The conjunctivitis

Two years after the day in 1996. It was a season of conjunctivitis. It had infected every second kid in the locality. I was not the lucky one. Both my eyes had swelled up. It was very common those days. Especially among the children. It usually stayed for a few days and then used to get away, without any harm to the eyes.

But this time it was different for me. Everything was usual. But as the conjunctivitis went away I gradually started noticing that my right eye having problem seeing things. There was some fuzziness in the vision with the right eye. As my left eye was working just fine, I did not have any difficulty in seeing things though. I waited for about a month for it to go away by itself. But it persisted.

So I told this to my mother. She got worried. Very worried. We consulted the compounder in our village. He suggested consulting an eye specialist doctor. There were no doctors around in the village. The nearest we could find one was in the city about 45 kilometres away from the village. The transport was also not an easy task. The money problem was another issue.

It took us a few days to convince our father that I needed to get consulted by an eye doctor. So finally we went to the city. Probably this was my second visit to the city. We consulted the best doctor available in the city. He happened to be the head of the ophthalmology department of the medical college in the city. He saw me and asked if my eye was hit by something. I could not remember anything. He prescribed some medicines and eye drops and advised to come back in three months after the medication is over. So we came back to our village.

The vision was only worsening day by day. The fuzziness in the vision turning more towards darkness. The medicine continued for the period. I did not notice any improvement. So we got only worried. We started consulting other people as well while the medicine was continuing.

Three months had passed. The vision was getting darker and darker. We went back to the city. We were advised to visit a doctor called S.N. Mitra at a special eye hospital called Poor Home. This was a facility in the city that was running with an aid from some foreign agencies. It had all the modern facilities to diagnose the disease.

At this place we consulted this Dr. Mitra. After the tests he declared that it was a cataract! He did not prescribe any medicine. He suggested that I should wait till the cataract gets ripe enough to be operated upon. He said it will get ripe in a year or two.