Patrick C. Notchtree's Blog: Patrick C Notchtree, page 3

I attended the Eye Infirmary on 2nd November 2016. As usual, I was given an eye test before going in for my injection. Of course the right eye test is inconclusive because of the old corneal damage, but the left eye, the one with dry macular degeneration, shows no further decline which is great news. Of course I live day to day on this, but if it stays on this plateau I will be happy.
Then into the operating room. The operating table had gone and in its place was a chair, rather like a dentist's chair. (I had been to the dentist that morning for a check up - what a day.) This chair fully reclined. I will never get used to having things shoved in my eye and they put the clamp on my eyelids to stop it shutting. Anaesthetic applied of course, lots of drops and antibiotic fluid.
"Look down," she said. "Sharp scratch," she said and then I could see the fluid in my eyeball. Slightly sore but it was done.
The fluid wore off much more quickly this time, within an hour vision was back to normal. Either my eye is getting used to Eylea or the dose is smaller than the initial injections. But the eye remained sore, feeling like you've got dust in the eye, for quite a while.
Back again on 28 December. Merry Christmas and Happy New year!

August 2016

I decided to go to an optician (Specsavers, actually) to if anything could be done to sharpen up my vision. I was seen by an excellent lady who understood my position perfectly. She discussed at length my needs and tested me thoroughly. I ended up with a new pair of varifocals which did improve matters. (I've had varifocals for many years so I did not need to adjust that way). I can now drive with much more confidence. She also gave me a pair of reading glasses, with the same prescription as the bottom of the varifocals. These make reading very comfortable, and somehow, all the double vision has gone with both pairs! I use the reading glasses for the computer at a distance of about 30cm from the screen, and everything is sharp again. I've turned off the magnifier bar.

I have been taking Visionace for some time which has 4mg of lutein, one a day. But I've dropped that now in favour MacuLEH, a formulation developed by the London Eye Hospital (@EyeExpertUK) based on the results of a study called AREDS2. This has 10mg of lutein per tablet, and I'm taking three a day. Quite a jump! Let's hope it staves off the evil day.

According to the consultant at the Eye Hospital, things are stable at the moment, and my Eylea injections in the right eye are now to be every two months. The next is on 1st September, when one again for a few hours I will have my own private lava lamp!

September 2016

On Thursday I went along to the eye hospital with my dear wife for another injection. I suppose I should be used to it by now but that doesn't seem to be the case, I was still nervous. I was surprised that there was no retinal photography this time, and they didn't seem interested in my left eye, the seeing one that has the dry macular degeneration. When I did the sight test before going into the operating theatre, the person wasn't even going to test my left eye, but I insisted, because I want a standardised, empirical measurement of how the left eye is seeing. Rather important for driving! As it turns out, the left eye is still well above the driving level. The test for the right eye of course was pathetic because of the corneal scarring and really not much use in assessing how the retina is doing.

The into the theatre for the injection. Iodine wipe of my face then a mask over the face, covering all except the right eye. Lots and lots of drops, anaesthetic and antibiotic, and then they put the spring in to keep my eye wide open, I don't feel that, but I know it's there and I actually saw it this time as it was put in. Very disconcerting. A nurse comes and holds my clenched hands on my waist. More drops and then the nurse practitioner says "Look down and to the left - sharp scratch." Although the outside of the eye is numb, the inside isn't and there is a sharpness as the fluid comes in, which of course I see. But it's quick and the needle is gone. Then it's wipe away the tears (literally) and get up, viewing the world with the lava lamp effect. It's no good shutting my right eye to blank it out because it's inside my eye! But I can see well enough anyway with the left. Make an appointment for the next one on October 31st.

I am driven home and try to relax. My eye is sore, as though there is grit in it, all evening, and in the end I went to bed early. The next day it was still sore but the fluid has dispersed and by Saturday, vision was quite normal again (for me, anyway) and the right eye was only a bit tender.

If you want to help, please buy the book!

Some will have noticed I tweet about macular disease. Some bad news. My left eye (the one I use) got suddenly worse mid June(2016) to the point where things are doubled or blurred. Karen took me to the eye hospital A&E on a Monday morning where they did tests. The retinal scans showed that the dry AMD has spread in my left eye. This means my vision is no longer good enough to drive. I'm not making any decisions in a rush but I'm not driving, for the time being anyway.

Some small good news is that the retina with wet AMD in the right eye is much improved after two injections, but of course I can't see with that one anyway because of the corneal damage from the accident in 1977. But it could open the way for a corneal transplant at some point in the future. Whether that would give me enough vision in my right eye drive again is far from certain though. I have an appointment for a third injection in the right eye in July, but it could be the consultant, after receiving the report from A&E, will call me in before that to look at the left eye. But as no treatment is available for dry AMD, there may be no point.

I am using a magnifying glass to look at the screen to check what I am typing. The computer is quite difficult to use so I will have to start looking into the accessibility options in Windows. I will try to continue to post. If you want to help, please buy the book!

This short book is an honest and candid account of a young man’s trials growing up in America and the realisation that he was ‘different’, from a somewhat dysfunctional family background, facing up to and coming to terms with his sexual identity. In many ways I could identify with his experiences as they mirrored my own in some ways.
Non US readers might find one or two of his references obtuse, and I found his occasional riddles about locations a little distracting, but American readers would no doubt take these in their stride.
It is written from the heart, and it seems no matter how much he chases the ‘American dream’, it eludes him. There is joy, beauty, love, heartbreak and discrimination in almost equal measure. It has a very colloquial style, almost as though he is there chatting to you. There are a few grammatical and typographical errors which could have been corrected with better proof reading as others have pointed out and which cost it a star, but that should not prevent his story being told. He is still a young man, (or ‘biological male’ as he says) and I hope he finds his dream.

Freedom from My Self: Moving beyond the voice in my head
Craig Mabie came across my book (The Clouds Still Hang) online and made contact, so I downloaded his book. I was struck, indeed amazed, by the similarities of the trials of our childhoods, although years and miles apart. So much in common in those formative years. We have both known despair, trauma and persecution, we both, in our own ways, fought back to rise above these and find our true selves.
Inevitably as we both reached adulthood, the similarities diverged, living as we do in different times and places, but his account of his struggles is both inspiring and informative. We can all learn from his new outlook and gather the precious moments from each day.
A recommended read.

Prison suicide rates are rising sharply, although former UK Justice Secretary Chris Grayling dismissed this appalling waste of life as a mere ‘blip’. This strikes a chord with me, both as someone who twice attempted suicide in my youth, and also because I have a dear friend, James, currently locked up. He suffered horrendous sexual abuse as a boy, which has blighted his life. He committed a number of internet offences and has now ended up inside. In the nine years I have known him I have stopped him from going off a bridge twice, both times involving the police, and I also took the serrated knife from his hand and took him to hospital to have a deep wound on his arm stitched. The scars on his left arm mark the history of his trauma, pain and stress. Those who have read my book, “The Clouds Still Hang” will understand more about the suffering James has endured.
I do not condone his offences which were all internet based (he would never hurt anybody, especially after what he went through) but I do understand what drives him. His boyhood was stolen at at some level he wants to go back and do it again, but of course he can't.
Since being inside, he has twice made suicide attempts; once he found a bottle of pills on the landing beside a waste bin, and took the lot. He was ill but survived. He made a crude attempt at hanging but like me many years earlier, found it far too painful to bear.
It is my nightmare that the phone will ring from the prison (I am down as his next of kin) with the worst news.
The second of his bridge attempts was in 2009 after his abuser, against whom he had at last summoned the courage to make a 31 page statement, was acquitted at Crown Court as the abuser’s defence attacked my friend for his criminal record, ignoring the fact that the abuser was at the root of this. James was badly let down by the police who mishandled the case, and by the criminal justice system.
When he misused the internet again,(there was never a question of hoarding or trading images of teenage lads, and the total was about 30 pictures) he was sentenced to prison for a long time. On appeal against sentence, the terms of his SOPO were reduced but the length of sentence was not.
Before this James had started a treatment course, but is unable to do this in prison because of his high suicide risk. So in other words, prison is doing him no good at all and is just taking a few years out of his life for no gain, a complete waste of his time and public money. He lost his home and his family, the press hammered him and if he makes it to release, will start from an even lower base than when he went in.
Meantime, the abuser, who so damaged this young life, walks free and anonymous. It’s enough to drive anybody over the edge, not just someone so damaged. Justice?

(Adapted from a blog post prevously published at http://www.no-offence.org)

This book, Death in Venice, California in some way parallels Thomas Mann’s original, but in other ways is startling different. The obvious difference is the setting, but many of the other themes have been successfully transposed. Jameson is protagonist who seeks to ‘find himself’ in Venice CA and is drawn into the strange world there, especially to a young man who fascinates him and who starts to wield more and more influence over him, rather than admire from afar . He is taken on a roller coaster ride and we are inexorably taken with him. This book has a strange fascination of its own, and even though one is familiar with Mann’s story, the differences are such that one is impelled towards the end; will it be different, if so how? Vinton Rafe McCabe has done a good job of retelling this tale, is there no fool like an old fool?

The UK's Rehabilitation of Offenders Act creates spent offences allowing reformed offenders to rebuild their lives, but is increasingly outdated by virtue of the storage and easy accessibility of archived data on-line. I have no doubt the same applies in other countries with similar provisions. Once an offender's case is on-line in the media, it remains there and is accessible via search engines such as Google.

This hinders rehabilitation and undermines the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act because although a person's conviction may be spent and therefore normally not required to be declared (some categories of employment exempt), many employers apparently Google the names of applicants anyway. On finding the applicant's conviction, they are then accused of hiding their past and are denied employment. Or more usually, are not even considered for interview.

I know the EU was looking at a 'right to be forgotten' but this seems to have died a death or got so bogged down that rigour mortis has set in.

My understanding is that any such EU legislation would exempt newspapers and certain other archives on the grounds of a free press.

I fear that the exceptions will render any such right useless. It is internet archived press reports that pose the greatest problem. We had a free press before we had the internet and nobody is suggesting that hard copies held on file at newspaper archives should be shredded. But the ease of access by all and sundry means that past mistakes can now haunt someone for the rest of their lives.

My suggestion would be that individuals concerned should be able to require the removal of online copies once their conviction is spent in their jurisdiction. So in the UK, this would mean that once a conviction is spent under our Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, that person would be able to contact any archive where the article is held informing them that the conviction is spent and that the online record should be removed.

In the case of Mario Costeja González, Google (and other search engines) were forced to remove certain links from search results. Whilst this decision is qualified, for example Google would not have to remove information if there is a general interest to public in keeping the link online or if it refers to a person who is in public life, it is difficult to assess for certain on what grounds Google would delete information because the court rather left it up to them to make the final decision about whether the applicants justifications for removing their link are warranted.

Google now have a page where people can apply to have links removed but where criminal convictions are concerned, they don’t. Appeal to the UK’s Information Commissioner is the next step, but again, a criminal conviction, even if the offence was decades ago, and the conviction spent under the ROA, the ICO deems it in the public interest that the search links should stay.

Once convictions are spent, the items should be also removed from the internet archives of the original publisher. As I said, hard copies would remain available in their physical archives. Such removal would prevent re-indexing later by the same or other search engines. Often these articles are now directly linked to Facebook pages particularly those campaigning against certain crimes, so removal from search engines alone would not create the privacy enabling rehabilitation. A criminal record can now turn into a form of life sentence.

We need a fundamental look at this because the act was passed in 1974, and the information age has moved on so much by now that despite recent amendments, it is antiquated and irrelevant as far as the availability of past convictions is concerned.

Stick Your Neck Out by John Baharie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Mr Baharie has written a fast paced novel with many twists and turns. Set in a near future Britain, with many very topical threads, it follows the adventures of an ordinary man who acts in an extraordinary manner when he sees a family in distress.
This leads him on a crazy path of adventures, taking on the organs of state and pursued by a fanatical and unbalanced servant of that oppressive state.
It's a read that keeps you going right to the very end.



View all my reviews

Not having internet access for several days really brings home how much one has come to rely on it. Quite apart from my work for Parliament, there’s online banking so I can’t move money about which I’m always doing to keep the books balanced, I can’t pay bills, accessing the publishing sites about the book The Clouds Still Hang, online shopping which I do for “Robert” and “Ken” at Tesco, never mind things I want from the likes of Amazon, updating my TV guide, Facebook, Twitter which I use for the book, never mind other social networking contact sites. Then there’s Facetime which we use to speak to “Harriet”, getting updates for software and antivirus programs, I know I’m getting important emails but I was limited to my phone for dealing with them which often can’t be done because of attachments I need to send etc (and anyway I can’t even get 3G in the house); the list goes on. It’s surprising how often I think I’ll just do something. Like googling for something while watching TV for instance, and then realise I can’t because whatever it is needs online access. I could sometimes get next door’s wifi on my phone but it’s weak. A couple of times I managed to connect the computer via the phone and next door but so S L O W.
Engineers and helplines were helpless. But I described the symptoms to “James” who then promptly diagnosed the fault and here I am, back on line. Can you see why I love “James”?
And yet 25 years ago I seem to remember managing quite well before the internet came into general use.