Tim is fifty-six now, but his eyesight problems go back to when he was very young

He had a lazy eye as a young child and was in glasses by the age of three. From then until now, he humorously states how many countless pairs he has been through. His left eye was so weak that he had to wear a patch over the right one, forcing the weaker to do the work.

"I hated it," he says. But it did the job. "The good news is that my eyes now both go in a straight line, and people can't tell it's a bit lazy."

As Tim got older, it was explained to him that he also had astigmatism, where the eye is shaped more like a rugby ball than a football, along with long sight. Between the lazy eye, the astigmatism and the long sight, glasses were a permanent fixture in his life, worn for over fifty years in total.

"I always wore glasses because I just wanted to see as best I could, all the way through."

Tim clarifies that his glasses as a child were always NHS issued, which meant that, whilst practically sound, perhaps they lacked the style that Tim would have wanted. As well as this, at his small school in Derby, there happened to be three boys called Tim in his class, so nicknames were needed to avoid confusion. Tim became known as, "Specky Lecky," a name that followed him into the classroom.

Sport was where it showed most. He'd take his glasses off for rugby, which meant he was never much good under a high ball. Tennis and squash were "nearly impossible," and anything else involving a fast-moving ball found him out quickly. In goal for football, relying heavily on the good defense in front of him. Sailing was one of the few sports that worked, glasses and all, aside from the rain and spray.

Away from sport, Tim says he simply got on with it as a child and largely let the comments from other children pass him by. As he got older and more confident, he stopped worrying about what people thought, and the glasses became a good part of his identity.

The deeper impact was on the path his life could take. Tim had wanted to be a pilot, and later hoped to join the Royal Navy, but both ambitions were closed off by his eyesight. He was additionally told that he couldn't drive ships or train as a Marines officer.

"So I was allowed to go and be an engineer," he says. It turned out to suit him well. He was turned away from driving ships at his Navy selection board at fifteen or sixteen. Years later, after his cataract surgery, Mr Antcliff told him, half in jest, that he now had "fighter pilot vision," a small, late irony that has stayed with him.

Noticing something was wrong

At fifty-six, Tim noticed his vision was beginning to deteriorate. He wasn't entirely sure why, and put off looking into it for a while, as people often do. The moment that changed that was an ordinary one. He was sitting outside on a clear night, looking up at the moon.

"The moon wasn't as clear as it should have been," he says. "It was a dark night, so I closed one eye, and through my right eye, I could see two moons. I thought, that's wrong."

He looked into it that evening, and cataracts came back as the likely explanation. It wasn't a complete surprise. His mother had needed cataract surgery in her early sixties, so there was a family pattern to it.

He carried on for a while, able to see well enough to put it out of his mind, until the practical signs became harder to ignore. Working from a screen much of the day, he found himself leaning in closer to read detail that was starting to blur. A visit to his optician, confirmed cataracts in both eyes, growing unusually from the centre outward rather than the more typical edges in. At that stage, his optician was able to correct it and buy Tim some time.

Worsening symptoms

It didn't last long, a few months later, walking home one evening, Tim realised how far things had slipped. The light of a single tree lamp had splintered into separate points in his right eye, and four in his left. He described this to his optometrist, Brad Abrahams, as like a tripling of objects, what's clinically known as monocular diplopia, caused by the cataracts.

"It wasn't good for work," he says, "and wasn't safe for driving, either." There was nothing more his optician could do. Tim needed a referral.

By this point, it wasn't really a decision so much as a necessity.

Choosing Sulis Hospital

Tim didn't have serious reservations about the surgery itself. He had researched the procedure in advance, and his mother's experience gave him a head start in understanding what was involved. Being privately insured also gave him more choice over where and how quickly he could be treated.

Tim's optician recommended three surgeons and passed his information on directly. Tim took the referral to his private medical insurer, who approved it, and consultation with the surgeon followed shortly after. The whole process moved quickly. From that night seeing double moons in February, to having his referral in June, and onto a surgical consultation and his first operation on the 13th of July, under two weeks passed between referral and surgery.

During Tim's initial consultation, discussions moved further than simply removing the cataracts. Mr Antcliff discussed Tim's work, lifestyle and leisure activities in detail, including long-distance night driving and his passion for sailing, to understand what he needed from his vision day to day. He suggested correcting Tim's long-standing astigmatism and long sight at the same time, through lens replacement, rather than treating the cataracts alone and leaving him dependent on glasses. That meant weighing up two kinds of lens: multifocal lenses, which can reduce the need for glasses altogether, and fixed-focus lenses, paired with reading or computer glasses as needed.

Tim chose the more cautious option. He had been told that some people struggle to adapt to night driving with multifocal lenses, and he didn't want to rid himself of the ability to sail in the dark. Given that one of his eyes had always been the weaker of the two, and his wish to avoid haloes at night, fixed focus lenses were chosen, alongside correcting his astigmatism at the same time. Extensive measurements were taken beforehand to ensure the implant power was precisely right for his eyes.

"I wanted to desperately hold onto those things," he says.

Tim was keen to continue seeing life. He even asked his surgeon if he could have both eyes operated on close together time wise, so as not to lose more of the summer (most importantly, sailing) than necessary. His surgeon agreed on the condition that the first eye was healing well. Five days after the first operation, Tim returned for a check-up; there were no signs of trouble, and his second eye was operated on the following day. Both procedures were carried out under local anaesthetic as day cases.

Recovering

Once home, it took around three hours for the anaesthetic to wear off and his sight to return, the eyelid opening gradually as light slowly filtered back in. He had gone in for around 9am, with the procedure itself finished by 10:15am; by early afternoon, his vision was beginning to come back.

The first sensation, Tim says, was a kind of gentle disorientation, as though the world had tilted slightly, from having a new lens inside his eye. Then, gradually, everything came into focus. Looking out across a field, he could suddenly make out individual leaves on a tree.

"That's the best I had ever seen. Ever."

Life now

Tim now says he takes his vision for granted in a way that he never could before. He no longer thinks about cleaning his glasses, remembering them at all times, or reaching for them first thing in the morning. He drives without them, and manages most of his day unaided, keeping a pair of reading glasses only for close computer work.

"It's a miracle, really. That's the best way I can put it."

He is clear that he wouldn't recommend the surgery for convenience alone. The risk of complications, which he understood to be in the region of one in a thousand, only made sense to him once his sight had deteriorated to the point where he had little real choice. "I'd only do it if you truly need to," he says. "My sight is too precious to take risks." For that reason, he didn't contemplate having surgery until his eyes told him it was his only choice.

Sailing is where the change has felt most dramatic. Where he once relied on clean glasses to make out marks and shifts in the wind, he can now spot boats and changes on the water from a mile off, without straining to see.

Socially, the change has been quieter but no less real. Towards the end, recognising people at a distance had become genuinely difficult, and he often needed someone to come closer before he knew who they were. He never let it stop him going out, but looking back, he can now see how much he had adapted his life around it without fully realising, right down to watching the big screen at Glastonbury instead of the stage itself. 

"You don't really know what you've been missing," he says, "until you get it back."