Scarlet Lipstick

I stand at the window with a lump in my throat and watch a great tit dip it's glorious black and white head into the feeder. Bird feeders which no longer blend like a mist into the background of bushes. Instead they now hang clear and proud in their green and silver suits.

A female blackbird bobs along the stone path below - a path that until Wednesday looked like a sea of sand to my cataract misted eyes - and I gaze in wonder as it pecks up a stray seed with its yellow beak... 

As I turn my head I spot a red breasted robin, its chest is as bright as scarlet lipstick. She lands on a branch of our candy floss pink, cherry blossom tree. I stare as she dives at the feeder to snatch a seed to feed her fluffy baby waiting below. 

My feasting eyes stray to our display of tulips which gently sway in the breeze. Mr H planted bag after bag of bulbs last autumn for us to enjoy. The startling pink stand behind the purest red and white I have ever seen.

Tall cups of colourful petals look up towards the grey sky which, to my new eye, is as bright as the Caribbean sun.

Now each morning when I wake my face splits into a huge smile as I watch the white brightness of daylight enter the room. The daylight that has been filtered by my cataracts for so long. 

But the temptation to carry on flirty winking is hard to beat. I have to cover each eye every day to check that my new cataract free eyesight is at least as good as the day before. This cover, check, mantra means that I am reminded of the grey world within which my left eye still lives.

When I read, the words are clearer, and at long last I can read on a deckchair in the garden; the words are no longer clouded from view as soon as my eyes see daylight.  

But reading glasses will be by my side for the rest of my life. My miraculous artificial acrylic lens only gives me distance vision. The lens can't adjust like my own lens used to before I turned 45 when reading glasses became permanently perched on my head.

After a week of rest, my energy bank is topped up and with sunglasses on I test my eyes on a pavement walk. I stride with more confidence as cracks and dips no longer hide from my trippy up view.  

Four times a day I drip drops into my eye which I protect with a patch at night. My calls to Mr H for help are more frequent as I drop things I cannot pick up or have to stop myself from reaching into low drawers. Bending to the ground is forbidden for a while. With military precision I follow the regime for fear that this gift may be lost if I do anything else.

And for now, I tingle with the joy of my new bright world. 

Patch

I can't see it I say as Mr H repeats: it's on the left near the bottom

No I still can't see anything I moan - all I can see is black.

Let me look again it's probably moved... no it's still there he says with furrowed brows as he adjusts our birdwatching scope at a Dorset bird reserve in the summer of 2016...you can even see the snipe's stripes . try using your other eye...

Back home I booked an opticians appointment and after testing then retesting my eyes and the promise of a warning letter to my GP, I left the shop with a pounding heart. 

The following couple of weeks I squinted in and out of hospital doors to attend appointment after appointment and was soon lying flat in the noisy hoop of an MRI. With my brain tumour history; blurred vision could not be assumed to be just that; blurred and cloudy vision.

But at the eye hospital, my pupils were dilated with dripping drops and peering inside them the eye hospital consultant said; you've got rapidly progressing posterior capsular cataracts. This type of cataract is usually caused by steroids...I had steroids during my brain tumour and breast cancer treatments I say with a shoulder shrug and wry smile - no one warned me I mutter...

I stumble through the weeks and months with my unfocused camera lens vision. People give me puzzled looks as I develop a habit of flirty winking! It's hard to resist a constant check to see which eye is worse, which one is more out of focus... it's like looking through a peasouper fog! 

I grumble to Mr H that I can't see the pavement cracks and potholes swim in and out of focus, adding layers of risk to my wobbly walking. I grumble that I can't read books anymore as the words hide behind cloud covered pages. I grumble when, in the dark,  I crash into our gates as I walk down the drive and at the dazzling super moon of light around every headlight...

This year large print letters plopped onto my mat and after two further trips through hospital doors, my name is, at last, added to the cataract surgery waiting list. Two weeks and a phone call later, I have a date for the following Wednesday, and it's not with Mr H, wink wink! 

I have to tape an eye patch over my eye at night for two weeks after the surgery I read out loud to Mr H. Will you still love me as I get more and more like long John silver? He laughs; of course it's the person not the patch that I love!

Back home last night in time for fish and chips

You don't realise how important your vision is until it starts to fail

So relish the colours of summer flowers

delight in the blueness of the sky

take pleasure in swishing grass swaying

and be thankful for the gift of sight