Eye-tem Number

As I write this, my left eye is red enough to attract bulls from up to 7 kilometers away and my right eye is showing the tell-tale signs of following suite. After consulting 3 doctors in 2 cities, I now know that what I have is Acute Viral Conjunctivitis (‘Acute’, being the succinct doctor’s lingo for, “Pretty Darn Bad”).

It all started innocently enough with me getting up one morning with my left eye reduced to size of a small peephole. As any calm person under the circumstances would do, I rushed to the doctor. Unfortunately he was having a bad day. No, really. The thing was, a patient was nagging him for medicines which he seemed very reluctant to provide. It’s always a warning sign when your doctor doesn’t want to dish out the drugs. In the ensuing irritated haste he diagnosed my problem to be caused by a stye. A stye, for the unaware, is a boil that forms on the underside of eyelids. It’s the eye-version of a pimple.

He then prescribed steroid drops to be deployed into my flared left eyeball.

Now steroids as you know are used by body builders and Olympic cheats to quickly inflate to the size of an average truck. The drops of steroid I happily dribbled into my eye caused the same effect on the germs inhabiting it. Within no time, my left eye could well have been used on a traffic signal in place of the stop sign.

Still cheerfully ignorant of my condition, I then proceeded to my Aunt’s place to holiday for the next 5 days, the first two of which I spent floundering around with my one working eye. I crashed into furniture with a feverish relentlessness. Finally my Aunt, alarmed by the sheer strawberry-like tone of the thing and the damage to her tables and chairs, decided to show me to her family doctor.

My eye was peered into for a second time by an MBBS holder. She took more time than the doc who had gone there before her. She stretched and yanked at my eye-lids, prodded and poked, dilated and undilated my pupil and finally she tut-tutted,

“It’s definitely not a stye. It’s just terribly infected. Either that or it’s turning communist.”

And so I was ordered a new set of drops to be put every half an hour. This time there weren’t any steroids in them. The next morning, I woke up feeling awful. There’s no other way to put it. My eye showed slight improvement but it pained and throbbed and if I bent down it seemed like it would fall out and roll away. I said as much to my Aunt’s doctor. She was shocked for a minute.

“No the results aren’t satisfactory. I think he should be shown to an ophthalmologist on an urgent basis. The infection might have spread inside the eye where they might have already called for interior decorators to do up the place. If that happens he might have to undergo intravenous introduction of antibiotics, surgery or even a viewing of select films of the Bhatt Camp.”

It looked very grim when she put it thus.

And so, in what must surely be record time, we exited one clinic and checked into another. Even though my case was considered ‘urgent’ and written down in the visitor book as ‘an emergency’, I was shown into the doctor after about one and half hours. That's to tell you what kind of rush these eye specialists enjoy. The waiting room was packed with cataracts and people who claimed they could see everything double (which is not entirely a bad thing, if what you’re seeing is Chitrangadha Singh).

Eventually the third doctor had a look at my red orb. He obviously went much deeper than the other two, using complex instrumentation consisting of a light and a microscope, he peeked at my cornea and retina and I’m sure saw a surprised bunch of bacteria staring back at him. When he was done, he solemnly asked me to have a seat. I sat, expecting the worst. He took a deep breath and said, “It’s Acute Viral Conjunctivitis.” Those, I think, are the most joyous words, I have ever heard, trumping even, “Congratulations, you’ve passed!”

The travails still continue though. 15 days of trouble is the doc’s estimate. I still wake up with my eye clamped shut and unwilling to open (I eventually get them open by promising them a treat of internet sites and a small amount of cash.) Drops are dispatched in my eyes, though I squirm and shout less, now. And I’m listening to a lot more sob stories from people nowadays. They find me to be a very sympathetic listener. It’s not that this ordeal has mellowed me; it’s just that I’ve trained my eyes to water at the right places.