An Eye For The Season
Come June, and the fiery sun gives way to the cool showers. Droplets fall from the heaven, bringing to us relief and succor from the sweltering heat of the previous couple of months.
We rue having to step out cocooned inside our rain coats, and be ever alert to not be sloshed with water from the puddles on the road, but still, we love the rain. Sitting near a window, with a hot cup of chai and a plate of steaming pakoras is moksha for most of us.
Along with the snugly moments and hot condiments, rains also bring with them another thing, which most of the parents dread – a season of infections. Come rains, and you notice queues getting longer outside the paed’s clinic. From just born infants to 10 year olds, all lined up to get a running nose, a sore throat, a raspy cough or a burning fever treated. Not to mention the other types of infections – food poisoning from a happy meal shared with family the previous evening. Or a red itchy eye (which, for some reason I have never been able to fathom, is called the Madras Eye!).
When S started rubbing his eyes vigorously 3 days ago, I attributed it to lack of sleep. For just the previous night, he had slept at 11.30, only to get up at 4 the next morning (that he had started feeling sleepy again by the time his school van came is another story). When I went to pick him up from his day care later that afternoon, his teachers also told me that there was some swelling underneath his eyes. We looked closer. There was no redness, so we decided that it is just fatigue.
The swelling however, did not go away. His left eye would look puffy as soon as he woke up, but the swelling would subside a little through the course of the day. But it did not vanish completely, he kept rubbing his eyes, and that made me more restless. It told me there was something more to it, even though there was no redness.
So yesterday we took him to the doctor. As always, my son brought the roof down with his cries as the doc shone the torch into his eyes. My husband and me both had to hold the thrashing boy tight so that the doc could have a proper look. And after an examination that lasted just about 15 secs, out came the verdict – conjunctivitis!
In a way, S was happy with the verdict since he got his first pair of goggles. He wore them through the evening and insisted on going to sleep with them on (and today morning one of the legs of the frame has become lose). But what he is completely not happy with is the train of drops that the doc has prescribed. Sigh! Every medication session at our home looks like a WWF wrestling match, with my husband and I tagging S down and me prying his eyes open to administer the drops. And hope they fall into his eyes!
I could not have done it alone, so here we are, on a Friday, S enjoying his ‘sick leave’, me taking an off from work, and my husband ‘working from home’. I hope the rest of the rains pass off without many such events!
Yamini is a software professional turned work-at-home-mom. Amidst her domestic responsibilities and a very demanding 2.5 year old son, she snatches time to write academic papers, freelance content, fiction and poetry. Her stories and poetry have been published in various online literary magazines and anthologies by Penguin Books and Cyberwit Publications. Yamini voices her thoughts now and then at http://myexpressionsandme.
