Pauline Driscoll

For a long while I blamed the lightbulbs, then the newspaper print, then my own tiredness. The truth was that my eyes were quietly clouding over, the way a bathroom mirror fogs, and I had simply stopped noticing how much I had lost until oncoming headlights bloomed into great smears and I started avoiding the evening drive home. A cataract in each eye, the optometrist said, and the only fix was surgery. I was in my sixties, frightened of anyone going near my eyes, and full of questions nobody seemed to have time to answer.

I had the first eye done, waited a few weeks, then had the second, two separate visits with two separate sets of nerves. What surprised me most was how ordinary it turned out to be: a day case, awake, twenty minutes or so, and within a day or two the colours came back so vivid they almost startled me. But getting to that calm took weeks of reading and worrying, and the plain account I wanted, what the day actually feels like and what is normal afterwards, was hard to find among the clinic sales pages.

So I gathered everything I learned into Be Healthy, written for the person I was before my first operation: anxious, googling at midnight, wanting straight answers in ordinary words. I am a patient, not a doctor, so a consultant ophthalmic surgeon goes through every article before it appears here, keeping my plain language honest about the medicine. The fear was mine; the facts are checked by someone qualified to check them.