Looking Good

Pimped-up patches gave me confidence!

- Rachel Tompkins/Erin Cardiff.

My right eye started off a bit puffy. Then my vision got blurry.

Probably just an infection, I thought, looking at it in the mirror.

But, a few weeks on, it still hadn’t improved.

It was last May, and I booked an optician’s appointment.

‘I don’t wear glasses or contacts,’ I explained as the optician studied my eye.

‘I’ve been an optician for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,’ she said eventually, calling in someone else to look.

Suddenly, I felt worried.

Apparently, there were lines on the back of my right eye.

Was that unusual..?

The optician referred me for an MRI scan.

While I waited for my appointment, I went to my GP, who checked my thyroid and prescribed antibiotics.

‘It’s probably just an eye infection,’ he reassured me.

Thank God.

Sadly, though, that wasn’t the case.

Within four weeks, I’d been told the MRI had discovered what doctors first called a ‘lesion’ behind my right eye, and I’d had an operation to remove the 4mm tumour.

‘There’s a poorly bit in my eye,’ I told my children, then 3 and 4.

Five days after the surgery last July, I went back to have the stitches removed.

‘It’s cancer, I’m afraid,’ the doctor told me.

But that wasn’t even the worst of it...

‘We think the type you have is resistant to chemotherapy,’ he went on. I sat there, trying to take it all in, too shocked to cry.