on the shelf. Out of the loop. Lonely. Forgotten. That’s how it’s been with me this last year. Every Tom, Dick and Mary in my circle has one, some even two.
Then my luck changes. It happens suddenly while undergoing my yearly eye test. With a torch that would light up Roodepoort Rugby Club stadium blinding my eyeballs, the optician breaks the news. First the good: I’m not a diabetic. Then the bad, to her that is, I have cataracts. In each eye.
She’s shocked when I shout, “Yippee! At last! Now I can look Tom, Dick and Mary in the eye, and say I’m one of you now!”
Furthermore, I’m booked in at the same eye clinic where their cataracts were gouged.
That’s where the good news is tempered a tad. I enter a white-walled ward with six white easy chairs lined up, facing a large plasma television screen. Five of them already occupied with patients wearing blue shower caps, blue plastic overshoes, and blue back-to-front nighties.
A buxom nurse pushes me into the vacant chair, plonks a shower cap on my head, removes my shoes, replacing them with the plastic ones, yanks me up and dons the nighty, pushes me down, grabs an arm over which she velcros a blood pressure pad. She reads the result, “Hmm. Not bad for a man of your age.”
Anaesthetist named Gerda enters. Grabs an arm, inserts a needle and says relax. Relax? I go numb. The plasma screen comes into focus and all I see is acoffin being carried to an open grave. A portent?
Another nurse approaches, pulls me up and guides me to the theatre, with me the only actor on stage. I’m lowered onto a bed with a monstrous machine with a Zeiss logo hovering over me.
Gerda is back and inserts a drip and connects me to a heart monitor. A theatre sister places a hood over my head, reminiscent of those used by the Klu Klux Clan, except this one has only one eye hole. For my eye that needs surgery.
What happens then is vague (with one eye you can’t see much) but when I’m taken back to the ward everything looks brighter and the nurses prettier.
And I’m now part of the scene.
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