School's out

That is it for another year! Patrick had his prizegiving today, held during continuous rain. It was a jolly affair with the DP Ms Quinn keeping up an amusing commentary about proceedings. The kids whooped their mates when they won prizes. Paddy won a special teacher award for his work. He seems to have had a good year.

So now we have 6 weeks of lie-ins and messing about. Margaret and Ian fly in from Oz tomorrow and will be with us on Saturday. They have broken the drought which is good for us and hopefully not too disastrous for them. It had been pretty dry for about 2 months and on inspecting our rainwater tank, I found that we were down to the last 1/3. We had got in touch with the water carrier to arrange delivery of 10,000 litres to keep us going when the forecast changed. It started rainingg at about 4am this morning, and it did not stop for about 8 hours. I reckon we got about 30-40mm of rain. Our roof has a catchment area of about 400 square metres which equates to about 4,000 litres of water by my reckoning.

I have not been very good with updates recently so there is lots of stuff that has gone unreported.

One major for me has been the saga of my eye. Back in September I was scything down a very tall gorse plant. It whipped back and a spike got behind my glasses and poked me in the right eye. I thought at the time "I should not have done that!", like you do. I experienced some blurred vision for a few hours and it gradually went back to normal. Some 5 weeks later after having had no further ill effects, my sight started going blurry again. It looked like the lens of my glasses needed cleaning. It quickly became very painful and inflamed and a visit to the doctors and then casualty was needed. For quite a long time, I thought that it was the symptom of some horrific degenerative disease. The internet was full of possibilities and I was pretty worried. Numerous visits to the opthalmologist and about a gallon of eye-drops later, he decided that he could see a site of damage in the lens that suggested that the gorse had caused all the damage. A cataract op (lens removal and replacement) was required. The inflammation had to be brought under control first. That did not happen and my eye ended up with a pool of pus in it. I thought you might enjoy a picture so it is shown in the post below.

When Mr Watt saw how bad it had gotten he told me that he would remove the lens anyway and then continue to treat the infection. That is the situation now. I am on eye drops containing aantibiotic, another that has steroids to keep the inflammation down and a third to keep the pupil open. I will go back in January to see if it is clear enough to havve a new lens inserted. In the mean-time I have verry blurry vision in my right eye, have problems with depth perception and bright lights. I have to wear dark glasses or an eye patch hen I am out. This causes witty people to ask me where I left the parrot etc. Hahaha. And I am not supposed to go swimming ... in the hot Northland summer, when I had decided to really get into snorkelling!

On the other hand ... it is pretty amazing that I am not permanently blind in one eye. My disability should be temporary and if all goes as expected,by this time next year, I will probably take my full vision asmuch for granted as I have done for the last 43 years of my life. Not for the first time, I am really grateful that I have access to very, very good (and free) health care. That along with my vision should not just be taken for granted.