Help my mom keep her sight

Hi all...

So, I'm going to tell you a little story.

When my mom Tracey Chananie was about 2 years old, she was playing with her kitty cat, when unfortunately, the kitty cat got a bit too rough, and ended up scratching her right eye. Her actual eye. Her cornea was unfortunately too badly damaged for the doctors to do anything really constructive, apart from a cornea transplant. My amazing late Nana offered up 1 of her corneas, but it didn't happen, I can't remember the exact details as to why. Even without the transplant, my mom spent a year in hospital because of this injury.

Anyway, my mom learnt to live with only 1 working eye, later requiring glasses in her teens, and so she's carried on. Her right eye is still there, it still moves, her eyelid still opens and closes, but she just can't see out of it. She's going to be 56 this year, so that's 53 and a bit years of living with sight in 1 eye.

Fast forward to 2010, when a cataract was discovered in her bad eye. Ah that's not a problem, you would think, as she can't see out of the eye anyway. You'd be wrong. If the cataract was left to grow it would cover her entire eye, making her eye look completely white, like it had rolled back as you would see only white, and the eye would now render itself completely useless. An amazing guardian angel stepped in, and paid IN FULL for the surgery required, asking for no payback, with no strings attached. He simply wanted to help.

My mom isn't on medical aid due to financial constraints, and hasn't been for over a decade now. She has been seeing the same ophthalmic specialist surgeon for 33 years, and as she only has 1 working eye, I fully support her wanting to see the best of the best.

Fast forward to 2017, March. My mom casually mentions that she has a smear on her left (good) eye, and it's not on her glasses. She has checked, several times. I scraped together what I had, and managed to pay the R850 for her to see the specialist to confirm what we already knew; she has a cataract in her good eye. I cannot even explain how my heart sank.

My mom is the most generous, amazing, hardcore, says-it-like-it-is woman I know. She is strong, sensitive, capable of immense love, and she's now going blind. And I can't fix it.

So I'm doing something I would not normally do, and that is ask for help. Her doctor had so kindly offered her surgical services for free but unfortunately this has now fallen away, so we have the hospital fees, doctor's fees and the anesthetists fees to cover. I'm doing everything that I can to put aside any spare change, but I'm asking for your help, no matter how small.

Please help my mom keep her sight.

PS: if we exceed our goal, all extra funds raised will be donated to CHOC x