For those of you who have read, “When Ignorance is Not Bliss”, you should find the theme of this post similar to that. I am trying to convey in this post, a message which I have learnt from my own experiences. And this time, the experiences are more medical in nature than the geeky or techie experiences elaborated upon in the other post. As I start typing this article, knowing what I want to eventually talk about, I am reminded of a poem I read during my school called “Ek Tinka” (A single particle). This poem was about telling people to lower down the sizes of their egos for a single particle was capable of making them cry or even killing them. What I am about to say is something similar.
I had to undergo a minor operation a month ago for a thing I did whose triviality is often over estimated. Lip biting! I bit my lower lip in a moment of intense thinking when I was completely lost and not at all conscious about what I was doing. I guess most of us do these kinds of things when lost in our world of thoughts. But a week later, I saw that a small part of the lower lip had swollen. An immediate check on the net revealed that this was apparently a ‘mucocele’. I also learnt that these things normally swell further and further until they eventually disappear on their own after bursting. But still, was it indeed what I was reading about or was it something more trivial or more malignant? Obviously, it was better to show it to a doctor.
My doctor told me it was indeed a mucocele. He advised a waiting period of 4-6 weeks for letting it go on its own. But this did not help. The mucocele burst and reappeared 2-3 times before we finally decided that it was time to remove it surgically. Now, I had heard all kinds of things about this procedure. I had heard people complain that it left them cosmetically deformed for a very long time and it was obvious that this was my major concern too. I had also heard about not being able to eat properly for a week after the operation. Sounds easy? No, sir, it ain’t! And moreover, this was going to be my first ever surgical procedure and that was itself capable of giving a few goose bumps.
Anyway, I was fortunate to have a doctor who was very concerned about the cosmetic outcome of the procedure and used a method quite different from what I had read about. He carved a deep incision and removed the entire fibrous deposit and instead of stitching my lips, he stitched a bolus onto it to prevent bleeding and gave me two days for allowing what is called ‘epithileal regeneration’, a fancy term that means ‘allowing the skin to grow back on its own’. But for two days, I had that bolus stuck between my lips causing intense salivation, not allowing me to speak and eat anything except the softest of foods. Two days later, it was removed. The healing had been quite good and there was no need for stitching the lip.
However, it was going to hurt if I try to consume food like a normal human being! What I had to do for the next few days was apply an antiseptic and an anesthetic gel to my lip before every meal and eat only with the spoon driving the food directly to the back of mouth avoiding contact with my lip. There is a hidden aspect to this which even the doctors did not mention to me and let me set the record straight that the reason doctors did not tell this to me is because none of their previous patients would have reported this to them! More about this later! When you apply an anesthetic to your lip, it loses all sensation. Obvious but what is not obvious is that when you lose sensation of the lip, it does not warn you about saliva coming out of your mouth and by the time you discover it, it has already drooled out of your mouth! I guess I can call it one of the functions of the lip – preventing saliva from drooling out of your mouth! And this is what happened to me as well and thus it was no longer possible to sit with people and eat with them. It was very awkward. Thus, I had to socially isolate myself at lunch and dinner tables while having meals at the canteen.
All this suffering for an act which we usually call ‘trivial’! Lip-biting! Now, I am not going to bite my lips any more after all this but I can hope that all those who are reading will stop that too! But I do not want to end with just a narration of this experience. There are other things I want to talk about as well. There are other small things that we do that are very harmful. The easiest to point out is sitting in a wrong posture. I have not seen many people keep their backs straight and follow other “rules” about sitting when working their day out at their work places which today are chairs in some office. My friend’s father has severe vertebral column damage due to long term incorrect posture. Heard of kidney stones? A common cause for their occurrence is the violation of a simple rule – ‘drink plenty of water everyday’. And no, I am not reading this off from some Wiki article but correlating the habits with people who suffered of this.
As a final example, let me quote a very horrible one. This is about Dave Mustaine, the leader of the heavy rock band ‘Megadeth’. And he is one of the craziest and talented guitarists I have ever seen. One fine evening, under the influence of alcohol, he fell asleep in a weird sitting posture. This posture caused severe damage to his radial nerve and his hand was paralytic. To me, this is all very scary! Just as an encouragement note, Dave Mustaine came out of it against all odds, re-learnt the guitar, produced 2-3 new albums and gave several world wide concert tours. But others might not be as brave or as lucky.
Apart from the word of caution that we must watch out for the smallest of things, I also want to talk about a lesson I learnt about the doctor-patient relationship. Feedback is very important. No matter what you are going through, as long as it not really common like a common cold, it is always a good idea to use some medium to communicate to your doctor about the problems you faced and how you battled them during the course of your treatment. This will actually allow your doctor to better warn or caution the future patients about the problems they will face. I would not be surprised if the friendly doctors were the most successful ones for I would be more than willing to share the tiniest of my experiences with a doctor with an open ear rather than an impatient one.
I shall end this post for now with the hope that none of you ever have to face big problems because of the small things!