Becky Fennell interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2002-06-04

Becky Fennell is having a beautiful day.  She can’t quite believe what a fabulous world this is, to be alive in.  She blinks in the sunlight, as we sip cold cans together, outside the Good Food Kitchen, in Ringsend, where she works, cooking delumptuous meals for everyone from Bono-who loves the ham in her sandwiches-to the discerning Dublin four dinner-partying set.   She tosses back a mane of stunning blonde locks and her ultra-long lashes stick together slightly, as she looks at me.  “I can’t believe it!’ she explodes with enthusiasm.  “I feel incredible. I can see people at the end of the street!  It’s just mind-blowing’
Yesterday, Becky was doped up on valium. 
‘I sat on the sofa with shields over my eyes, because I had to keep them closed all day, listening to the radio all day long.  And the awful thing was, I kept thinking this is what it must be like to be blind.”  She pauses once more, to marvel at the miracle that is Ringsend.
“I can see the writing on that sign! Nick, my boyfriend had to take a day off work, so he could drive me home.  I couldn’t even eat properly, because I wasn’t supposed to look at what I was doing.  That evening, I kept taking peeks and it was so bizarre to look out the window and to suddenly be able to see chimney tops.  Every hour, my vision was getting clearer and clearer, it was unbelievable!  Last night I was so tired I kept nodding off, and waking up thinking oh God, I’ve got to take my lenses out!  I always used to fall asleep with my lenses in and have really sore eyes.’
Becky has just had laser surgery on her eyes and has gone from being a minus ten on the scale of myopia to being able to see perfectly.
I put her to the test, asking her to read some writing on a sign, down the street, which I, with twenty twenty vision can just read.
“Legal and general stationery?” she says, quite correctly.
Becky had pretty bad eyesight, by anybody’s standards and it was getting worse.
‘I’m now twenty seven and in the last four years, I’ve deteriorated to minus ten, I was minus seven, when I was twenty.  The consultant at the Wellington Eye Clinic said it’s really abnormal to have your eyes degenerate so much.  It does run in the family, though.’
The Good Food Kitchen specialises in Gourmet organic cooking.  Does Becky eat carrots?
“Funnily enough, I do, I’m a vegetable freak, I love all vegetables!    So I get loads of beta-carotene.  But my aunt was virtually blind.  They couldn’t make contact lenses for her, so she had the operation when it first came out, twenty years ago and her eyesight is still perfect.”
Did the operation hurt?
“It’s strange.  You walk in thinking this is a really big deal, it’s a big operation, and yet there’s five or six people sitting there, all waiting to have it and it’s all happening in the space of five minutes.  Literally, one person is in and out again in ten minutes.  So you are seeing people at every stage. One girl looked really miserable and I thought Oh God, it must be really awful.  But the next guy was so jolly when he came out, it looked like he hadn’t had anything done.”
 She wasn’t at all sure that the operation would be able to help her.
“I  literally couldn’t see anything and I went in there  convinced that my eyes were so bad that it probably wouldn’t work.  And I didn’t think I’d be able to afford it.  The reason I was able to was because of my amazing grandmother, who paid for me to have it done.  She was so excited, she sat by the phone all morning, waiting for me to tell her how it went.  I think she was nervous, in case something went wrong.  I was the only one who was totally confident that anything was going to be better than what I had!.”
Having spoken to Dr Arthur Cummings, Becky’s consultant at the Wellington Clinic, I ascertained that the risk is quite minimal.
“Less than one in a thousand will have any kind of serious problem, as a result of the operation, it’s very low risk.  If the eyesight isn’t fully corrected by the operation, an adjustment will be made, free of charge, within six weeks,’ he tells me.
But Becky was nervous.
‘  It is a bit scary.  They grip your head in place and take a suction thing and suck your eye out and make an incision on your cornea, so that they can take a flap off and insert the laser.  The thing is, you go completely blind, when they do the suction thing, which is very scary indeed. But the most alarming thing is when you suddenly smell the burning, that’s what the laser does, it burns off some of your cornea.”
Dr Cummings described what is actually taking place.
‘The laser removes tissue from the cornea in a very specific, pre-determined pattern, to change the shape of the cornea, so that light can focus at the correct point.”
Rather like changing the lens on a camera?
“That’s a very good way to describe it.  It can correct short-sightedness up to minus twelve dioptres, far-sightedness up to five and a half diopters and stigmatism up to seven diopters.  It is an elective procedure, and would be an option for anyone who doesn’t want to wear glasses or lenses.”
 Dr Cummings says that anyone considering having the operation done should have an evaluation, because it won’t be suitable for eyeryone.  But Becky is obviously thrilled with what it has done for her.  Particularly, as she says, when it comes to sports.  She was one of the contestants on RTE’s ‘Treasure Island,” last year and was terrified that her eyesight would get in her way.
“It’s horrible, having lenses on a beach.  So I got prescription shades, but they didn’t want me to wear them, they wanted to see my eyes.  The only thing about it that still send shivers down my spine was that the girl who won, who was on my team, was lovely and friendly to me, the whole time, but she complained about me that I never got up during the night to tend the fire.  And I had to take my lenses out before it got dark, so I would have fallen into the fire, if I’d tried!  And she knew this.  I couldn’t believe it when I saw her on national television, basically saying that I was a lazy old cow!”
Having her new eye-sight will affect everything in her life, Becky says, particularly working in the Good Food Kitchen.
“There is nothing worse than wearing glasses in a kitchen.  Your eyes really dry out, in the heat, if you wear lenses, but glasses steam up constantly and the sweat makes them slide down your nose.  That was a nightmare!  I just can’t believe I can see now, without them!”  And off she goes, to make me something nice hyto eat.