PART ONE: It Started with My Eyes
This is the first post in a short three-part series about the unexpected chain of medical appointments that eventually led to cataract surgery.
For the past eight months it seems as though a week hasn’t gone by without some sort of hospital appointment. Nothing dramatic — no flashing lights or overnight stays — just a steady stream of visits, usually to Outpatients, for one thing or another. It all started with my eyes.
To explain that properly I need to go back to the end of 2020, when I began to notice that something wasn’t quite right with my left eye. I’ve always been short-sighted, though not severely, and historically both eyes have shared much the same prescription. Gradually, however, the left eye began to feel distinctly more short-sighted than the right. It wasn’t dramatic — just slightly off.
I did the obvious thing and made an appointment to see my optometrist, fully expecting to be told that I needed new glasses. There was, however, no change in my prescription.
At the time I wrote a blog post about it (MS – Eying Up the Future, January 2021) and was eventually diagnosed with optic neuritis, one of the more common non-optional “extras” that can accompany multiple sclerosis. I accepted that this was simply another adjustment I would have to learn to live with and something that would probably get worse over time. As it turned out, I was wrong.
Fast forward to June 2025. As I approached the grand age of sixty-five I began the process of sorting out my financial affairs once my income protection insurance stopped. Although I would receive NZ Super, that wasn’t going to cut the mustard. I was going to have to deal with WINZ — or MSD as it is now known. My previous dealings with WINZ had not filled me with happy memories, a saga I had written about previously in a post titled The Unfathomable World of WINZ.
Once again I found myself drowning in WINZ forms. There were applications for the Disability Allowance, Community Services Card, Accommodation Supplement and Temporary Additional Support. At the same time I was attempting to untangle a tax issue with Inland Revenue. It was not a happy time.
Among the many things MSD required was a list of hospital visits from the previous year. My GP wasn’t easily able to generate this information, so I naively assumed that if I registered for My Health Account — the Health New Zealand portal — I would be able to access everything online.
The system, however, would not accept my driver’s licence as identification. After calling the helpline I was informed that this sometimes happens if the licence has expired. I was certain it hadn’t. I had renewed it less than two years earlier when I changed my name back to my maiden name. What I hadn’t realised was that paying for a new licence when changing your name does not reset the expiry date. My licence had expired a week earlier which meant that for the previous week I had been driving without a valid licence and, potentially, without insurance. This was not a comforting realisation.
I went to the AA to renew it, expecting the process to be straightforward. It wasn’t. When asked to read the eye chart using only my left eye, I couldn’t see it at all. Not just the smaller letters — the entire chart was simply a blur. My right eye, by contrast, had perfect vision. The staff were reassuring. Because my right eye met the legal standard, renewal was still possible provided I was able to get a DL12 form completed by an optometrist. By this stage I was becoming something of an expert in government forms. I was also advised not to drive until the matter was resolved, as technically I would not be insured.
Living in Diamond Harbour makes instructions like that more theoretical than practical. How exactly was I supposed to get home? What was I meant to do with my car? Public transport was hardly going to solve the problem either, given that it would involve walking distances I simply couldn’t manage. I drove home very carefully.
The following day my daughter took me to the optometrist. My pupils were dilated — those stinging drops that make you look like a startled possum in the headlights and leave you unable to read anything for several hours. It was fortunate that I hadn’t driven. The DL12 form was duly completed, which meant I could return to the AA and have my licence reinstated — a small bureaucratic victory in what was rapidly becoming a much larger saga.
That appointment also revealed two things I had not anticipated. The first was that I had a cataract in my left eye — the same eye that I had assumed was behaving strangely because of optic neuritis. Whether the optic neuritis was still playing a role wasn’t clear at that stage. The second was that there was also a very small retinal tear in my right eye — the eye that had seemed perfectly fine. Although the cataract was significant enough to qualify for publicly funded surgery (CPAC score 55), I was aware that there would be a process involved along with a waiting list. The retinal tear, however required urgent attention at the Eye Clinic at Christchurch Outpatients. I was booked in for the following day. This turned out to be the beginning of a series of seemingly endless hospital appointments.
The Eye Clinic at Christchurch Outpatients is less a clinic and more a small ecosystem. There are multiple waiting areas and a labyrinth of corridors leading to consulting rooms containing elaborate pieces of optical machinery that require patients to focus on crosses, dots or circular patterns depending on which room they happen to be in. There are also different doctors responsible for assessment and treatment, most of whom are enthusiastic about administering those awful dilating drops. Appointments typically lasted between two and three and a half hours. At some point during most visits someone misplaces their glasses, forgets which waiting room they were sent to, or attempts to find a toilet while temporarily blinded by eye drops. Disorientation becomes part of the experience, given that the majority of patients are there in the first place because they can’t see very well.
At my first visit in June I had laser surgery to repair the retinal tear and was told that I would be sent another appointment in a month’s time so the eye could be checked. Very little was said about the cataract.
Thinking that my right eye had now been fixed, I returned to the tedious task of gathering information for MSD. Once my new licence arrived I was finally able to register for a My Health Account. I sat down at my computer, connected the printer, loaded the paper tray and fully expected to quickly print out all the health information I needed. No such luck.
I could book a Covid-19 vaccination, view and report a Covid test, check what to do if I had a positive RAT result, confirm that my Covid vaccinations were up to date and even share my iwi affiliations. What I couldn’t do was access a straightforward list of hospital visits. The portal may have been extremely useful in the middle of the Covid pandemic several years ago, but it had not yet caught up with the realities of navigating healthcare in 2025.
In July 2025 I turned sixty-five. Throughout that month I had five birthday cards, four emailed notifications about hospital appointments, three letters from Inland Revenue, two GP visits and an appointment with MSD. At that stage I still had no idea how complicated the next few months were about to become. I assumed that most of it would somehow circle back to MS — because with MS it usually does.
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