Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Confessions of a hypochondriac

issue 07 September 2024

My neighbour had a surgical procedure and keeps telling me about it. Every time she starts, I shout ‘No! Please stop!’, because I’m squeamish.

At the risk of distressing anyone else who is squeamish, I do need to say that she had her eyeball injected, because of what followed.

A day after visiting my neighbour and having to cover my ears as she explained her eye op, I bumped into a lady I know outside church and when I asked after her husband she said he was going into hospital because: ‘He’s having his eye injected.’

Two days after that, a reader emailed me to say a piece I wrote cheered him up after ‘getting an injection into my eye yesterday morning’.

I’m not a statistician, obviously, and I don’t understand the mathematical odds of having three eyeball-injecting conversations with three different people in four days.

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