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I was then told that after my eye surgery (which is nowadays dismissed as a mere 'procedure'...like Boys Method in our student Phy Lab) we would have to buy bottles of four different eye drops:
1. A cortisone healer
2. A cleanser lubricant
3. An antibiotic
4. An anti-inflammatory
And get them dropped into my operated eye one different drop every other hour or so. All in all there would be as many as 20 times that one or the other drop would get into that eye every day during the first week, and thereafter the frequency gradually goes down in a month.
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1. A cortisone healer
2. A cleanser lubricant
3. An antibiotic
4. An anti-inflammatory
And get them dropped into my operated eye one different drop every other hour or so. All in all there would be as many as 20 times that one or the other drop would get into that eye every day during the first week, and thereafter the frequency gradually goes down in a month.
There is nowadays an advanced drop-technology which was alien to my school days in Muthukur.
There was then not much awareness that the variety of holes on our face are interconnected. Till I went to Vizagh for my university years. Our neighbor was a doctor and his name plate had an 'ENT-Surgeon' beside his name. And after discreet inquiries I got to know that it meant an Ear-Nose-Throat chap. The E there didn't refer to the Eye...that was a different kettle of fish altogether.
We lived in prehistoric times when there were no dropper-bottles. I was soundly sleeping on the floor-mat one night and suddenly there was this terrific pain in my left ear. I woke up and found that something alien was fluttering its wings well inside my ear. And it was terrifying apart from hell of a pain.
I woke up my grannie (all others were having their beauty 8 hours). And she shone her torch light inside my ears and asked me to hold on. And she went inside the kitchen and duly returned with an iron ladle which had warm cooking oil in it. She asked me to turn on my side and poured the damn thing into my fluttering ear. I was then stupefied not knowing which hurt the more. After a few seconds that felt like an hour, the fluttering gradually died down and I joined my grannie in her sleep.
In the morning grannie inspected my ear and with her cotton swabs rolled onto broomsticks she cleared the mess inside. And one by one the remnants of a dead fruit-fly emerged...here a wing, there a leg, and a head anon. As a cleanser, grannie used warm salt water, and I was well and kicking and went forth to my street-games.
That ENT surgeon in Vizagh would have been stupefied by my grannie's surgical prowess.
When my son was an infant at KGP he started crying inconsolably one night and nothing helped...my wife and I joined in his cries. We took him to the railway-doctor first thing in the morning and he gave us a bottle of pain-killer drops and a bottle of nasal drops. And told us that my son's nose was blocked well and good and he had been breathing through his mouth which has no built-in filter like the nose...and his throat infection reached his ears....that was the ENT connection that I learned painfully.
Till the other day I thought that my eye was outside my ENT system. But no! During my cataract surgery prelims several dames were pouring several drops into my eye...one for dilating pupils, one for easing pain maybe and the other for something else. One lady, before dropping in her fourth medicine, told me not to be afraid if the drops she put into my eye get into my throat...just swallow them...which indeed I did!
The first medicines I saw in glass bottles had to be dropped into my nose. They came with metal screw-caps that needed cutting. I had to hold my nose up and Father would pour a few drops into my nose.
A few years later the bottles came with an attached 'dropper'...a glass filler with a rubber squeezer. You dip the filler into the bottle, draw up the liquid to a measured scratch, and squeeze out the liquid into the nose.
Later on the filler was dispensed with and the cap of the bottle itself was of soft plastic with a side-nozzle...all you have to do is to insert the nozzle in and pump the stopper.
The latest gadget is a soft bottle with a nose that is capped...you remove the cap and squeeze the bottle...a user-friendly affair.
Many could squeeze in their droppers into their mouths, ears and noses...but not their eyes...they are scared. They need another person's help. But not I! I had mastered the art of dropping medicines like Eye Tone into my eyes by a trial and error process...wasting a few drops and needing a tissue to clear the mess on my cheeks...my son would never let me do this self-help which is wasteful, and prone to infection and hurt if the nozzle touches the eye ball...but he does it himself on his eyes...it just shows!!!
So he prepared an elaborate spread-sheet on his laptop with drugs and times and days and weeks etc and took a printout and pasted it on our Godrej alimrah so that either he or my D-i-L (assisted by Ishani) would drop all those 20 drops at their due times into my cutup eye:
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