GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 7 - January 2009

| GPWA Times 65 Affiliate Manager Interview Series making me blind. Dodgy enough, but I got taken to a specialist eye hospital in Lon- don and after two days they operated. Done under a local (!) the process involved clamping my eye open and making three incisions into the eyeball, one for a drain, one for a camera and one for a “laser.” They suck out all the jelly in the eye, laser the retina back onto the back of the eye, and then inflate it with air and stitch it up. I was awake for all five hours of it. Having a series of injections in your eye- ball is possibly the most painful thing I have endured, and the smell of the laser burning into your head is interesting to say the least.... Anyway, five hours later, my eye is rein- flated and I have nine stitches in the eye- ball. I then had to lie on my side for 20 out of 24 hours a day for 10 days (!), as your body produces tears which fill the eye and replace the air, and in time replace the jelly they sucked out so you can see again. If you move about then you run the risk of washing out the stitches and your eye collapses. Also football related – although I was watching this time, not playing – was the time I had been to watch England vs. Greece a few years ago – the one where Beckham scored in the last minute and England got into the Euro Champion- ships. When we got to Earls Court tube station, I was on the phone to a friend and picked up another friend’s bag, threw it over my shoulder, and....just went backwards. I remember throwing my phone towards the platform, and then waking up in a spe- cial room at the station with a bandage on my head and the ambulance people say- ing that there was no way I should have been alive. Apparently when I landed on the track my body was face down and my face was turned 180 degrees, facing up at the platform with my eyes open. I was bleeding from the back of my head. People were apparently screaming and parents were shielding their children’s eyes (it was like, half 5 in the evening).The ambulance people couldn’t work out how I hadn’t been electrocuted or broken my neck in the fall. The only reason I wasn’t hit by a train is that apparently four Australians saw what happened and then jumped down and lifted me out before the next train stopped, which at Earls Court is every few minutes. Apart from the cut on my head, concus- sion, and a bruise/burny type thing down my back I was totally unharmed. I never met the Australians.