CHENNAI : Remember when your giant grunting child was a baby? When they were so tiny and defenceless that you’d take them to the doctor every time their noses so much as twitched before a sneeze? How every milestone was carefully noted in their medical record, how they got all their shots like clockwork? And then, not in the blink-of-an-eye, but over days, weeks, months and years that you felt every minute of they grew up! They stopped looking tiny and delicate and began to resemble adolescent Hulk. Booster shots lapsed. Their height and weight was a number plucked out of thin air and then rounded up. Why go to the doctor when one has enough OTC drugs in the kitchen cabinet to start a pharmacy?
But then one cannot always avoid a visit to the doctor and it’s on these trips that one is reminded that their mini Hulk is more mini and less Hulk. I took the tween to the eye doctor recently after ignoring an alarming eye tic for as long as was decent. After the usual alphabet chart routine, the good doctor decided he would need to dilate my son’s eyes.
The tweens ‘Oooh what’s dilation?’ quickly turned into a ‘My eyes! My eyes! I’ve been blinded! I can’t see!’.
Yelling the word blind at an eye doctor’s is like shouting Burger King in a vegan soup bar. Everyone recoils.
‘Of course, you can’t see your eyes are closed!’
‘How long will I be without the power of sight?’
‘Half an hour. Now pipe down.’
‘Thirty minutes? That’s forever!’
‘No, that’s for 30 minutes. Come on, let’s do something fun! How about we play I spy or something?’ Not funny? Fine.
Mini Hulk has by now clean slid right off the chair and is lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. Everyone in the waiting room watches mini Hulk with interest. Except the dour receptionist who is trying to watch a Tamil soap on her phone. Hulk’s moans of impatience are drowning out the dramatic dialogues. The elderly gentleman sitting next to us has also had his eyes dilated and I can see him flinch every time the tween lets out a yelp. Even worse are the two young boys sitting right opposite us, also with dilated eyes but who must be direct disciples of the Buddha for they are sitting there with calm, beatific smiles on their face. Their mother drugged them, right?
Mini Hulk gets chatty again.
‘Will I have some kind of amazing super strength or power after this?’
‘No.’
‘Can I get a seeing-eye dog?’
‘No.’
‘Does this mean I never have to write or do homework again?’
‘Nurse, please can we see the doctor now?’
The doctor has no doubt been alerted to the situation and he calls us in before all his patients exit en masse. He casually remarks as he examines the tween’s eyes that children should be dilated every six months just to teach them a little patience.
Sure! But just make sure you knock me out with a dose of general anaesthesia first, okay doc?