I’m happy to say that my brother would appear to have been ‘ lucky’ in that his injury could have been so much worse. A narrow diameter cylindrical pole, with an open end, could have gouged his unprotected eye completely out, or even entered his brain.

As it is, it cut into his upper cheek and his upper eyelid, ‘merely’ compressing his eye into its’ socket with enough force to blow out the soft bone upon which the bottom of one’s eyeball sits – a so called ‘blow out fracture’

Thankfully eyeballs are pretty robust so don’t just go pop, otherwise an awful lot of us would have been blinded in childhood or minor accidents/ fights.

Hes been told that he should recover, but given he can’t open the eye yet, that can’t be a definite prognosis.

What will happen is that at first, because the eye will be slightly lower in the orbit, and looking in a different direction to the other eye, he will have double vision ( 2 images, one above the other ) treated by wearing an eye patch or specs with one lens fogged.  Hopefully it’ll get better by itself, or he may need specs with prism in them, or need surgery, or both .

The other problem with an impact injury is that ( especially in short sighted people – and he is ) the retina can detach at a later date, sometimes years later.  Also traumatic cataract is fairly likely, and although that can be removed it increases the risk of retinal detachment further.

I pray that luck is on his side again though. I think that he’ll never forget to wear his goggles again, and neither should anyone reading this ..

Tomorrow morning I visit my very ill partner, Selculk, who is now at home and bed-bound.

As he is upstairs I won’t be able to see him face to face.

As he is no longer speaking only one way conversations are possible . I hope that my buddy, Irfan, who is coming with me can hold an ipad close to him so that at least I can see him and say what I want to say.

I hope he can understand me, at least.

His devoted wife, Christy, will be there too, and I do very much want to talk to her too .

Life isn’t very fair, too often.