Digital Thermometer

There was a time, when the thermometer inserted into the mouth, one was hoping and praying to the Lord Almighty, please let the mercury be at 99 at least and higher the better, a 101 was a sure Att"C" (Sick in quarter) for 72 hours, but even a 99 would get you at least 24 hours off. We would try all possible stunts, someone suggested keeping a cut onion under the armpit was a confirmed method of tricking the mercury in the thermometer into generating a reading of 100 plus. It never worked for me though! We would convince ourselves that we were down with a fever and the thermometer was playing tricks, despite blowing all the hot air into it, it just refused to budge beyond 98.4 deg F. With a normal temperature there was no hope for any leniency from the Duty Medical Officer and the Medicine & Duty (M&D) was like extending an invite to the CSM to be transformed into the mighty Khali in the WWF arena and  we were reduced to the punching bags who would be reduced to pulp.

Anyway, without digressing, the culprit was the thermometer and even today it is this device which continues to play truant. In the pandemic times, how one wishes that the instrument stays true to its traits of returning a 98.4 reading, but alas, it just refuses to heed our call. The mercury in the glass thermometer has paved the way for its digital avatar, which is quite precise in its reading down to decimal place. Its predecessor made the reading such an art form that as kids we could not make head or tail of that invisible streak of mercury which just flashed for a millisecond and before we could correlate it with the scale, it disappeared, despite squinting, holding it against light or any other means, till one of the oldies in the family grabbed it and with a flick announce the severity of fever. I always felt they fibbed, till I grew old enough to be able to read it myself. The digital one also comes with the beep to take it out of the mouth, unlike the glass mercury one, where one had to just hold the pulse and try reading it for about a minute. Then the elaborate exercise of giving it massive jerks to bring the mercury down again before depositing it in the case for safekeeping from kids. Mercury was highly toxic and could prove highly dangerous.

But somehow, due to the reliance on "old is gold" adage, we are more comfortable with the good old ones where there are no false reports, no cells discharged. Same as in the Blood Pressure instrument, the old phus-phus variety clinical mercury manometer as against the digital version, where discharged cells return erroneous results, which could prove very costly.

The latest to join the bandwagon is the pulse oximeter, a household name, which was unheard of till Covid struck. This is a simpler device though, and the readings are also pretty simple to record. In fact for the Corona patients it is the lifeline, which gives out the Oxygen level in the blood and any reading below 92 is a cause for worry, something akin to the CBSE Board score of less than 90. A report of 85 spells doom whether Board result or Oxygen level. 

As we battle the pandemic at all levels including personal ones, I wonder, how the cadets reporting sick would be feigning sickness now with all these digital gizmos, may be the CSMs are themselves armed with these to weed out the malingerers. But trust the ingenuity of cadets, when they could fall from the Log Tables, thereby getting photosynthesis in their legs to fool the Drill instructors, I am sure they will devise methods to hoodwink these machines as well.....