Beware the one legged Ophthalmologist!

IXL rang very upset. She was home alone and suffering ‘flashes of lightning’ in one eye. Her only computer is at ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ where she makes delciious goodies for the Noosa Farmers Market, so she asked me to look it up on the net. Diagnosis? Detached retina associated with floaters. (Bits of debris and/or blood in the eye). Natural degeneration associated with being over fifty. Nothing life threatening, but in need of treatment, usually laser tacking of the retina back into place. Sounds easy. But it reminds me of a Monty Python scrap where the media person describes playing the flute. ‘You just blow in one end and move your fingers up and down the outside. Next week, I’ll tell you how to do brain surgery.’

Yes, she had a floater ‘shaped like a fish hook’ so yesterday I buzzed over to her place on my Hyosung (99CC, $2,500 brand new on the road) and drove her to the docs where Tom, her GP, arranged for her to be seen by an ophthalmologist immediately. Verdict? ‘No surgery required yet and maybe it will settle down. Come back in two weeks.’

That verdict took about an hour to arrive. Meantime, I caught up with the latest gos on Hollywood goings on, who is pissed off with whom for sleeping with their best friend and who is in Africa gathering babies to adopt. Agents must bust a gut keeping their faces in No Idea and its imitators.

In about ten minutes I had renewed my acquaintance with Pammy’s implants and was left staring at the opposite wall where the word OPHTHALMOLOGIST had been Araldited to the wall in bas relief. At twelve years old I studied Latin for a whole year. It failed to drag my attention from mucking about in boats, but it did provide a tool for analysing word structure so I put it to work.

Op = getting along on one leg.
H (silent) as in hat. ‘I left me ‘at at ‘er place.’
Thal = Biblical direction meaning DO IT, as in Thou thal not covert thy neighbour’s wife. If you see her uncovered, take a look but leave the blanket off.
Mol = Lady of easy virtue, which seems to indicate she finds it easy to be virtuous but in fact she doesn’t.
O = shortened version of ‘of’, of Celtic origin, as in John O’Groats, funny name for a village closest to Dunnet Head, most northerly tip of Scotland where you can get a ferry to Orkney or catch a cold.
Gist = the meaning of stuff. As in ‘getting the gist’ of something.

So, I went in and dragged her out. Who wants your favourite grandma being examined by some one legged bloke who’s knows a lot about prostitutes!