The week of April 9, 1965 would be largely forgettable to most people, apart from those who were born or got married for example. For one eye doctor and his patient however, it was a week which will remain forever memorable.
The doctor in question gravely notes in his casebook that he was called to the hospital because a 24 year old patient had battery acid in his eyes and was screaming in agony. Sounding somewhat exasperated by the young lad’s cries, he resorts to using a self-retaining lid retractor and discovered a red oedema of abut 8mm on the bulbar conjunctiva.
‘The patient was yelling and complaining of pain out of proportion to what the lesion indicated,’ he remarks unsympathetically before reluctantly agreeing to a pethidine injection.
Later, the doctor discovered that the patient did indeed have burns on his eyes and was admitted to the wards. After refusing to administer a second pethidine injection, he went home only to be recalled to the hospital as the patient was found in the sister’s office trying to break into the drug cupboard.
Alas, the truth emerged. The patient was a pethidine addict and had resorted to routinely burning his own eyes with cigarettes in a bid to get his hit. He was duly hauled off to a psychiatric unit for addicts which in those days would have been a pretty grim experience. The doctor doesn’t relay the poor man’s fate but perhaps this is unsurprising - he seemed lacking in the bedside manner department from the offset.