Dear Reader
It’s been a while hasn’t it? And, as one says in a tiresome amount of emails, I hope this finds you well.
I know I said that I was retiring the Blog but I’ve decided to start posting again - lucky you!
At the end of this year I’ll be turning fifty. Yes, I’m sorry to disillusion you, as you thought that I was thirty seven, but it’s all too true. 50 - a big round number. And, like many landmark ages, it’s making me take stock. I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough about something recently and I thought I’d share the love.
It seems appropriate to talk about this because at the age of fifty, many women are going to be preoccupied with their appearance. This might seem like an irrelevant detour, as it’s not about ageing or wrinkles, but it’s something that it’s taken me a whole lifetime to come to terms with.
I’ve found this enormously difficult to talk about and I didn’t think I’d ever write about it but actually, like ripping off a plaster, it’s probably best to get it out into the air. When you find out what it is, you’ll probably think - eh - is that all?
I was born with a squint, otherwise known as a lazy eye. It was operated on when I was a baby, I’m not sure exactly how old I was. The operation hadn’t completely fixed things and I used to have to go to a clinic with a kind lady with short grey hair, who made me do slightly odd things like ‘put the lion in the cage’, while looking into a machine. I also had to read pages of terribly boring text, with a patch over one eye. Even if I hadn’t attended this clinic, I would have known that I still had the squint as the kind children at school were more than happy to alert me to it. One of the things I’d been told was that there were no baby pictures of me, because of the squint. The person saying this had good intentions but the message I received (and remember that all communication is about decoding and applying our own meaning to things) was that I was ugly and deeply flawed. I grew to dread seeing pictures of myself.
Now, in the great scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal. I wasn’t beaten, starved or locked in a basement, and I didn’t have a disability. But in terms of my psyche, it had a great effect. I would fantasise about losing weight and somehow, I didn’t know how, having the squint fixed. I was very taken with the Ugly Duckling/Return to Eden fantasy, where all the woman had to do was get mauled by a crocodile, after her husband had tried to kill her, then have transformative plastic surgery and reinvent herself as a model. Seemed reasonable enough.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085079/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Often, when I went for an eye test, the optician would point out the squint, as if they’d made a rare discovery and I hadn’t noticed it myself! It wasn’t until I had kids that I realised that there might be something I could do about it. A midwife who visited after I had my second child, mentioned that they used Botox nowadays, to correct squints. She brought this up because I told her that I was paranoid about passing the affliction on to my children. Long story short, the doctor referred me to the eye unit at the hospital. They did try the botox thing (very unpleasant) but it wasn't effective, so they decided to operate instead. At the age of forty I had the operation to correct the squint. The surgeon said he was very happy with how it had went but that the ‘brain was very stubborn’, which I took to mean that my stubborn, ornery brain would decide to sabotage me and the squint would return. (between the lazy eye and the stubborn brain I was on a bit of a losing streak) I also lost a lot of weight. So my childhood fantasy had come true - was I happy? Kind of but I also started to focus on the lines on my forehead.
A kind of happy ending, right? Well, last year I went to the doctor about some digestive problems I was suffering from. A G.P I’d never seen before said to me; “I know this is nothing to do with it (the digestive issues) but is that a new squint? Because if it is, that can be a sign of a brain tumour.”
I was shocked and dismayed. All sorts of thoughts shot around - just how bad did the squint look? I could tell myself, from photos and the mirror, that my stubborn brain had chosen to reinstate it but didn't think it was wildly pronounced. But also, although I knew that it wasn’t a new squint, of course I knew that, what if I did have a fucking brain tumour!
I told the optician at my most recent eye test about this interaction with the G.P. She tutted and said that there would be other signs of a brain tumour, before the squint became a signifier. She referred me back to the hospital.
I waited several months for the appointment and recently spent a few hours at the Royal Eye Unit, at my local hospital. I saw two lovely women - one of whom took extensive measurements and gave me a test to see whether I could see things in 3D. The second person I saw was the consultant. They both told me that the squint didn’t measure that badly and certainly not enough to justify further surgery - which might make the situation worse. Because I don’t have double vision and can (sort of, sometimes) see things in 3D, it’s not really a problem. The consultant then conducted a few strange tests, including pushing against her hand with my shoulder and said; “There are no signs of a brain tumour.”
I could have kissed her.
I came away from the hospital feeling massively alleviated. I was worried about wasting precious NHS resources but they didn’t treat me like a time waster.
The thing is, my eyes will never look perfect (and I’ll probably feel happier talking to people when I’m wearing sunglasses) and the squint will never be totally fixed but that’s O.K. As someone who has tried to embrace body positivity I should have come to this conclusion a lot sooner but it was deeply ingrained. It’s O.K not to look perfect. My eyes are not perfectly aligned, my feet are slightly different sizes and one of my breasts is bigger than the other! So it goes.
Thanks for reading, Babe! x
