Watering of the eye

Coming out of the church about noon one Sunday, Mr. Oladimefa stopped to say hello to his friend’s 7-year old daughter. “Good morning Funmi,” he said. “Good morning Papa Folake,” she replied. “Papa, why are you always crying?” she asked innocently. Embarrassed, he quickly wiped his face with his handkerchief and told her that he was not crying and that the water was just overflowing from his eye. At home that night, he told himself, “I must do something about this. It has been going on for far too long.”

He could remember several other embarrassing moments. It was just the left eye. He could recall exactly how it all started about eight years back. There had been an epidemic of Apollo (conjunctivitis) and numerous suggestions from relatives and friends as to how it should be tackled.

Various remedies were suggested. He chose the one he felt most appropriate – battery water. He ended up in the teaching hospital. But for the effort of the skilled ophthalmologists, he could have lost the eyes. He was later told how lucky he was because the only serious aftermath was the watering of the left eye.

His ophthalmologist had told him it was due to the blockage of the opening (orifices) of tear ducts in the left eye. He however did not like the only option of surgery, which had been prescribed. “Tonight,” he told himself, “I must find an alternative solution. Yes, I will search the Internet. There must be something out there other than surgery.”

Mr. Oladimefa was bewildered at the amount of knowledge out there on the Internet. It was tough deciding where to start. He chose to start from the anatomy. “Why are tears overflowing? What happens to the tears in normal people?” He found that tears are normally produced to lubricate the surface of the eyes so that one can see without any difficulty. Excess tears are drained through a channel (duct or pipe) in the eyelids. There are actually two pipes. One at the medial part of the upper lid and another at the medial part of the lower lid. The two pipes unite to form a bigger pipe, which drains into the nose. Excess tears are discharged and absorbed in the nose.

The orifice of the pipe in each lid is called the punctum. “Now I now understand,” he told himself. “If these are blocked the tears have nowhere to flow to and must overflow. It is so damned simple!” He also realised that if the lids are not properly aligned to place the upper and lower puncti in the correct position to collect the tears, overflow could also occur. It was easy for him to figure out that obstruction in any part of the pipe from the lid to the nose could also cause overflow.

The obstruction could be due to chemicals such as the battery water he used or the direct effect of a repeated or poorly treated infection such as conjunctivitis or to debris from the infective process. He also remembered the young man he had seen in the teaching hospital who had a similar problem. “Now I know his must have been caused by the growth he had sticking out from his nose! The growth must have blocked the orifice of the pipe in the nose! So this thing is so simple. I should have been a medical doctor,” he lamented.

“Now that I know the anatomy, let me search for the solution. But wait a little,” he cautioned himself. “Isn’t the solution staring me in the face? If a drainage pipe carrying waste water from the bath is blocked for any reason, what does one do about it?” “I’d flush it to remove the obstruction,” he said, providing the answer to his question. “But what if the floor drain is damaged how do you get rid of the obstruction?” “I would get the plumber to replace the floor drain and flush the pipe with water under pressure.”

Suddenly, his face fell. “The doctor is right. In my own case there is no alternative to surgery. The blocked orifices have to be opened up.” Ruefully he said to himself, “tomorrow I will go back to my ophthalmologist to book an appointment for surgery.”