I am not sure how much I can share with you but I have reached a really scary point in my life and I just want to fast forward it. As you know I have lost more of the vision in my good eye, have a big black floater which distorts the vision I do have and a small hole has appeared in the retina since last September. This has meant that I have been signed off unfit for work since then, I have spent the months since then going to Moorfields for check ups and readjusting to the new level of sight and dealing with this stupid floater. To start with I was very nervous going anywhere other than my home and I had some really nasty headaches, but gradually as time has worn on the head aches have grown less frequent provided I don't 'over-do' activities during the day and don't get too stressed out. The thing that has been the hardest is every day is so completely different and I just cant seem to keep up with it. Before the floater dull days used to be perfect light for me outside, now they have become dangerous as added to the dull, there is the black smudge which means parts of my vision is missing, making crossing the road dangerous and basically doing anything where there is lots of movement almost impossible. I manage by weighing up the importance of doing an activity..like going to the bank, or doing the shopping...with weather conditions, how I am feeling on the day and what the public are doing outside of my nice safe house, so, I wouldn't go shopping into town or to a big supermarket on a Friday or a weekend, I am happy to go into a small supermarket or into town provided I can leave if its too busy and have nothing specific to buy, that way the pressure for actually looking is off. I also wouldn't go for a swim during school holidays or weekends but I know that Mondays at 12 noon are usually the perfect time to go. All this learning what I cant and can do and predicting the best time to do things just doesn't come easily and has taken the best part of six months to regain some confidence in trusting myself to do things safely.
As my confidence improved so did my need to get back to work and get back to what I used to be able to do, so I spoke to my Doctor and I had a meeting at work with my boss and my representative from RNIB, and it was agreed that I could be signed back fit to work, I would have to have a risk assessment so I wouldn't be able to work with the children until after the assessment had taken place, I found this hugely frustrating, slightly demeaning as I felt that after working with these children for fourteen years I was suddenly some sort of terrible risk to them, I went home feeling crushed, however my boss agreed that I could go into school an hour before the children got in to the classrooms in the mornings to reacquaint my self with the building, my classroom, the staff and actually the whole procedure of getting myself from my warm cosy bed to work, which was exhausting in its self.
The first morning was so exciting, I caught up with everyone and disappeared as the buses brought the children in, when I got home I went back to bed and slept for three hours because I was so tired. The second day was much the same, walking around the corridors and chatting to people, this time when I got home I had the worst headache ever, so back to bed I went again. I carried on and did a couple more mornings building up the time so that I was staying until after the children had come in and then leave once I had said 'hello' to them. On the last day before the start of the Easter holidays, I stayed a bit longer, I think I was expecting school life to be much the same for me, but it wasn't. I came home in a foul mood, feeling light headed and sick, my heart beating in my throat and just wanting to cry. So, once again I took myself to bed and cried until I fell asleep. The next few days I slipped into a bit of a depression and I just couldn't figure out why and it took a very wet day and a 'talking-stick' session with the family (we have to use a talking stick in our house, which isn't really a stick, we use the remote control for the telly, otherwise everyone just screams over everyone else) to fully understand what I was feeling, it also took me those few days of sitting on the edge of my bed staring in to space to accept that I was the one who had changed and not the environment around me, work was no more challenging than its always been but I am just unable to keep up with it now. It has taken a lot of soul searching to admit to myself that I may not be safe in the role I used to do, it has also been a struggle to accept that there are no other roles that can be offered to me within my present employment.
But now I get it, I really do get it. My usual reaction to anything that I feel I am failing at is that I am clearly not trying hard enough to achieve what I want and failure has never been an option, I have always pushed myself to my limit but the limit has been moved and I didn't see it coming at all!! (excuse the pun) The problem is, my brain as soon as I got into work, was screaming at me to perform at my usual speed, to work as the 'guide' of our classroom staff and to generally get back to bossing the hell out of everyone...staff and pupils included. But I hit a brick wall so to speak, I just cant perform at a level that I am comfortable with, I cannot track the movements around me quick enough for them to register in my brain and so it was making me unsteady on my feet, I couldn't cope with the noise level at all and so I was in danger of shutting down or having a complete panic attack, I couldn't hear what people were saying because I couldn't filter out all the unimportant noises like normal people do, I now fully understand the need for a risk assessment and to start with I felt a complete useless failure.
Then someone told me that I had shown great courage to even consider going back to work, to instigate the return to work procedure but it takes an even greater courage to acknowledge the fact that I am not the person I was and I cannot do the things I once could do. I am happy doing things slowly and comfortably and I know deep down inside I wont pass any risk assessment and for the most part now I have to prepare myself for the future. I cannot feel sad or bear any grudge for what is being mapped out for me because as they say one door closes and another one opens.
Like I say, I feel in a very hard place at the moment because I feel that I should be sharing these thoughts and feelings with you as some of you may be going though the same things, but I am not sure how much I can say. If there is one piece of advise I can offer, its stay honest with yourself and go with those gut feelings, mostly they are right! Treat your employers like friends not enemies, no one knows what people are really thinking, but you have to look at the bigger picture, consider the people around you in your work-place. Because of the person I was, the willingness to step up and take the lead and the speed in which I worked makes me a risk, I will never be able to slow down or take a back seat and that will cause risk to the ladies I love to work alongside, the children who have become part of my heart and a risk to myself.
I don't want to finish on a heavy note, so let me tell you about these pebble things I discovered, well, I didn't discover them, they were some one else's idea, all around the country people are painting pebbles or rocks and leaving them in places for people to find, when you find one you either pick it up and re-hide it or take it home, paint a new one and replace the one you took home, I am thinking about getting someone to help me paint two..one with the RNIB logo on and the other with Moorfields logo on and see how far they travel, look out for my rocks everyone!
I found (well Ralph found it really, sniffing it thinking it was something delish to eat) this one on a wall xx
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