The next morning I had a call scheduled with my bestie in Sydney. But at 9am, a nurse and a porter turned up to take me off to an MRI immediately. Thank goodness someone had actually ordered me one. So off we went. I managed to get through it fine. Clarence was of course right in there with me, smiling away. Then almost as soon as I was deposited back in my room, I was told they were sending me off to the Royal Free Hospital up in Hampstead, where they have an ophthalmology department.

They put me in a car and somehow I ended up where I was supposed to be. I must have got there around 11 am. More lights were shone in my eye, but they couldn’t see anything wrong with it, as I had obviously expected.

I was given a piece of paper with a phone number on it to hand to the transport desk when my appointment was finished. So I handed it over and was assured they were ordering my transport back to UCLH, then they wheeled me off into the foyer of the hospital, where I was left sitting in a wheelchair on my own.

One hour passed. I couldn’t see a thing, darkness surrounded me completely. I got the gist that the reception desk was somewhere in front of me. As another hour passed, I tried to get Siri to read out messages. One came in saying a blue Tesla with numberplate (XXXXXX) was on its way and to go to the meeting point. Clearly someone had got something wrong, as there was no way I could get myself anywhere without help.

Emboldened by a growing sense of fear and necessity, I got up and somehow managed to walk myself over to the reception desk, where I tried to explain to a disembodied voice in front of me, what was going on. The receptionist looked at my phone for me and told me I had apparently missed 2 cars because I hadn’t gone outside to find them. He then said it looked like a third car was getting sent, and to go back to my wheelchair and return to him in 20 minutes. Somehow I made it back to my chair, and spent the next 20 minutes asking Siri what the time was. After I launched myself back over in the direction of the desk, the receptionist called the driver from my phone and told him he had to walk in to hospital to collect me as I could not see. I stumbled back across to my chair to wait. Miraculously, this driver turned up, and I was sent off into the night attached to his arm. It took him about 10 minutes of walking aimlessly around the carpark to find his car, as he couldn‘t remember where he’d left it. But eventually I was sat in the back of some strange car, with some strange man, completely and utterly blind, and no real idea of where I was or where I was going.

To my sheer relief, when we got out of the car, we were in fact back at UCLH. The driver walked me in to the transport desk at main reception to hand me over. The transport desk, however, were not at all interested in me. While it would have taken 10 seconds for them to have called a porter to take me back to A&E, they told the driver he had to walk me there instead. He had no idea how to get to A&E, and was worried he might get a parking ticket in the meantime. I was worried I might be dead by the night’s end. But with the blind, quite literally, leading the blind, by our powers combined, with my memory and his eyes, we found our way, right around the outside of the hospital to the entrance of A&E.

As he disappeared out into the night, I think he was glad to see the back of me. And I was glad to be back where I was supposed to be. However, it took the people at A&E a good long time to work out why I was standing in front of the desk, rather than in my bed.

It was 9pm when I got back, 12 hours after I had gone off for my MRI that morning. Within 10 minutes of settling in, they whisked me off up to T13 where they’d found me a spot on the ward.

(Disclaimer: For obvious reasons, please bear with me as updates will continue to be slow.)