My days out didn’t always lead to suffering and negative thoughts! Some led to positive feelings and actions. Teresa drove me to one of my appointments with Dr Kate and the appointment was a positive one. We had coffee afterwards and there was a bookshop next to the café where we browsed the shelves. Well, Teresa did and she spent the visit reading snippets of books to me and we laughed a lot. A book caught my eye because it had a nice bright cover. It was Under the Tuscan Sun. A few weeks before I lost the vision in the second eye the movie had been on TV. I had loved it and after seeing the movie felt it was time for me to take stock and decide what I was going to do with my life. I had started thinking about what I wanted to do once we moved. Writing a book has always been a dream and maybe this was my time.
That day an email arrived from one of my favourite authors, Monica McInerney. We had met at a Books Alive function the previous month and had a lovely chat. I sent her a letter telling her how much I enjoyed her new book and related the story of reading her book in the waiting room at the Eye Hospital with the book right up close so I could see the words and how I was laughing out loud and had the attention of the other patients. Unfortunately we were all there because we couldn’t see very well and I’m not sure how many patients could actually see the name of the book I was reading. She wrote back a lovely email thanking me for my letter and said she enjoyed my story. She was very supportive and encouraging and inspired me to get on and write something.
The day after the trip to the bookshop and receiving Monica’s email I sat out in the sun with a marker pen, lots of paper and a glass of wine. I was always hearing, write what you know and love. I sat in the sun, had more wine and wrote a story about a little girl going to school with her new glasses. I thought it was a very cute story and the girls typed it up for me.
During the next few weeks I did some work on it, the girls did the editing on the computer and sent it off to a children’s magazine. I learned that, even with this drama happening there was still stuff I could do.
I did have an article I had written published. In the early days of losing the vision in my left eye, I started thinking about my cornea transplants. As my eyesight had been going well I didn’t think about my transplants but when I started having problems I thought a lot about my transplants, the donor, the donor family and remembered all that had happened when I was having the grafts done and the recovery time and how wonderful my sight was.
It was organ donor awareness week and all the publicity was on the heart, lungs and kidneys and I was a bit annoyed that they didn’t mention corneas which are really important. They are not a life saving and dramatic operation as the other organs but they change lives. I started writing a story of my eyesight loss and what my cornea transplants meant to me. There was an article in the ACT Writers’ Centre Newsletter asking for transplant stories for an anthology that was being put together. The date for closure had passed but I emailed the editor and asked if she would be interested in my story? She said yes and we sent it off.
Eighteen months later I received an email letting me know that the book was at the printers and my story had been accepted. I was very, very excited. Someone had liked my story and was prepared to put it in a book. A lot had changed for me in the eighteen months since I wrote the story.
A couple of weeks after I received the email I was having a day where I found it very hard to get out of bed and get myself going. I eventually decided I should get out of bed and take Madeline for a walk down to the pub to collect the mail. There was a parcel for me. In it was the book called ‘Gifts of Life’ and in that book was my story. It was such a thrill and certainly made my day.
I was published. Maybe, just maybe I could make a go of this writing business. I had seen the movie ‘Miss Potter’ and I remembered one of the phrases Beatrix Potter used. ‘We must not stay home alone; we must present ourselves to the world!’ My first story had been ‘presented’ and it was time for me to present other work I had written! I had not heard back from the publisher of the children’s magazine but at least I had not received the rejection letter either.
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