The longest day

Apologies if anybody has been missing my blog. I was at Moorfields Hospital from 7.30am to 7.15pm yesterday as my father had to have an emergency operation on his retina which suddenly detached from his eye. Apparently in one's old age the fluid at the back of the eye diminishes and there's a 1 in 10,000 chance that this will tear the retina. That blew my idea that he's 1 in a million. They repaired the tears, put it back in place and injected a bubble of gas into the back of his eye to keep it in place so, as long as he keeps his head down (literally - for 50 minutes every hour) for the next week there's a 90% chance that his sight will return in 6-8 weeks after the gas bubble's disappeared. I must say that the hospital staff were very jolly and efficient. The system there is rather strange, though. People come from all over the country first thing in the morning but they can only do the 4 most urgent operations per day. We were lucky to have the second slot. One poor man had spent £100 on a train fare from Coventry and had to stay the night in a hostel there (they don't have an overnight ward dedicated to retinal patients) in the hope that he may be considered bad enough to be operated on today. June 21 was indeed the longest day.