THE EIGHTH EYE TEST

The doctor had an air about him. It’s a sort of ‘professional kindness’, I suppose. He understood that sometimes my vision goes wobbly but his face was giving away very little about it. My guess is that they’re all trained how to do that.

Apart from not being clever enough, incredibly squeamish, unable to make critical decisions, and very flappable under pressure, that’s probably the fifth most likely reason why I can’t be a doctor: my facial expressions are a dead giveaway.

“So we still can’t find anything wrong,” he said, smiling dispassionately. A giant picture of the inside of my eye hovered behind him on a computer screen. I’ve been here before, I thought. And indeed I have - the very same room in the eye clinic! He moved the pen around to track my eye motion. He shone a bright light in me like a transporter beam and got me to look at the floor, the ceiling, his ear, the left wall and the same old posters. I don’t particularly want to have to do this again.

“So I think we’ll just do a more refined test of your movement next time,” he said, “Then one more check up and we’ll discharge you.”

“Do you think it is migraines then?” I asked.

“Not for me to say, really,” said he, the eye doctor, to me, the eye patient who clearly has nothing wrong with his eyes. Optics eliminated, it’s something else.

I stepped out into the bright sunlight. The drops were still working, keeping my pupils fully dilated against the will of the iris. It hurt as the sun scorched into my eyes. I blinked and sat down in a high-backed chair.

I don’t quite know why they can’t discharge me now, given that they know my eyes are healthy. I suppose it’s nice to be sure (and thank heaven for the NHS!) but it still leaves me wondering how to be less stressed, less boiling, less prone to migraines making the world jump about like Mexican beans. If anyone - the neurologist, the health and well-being counsellor, or even the dispassionate eye doctor - could help me with that, then maybe I wouldn’t need to be quite so familiar with the blurry old eye clinic.