I once upon a time got into trouble saying this, but

There I was at work, beavering away at one of the few jobs I've had with strict time requirements. I had to deal with many faxes in a day, and one of the many rules was that I had to deal with a fax time stamped 4:59, but didn't have to deal with one stamped 5:00. (For the youths reading this blog, a fax machine is technology invented in the 20's (the 1920's!) that sort of married a copier and a telephone.)

The first I knew of anything going wrong was a frantic message from Linda on my office phone about lunchtime. "Hi Love, they want to operate on me today, I'll call when I know more." (This was after cell phones, sort of, but well before ordinary people carried them around.) Considering all I knew she had on the go was a routine eye check, you can understand I was more than a little distracted that afternoon.

My colleagues were willing to help out and let me escape, but the main problem was that I had no idea where to go. Much later that afternoon Linda left another message on the phone (the fax machine was in another part of the office, and I spent lots of time walking back and forth) saying she'd be home and they weren't going to operate after all, and she'd tell me the whole story.

To make a long story short, she was fortunate in that her eye doctor saw something serious, and tried to get her in for immediate surgery, but there were complications we need not get into here and now. She was operated on a few days later, and it all went well for that sort of thing. The squeamish of you can skip the next paragraph in brackets.

(
Start skip procedure
They essentially had to take her eyeball apart to sew up a rip in the retina, and she has a grey spot in the middle of the vision of her left eye. Did you know the body manufactures the fluid in your eyeball as required? It took about a week for it to fill up again, meanwhile it sloshed around. She had to be careful.
End skip procedure
)

You're with me again? Good. She made a full recovery after a quiet week. I chanced to be writing a letter to my Granny and mentioned that Linda was out of the hospital and doing fine. Now, it will be no surprise to you that a woman old enough to be my granny (and yet younger than you might think) is old school, and addressed letters to us as "Mr and Mrs Keith Cartmell" in spite of Linda having kept her own name for perfectly good reasons we need not go into here and now. We corresponded irregularly, her mostly telling me about people I didn't know, me keeping her up to date on the antics of her favourite grandson.

Within a week, (A WEEK!!!) a special delivery letter arrived addressed to "Ms. Linda Mulligan" from my Granny. I got to read it eventually. The entire long letter was a full on rant excoriating me in no uncertain terms. She had a fine command of the language and expressed herself fully about my many inadequacies. She demanded to know ALL the details that I had left out, that any woman would plainly know were needed. (I was merely going to send a perfunctory apology, and add that it was an eye operation. I mean, really, how much detail can there be?)

So here we are. Linda is out of the (ex)hospital and doing fine. Here is proof. Yes the lighting sucks.

In the meantime, I went for a stroll along the river. To make up for any operating room icky I've given you, here's some cute little goslings. Pity I didn't a longer lens with me, but I didn't want to get closer and get mama all riled up.

Driftwood of the Day