Mrs Patil walked into the clinic with her daughter. She was in her 60s, wore a hand-woven saree, and tied her hair in a bun. She was the principal of a renowned school and rested her glasses low on her nose to complete the look. When she spoke to me, her eyes peered above her spectacles, taking me back to my school days, when our teachers glared at us when they wanted to appear to be strict. Unfortunately, she had a problem with her vision. “I am unable to see on my sides,” she mentioned. “When I’m attempting to cross a road, I can’t tell if a car is coming, and I keep bumping into things in the house,” she went on to explain.

Her eye doctor was quick to realise that this was a sign of optic nerve compression and asked for an MRI of the brain, which her daughter pulled out amidst sheaves of other reports. After I examined her, I wedged the films into the viewing box and went on to explain what we all knew. “She has a gigantic tumour arising from the pituitary gland in the centre of the head that’s grown large enough to push the optic nerves up. Both sides of her visual fields are affected because the tumour is compressing the junction of both optic nerves as they leave the eye,” I tried to explain simply.