Twenty- five Seven

Written in Blood

November 24, 2013

Prerna was rightly named thought Maasiji as she sat shelling the peas one winter afternoon. Shelling peas was a wonderful pastime she thought, as wonderful as cleaning the rice or rolling the wicks for the oil lamps for her daily pooja. She loved doing these mundane activities as it made her feel useful for the three months of the year she spent with her nephew Lalit Gupta and his family.

Maasiji was lucky – Her nephew lived in Bombay, way down South and way warmer than compared to Bhopal where she lived most of the time. But she didn’t like the winter in Bhopal and when Lalit invited her to his home in Bombay, she just jumped at the chance. She loved the busy city and the Bombay winter which was as milder than a pleasant day in Spring. Apart from the warmth being good for her bones, staying with her nephew was good for her spirit. After nine months of living alone in her own home, she enjoyed being part of a family even though she had to share the room with Prerna, Lalit’s daughter. Every evening she would go down to the garden and meet up with the other old people who had come down for the winter, staying with their sons/daughters or other relatives. It was fun meeting up with different people thought Maasiji as she caught the pea that escaped.

There was one problem though, well not exactly a problem, but you could call it a mild inconvenience. Prerna, was a lively child and was more than just inspired to mischief. Not that being mischievous was bad, thought Maasiji – after all a spirited child was any day better than a child with no spunk. But what she minded was that often Prerna used Maasiji as an alibi especially when she was caught. It troubled Maasiji’s soul to be her partner in crime.

“Maasiji, tell Papa that I was doing my Hindi homework with you, wasn’t I?” she’d plead when her Papa would scold her for some prank or the other. And poor Maasiji would nod her head in agreement consoling herself that it’s like replying to a hunter who asks ” did the deer go this way?” If you tell the truth the deer will be killed so it is better to tell a lie and save the deer and she would count 10 extra beads on her prayer beads that night hoping that God would pardon her and give Prerna some better sense next time.

She had just finished shelling the last peapod when Prerna came into the room, breathless with excitement. She quickly shut the door and told Maasiji to be quiet. Then she took out a pen and dipped it in a bottle of red ink and wrote

” This is written in BLOOD. We will come tonight at midnight to take your blood.”

She giggled as she thought of Saroj Aunty reading the note.

“What are you doing beta?” asked Maasiji suspecting that she was upto no good.

“Nothing, Maasiji, remember if Papa asks, say you know nothing, ” and she left the room with the note in her hand.

She went across the landing and slipped the note under the door.

That night at midnight, the doorbell rang. The door opened to reveal two men with a tray of test tubes ;

“We have come for your blood,” they said,” May we collect yours?”

“Sure ,” said Prerna’s mother and the entire family lined up for the medical assistants to collect the blood samples from them all. “I’m glad the Health Department is taking such strong measures against Malaria,” she told her husband as the men left the apartment and the family went back to bed

Within minutes there was a shriek from the neighbouring apartment. The Gupta’s ran to the door and saw their neighbour collapsed in a heap. Many other families too came to see what had happened. Someone put water on Saroj Jain’s face as she came to, pale and shaking.

“What happened?” they asked and she showed them a small crumpled piece of paper on which was written

This is written in BLOOD. We will come tonight at midnight to take your blood.

Lalit Gupta peered closely at the note. He had a faint suspicion it looked like Prerna’s writing. But she wouldn’t go so far, would she?

After the crowd dispersed, he came into Prerna’s room and woke her up. “You didn’t have anything to do with Saroj Aunty’s fainting episode, did you? he asked.

Prerna looked sufficiently shocked and rubbed her eyes sleepily and said “Of course not. Ask Maasiji. I was with her the whole morning shelling peas, Hain na?” she said turning to the old lady who had opened one eye to see what was happening.

And Maasiji who was secretly chuckling at the thought of that wishy washy Saroj quivering in fear nodded her head in agreement. Prerna was naughty all right, but this time she raised the bar.

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.
8 Reasons Why Old People take the Wrong Dose/Medication

November 24, 2013
My earlier post on the “Perils of Growing Old” evoked a strong reaction from my father. He felt that failing memory and poor eyesight which is part of the natural ageing process is not the sole reason why old people make mistakes while taking their medication. It is largely the fault of the Pharmaceutical companies manufacturing those medicines.As he grumbled and grumbled about what the problems were, I remembered distinctly while growing up that there were only five tablets I really knew of :
- APC – a big white bitter tasting tablet for colds, fevers and general malaise
- Vit. B Complex – a ghastly smelling yellow ochre tablet
- Mexaform – a smallish sized dirty pink tablet for a runny tummy
- Ledermycin – a white and red capsule( if I remember right) a general antibiotic
- Avil – a tiny white sweetish covered pill for allergies
These tablets were so distinct that I could identify them even without a foil or bottle. Moreover, these were all that we really needed at home to keep us in good health.

He rang me up one morning to tell me that it is all THEIR FAULT – They being modern pharmaceutical companies. After his rant, I realised that old people are at risk.

The Hazards of Geriatric Medicine
- Advances in pharmaceutical
  industry have greatly contributed to longevity and comfort of human life. Today
  there is a specific ‘pill’ for every specific ‘ill’.
- Majority of old aged people have multiple maladies resulting in multidrug therapy with its inbuilt increasedincidence of noncompliance. This has major side effects and it is nice to know
  that the industry is trying to formulate a single pill approach. Till that
  happens the old people have to face quite a few hazards.
- The various combinations of the prescribed drugs have to be stored separately to avoid double dosing or missing the dose altogether.
- The multiplicity of generics with increasingly tongue twisting names and different trade names adds to ordering difficulty. This coupled with frequent shortages results in non interferes with
  the treatment.
- The crinkled metallic wrappers with microscopic lettering and similar size and markings on the strips for different drugs makes it difficult to identify the drug to be taken in especially failing
  light and necessitates use of magnifying glass
- As you come to the end of the
  strip there is no visible drug name and the tablet has to be wasted.
- The drugs
  supplied have different strengths that require the tablet to be halved or
  quartered; a difficult task if the tablet is of very small size. An old time ‘supari’ nut cracker is very useful for this purpose.
- While unwrapping, a tablet may slip out and then it becomes difficult to identify it as different drug tablets may have same colour,size and shape.
To illustrate his point he sent me a photo of the medication he has to take every day – some tablets twice a day, some tablets once a day, some tablets in a dose of 1 in the morning and 1/2 in the evening……You get the drift.

So if Mr. D’s mother-in-law indeed took the wrong medicine or the wrong dose, it should not be blamed on her poor memory but rather on the pharmaceutical companies which still have not manufactured one pill for all ills.

p.s. I have not only reproduced his entry in a different font but also increased the size so that it will be easier for him to read!
Growing Older

November 22, 2013

Yesterday Mr. D came over to fix the bathroom. These days it is getting increasingly hard to get handymen over to fix little drops that drip and hooks that come off – somehow every contractor only wants to do a turn key job – one that involves at least a year of your time and half of your pocket . The standard complaint of any contractor is that labour is hard to find. So does that mean that there are no plumbers, painters, carpenters, masons and electricians left? Or does this mean that everyone is so well provided for ( by God obviously since our Government doesn’t care about giving us anything) that they don’t need to work?

Well, whatever the case may be, Mr. D who is a qualified civil engineer has been running his grandfather’s contracting firm and from specialising in Plumbing, he has gradually moved to painting, carpentry and the odd electrical job. But his main area of competence is plumbing and despite the fact that his employees are old, ancient and definitely lacking in any social skills, is still the only person we know who will come to look at a small drip. He is a very calm and patient man who inspite of his busy schedule loves having a cup of coffee with me whenever he makes a house call. However, yesterday the normally unflappable Mr. D actually declined the offer of coffee and seemed to be in a bit of a flap. He just had to go home in a rush he said, because he had to organise an ambulance for his father-in-law.

The story unravelled like this : Mr. D’s in laws were visiting when the old man developed a heart condition. He was admitted to the hospital and was advised further treatment. But being an old man with an old doctor whom he had immense faith in, he decided he’d return home to Pune and continue with the recommended treatment under his own doctor. Now this makes sense if you have a wife and other relatives to take care of you . Unfortunately for Mr. D, his own wife was the only child in India left to care for her parents.
Anyone who is looking after old parents will know the attendant problems of this situation – apart from dealing with the patients, you have to also deal with other siblings especially those living in the US who constantly call to ask – So what are you doing?
The best answer for this is – I’m waiting for you to tell me what to do – is not something that will go down well, so one has to go through the rigmarole of explaining everything to absent siblings who are in the meanwhle having their own consultations with their own doctors or that God Who Knows All aka Google.

After having deftly tackled this this question, Mr. D and his wife were in the process of arranging a cardiac ambulance to take the old man back to Pune. The old lady was staying back with Mr. D because there was no one at home to take care of her while her daughter stayed at the hospital with her father.

Before I could ask Mr. D why his mother-in-law couldn’t be left at home, he told me that the day before his son had received a call at work from his grandmother who sheepishly informed him that she thought she had taken a double dose of her blood pressure medicine. Now the young lad panicked because he didn’t know whether the old lady had or had not taken a double dose. So he called his father who happened to be visiting a site close to their home and Mr. D rushed back to check on her. He counted all the tablets in the medicine organiser and found that there was nothing amiss. The old lady then said that she may have taken the medication directly from the strip. Once again Mr. D checked the strips and couldn’t find any tablets missing. However, the old lady insisted that she’d taken the tablet herself but she couldn’t remember when. Now this could have been yesterday or even never.

The whole of the previous day Mr. D kepts making trips back home to keep an eye on his mother-in-law who it seems has either dementia or alzheimer’s. He immediately packed up all the medicines and kept them under lock and key and devised a chart whereby any one who administered the medication had to tick it off…

Incidentally Mr. D too has crossed over to the wrong side of fifty and a few years ago would have qualified to be an Old Man himself! The perils of growing old are not so much ageing but ageing with ageing parents. With our own memories getting fuzzy and our muscles getting weak, it is indeed a rough time dealing with old age!

p.s I’ve taken the picture off the Net

Written in Blood

8 Reasons Why Old People take the Wrong Dose/Medication

Growing Older