AHMEDABAD, Jan 28: Almost everybody in Rekhanagar Chowl knows where 80-year-old Bhikhabhai Christian lived. ``You mean the old man who lost his left eye and died recently?'' asks a woman as she throws washed clothes across a string. ``The last house in the third lane.''The passage to the house is narrow but clean. An old woman greets you, gets a rickety chair and calls her son. A thin man with a shrivelled face emerges from the opposite house, perched much below ground-level with just half the door showing.Bhikhabhai was operated on for cataract at the Shardaben Municipal General Hospital on November 3, and was one of the seven who lost their sight over the next couple of days. He was discharged from hospital on November 14 and died on December 18.The old man, otherwise healthy, died of the shock of losing an eye, says his younger son Samson, a factory worker. ``He was so shocked that he stopped eating'', he says. ``For the three weeks before his death, he didn't eat anything.'' David, Samson's brother, adds that even if he was offered nimbu pani, he'd take a few sips and then reject it.``He was so healthy he could easily have lived another 10 years,'' says Bhikhabhai's widow Maniben as she searches for case papers and medicine bills in a theli.Samson, who was with his father during his hospital stay, and his elder brother David, a worker of a closed mill, have borrowed some Rs 7,000 to meet the expenses of their father's treatment and his last rites.Shantaben M Solanki, another victim of the cataract operation-tragedy, seems to have accepted the destiny's cruel joke. She used to earn Rs 20 daily by working part-time in a paper factory. All she does these days is sit outside her two-room house and bask in the winter sun. ``I just sit on the porch of a small temple at the street corner,'' she says as neighbourhood women sympathise.Similar is the story of Nathiben S Parmar, who used to earn a decent living by doing domestic chores before she lost an eye. The blinded eye is still painful, she says, adding that she can't wash it.``My elder son's gone crazy for the past couple of months'', says Nathiben. ``There he is lying on the bed. He keeps to the bed all the time.''Bhikhabhai, Shantaben, Nathiben all lost their eye-sight for no fault of theirs. The hospital authorities say it was an accident and deny negligence on the part of doctors or staff. The culprit, they say, is fertile, an irrigating fluid used to keep the operated-on area clear of blood during surgery, which infected the eye.In medical terminology, this condition is known as endophthalmitis (post-surgery infection), fertile, an irrigating fluid.In medical terminology, this condition is known as endophthalmitis (post-surgery infection), and is known to respond to higher antibiotics. ``Maybe the hospital did not give them higher antibiotics as they are poor,'' says an eye surgeon, who believes that staff's negligence might be responsible for causing the infection. The hospital authorities, however, say the patients were treated the best.
