| |
“Time is running out... I am so sorry... I think you should tie up your affairs and try to live life to the max,” said the doctor, with a rather long face.
Nisha Sharma stared at the doctor not knowing what to say. She hated doctors. The bad news had nothing to do with that hatred. She had hated them from her childhood.
Nisha remembered vividly the first time she had visited a hospital. She was only five then. It wasn’t that she had not visited a hospital before. She was born in one, of course, but she was too young to remember anything about what had happened to her in those scary places.
She reminisced how her parents had taken her to the hospital for her vaccinations. For which vaccine, she couldn’t remember. But what she could recall was the smell of the place. The whiff of phenyl, which was so typical of hospitals in India in those days. It almost made her puke.
The doctor then had tried to smile at her but even as a child Nisha could sense how phony that smile was. He was—actually scary. He had a set of needles lying on his table, each one looking scarier than the other. Some of the needles were quite long and looked “piercy.” She knew that such a word didn’t exist in the English dictionary but that is exactly how she felt.
“Why do needles look so scary?” she remembered having asked the doctor. To her surprise, the doctor simply laughed. How evil! He tried to assure her that everything would be fine but she wasn’t convinced.
The doctor had asked her to lie down on a raised couch. With some trepidation, she complied and lay on her stomach. Without much ado, the doctor slid her skirt down. A startled Nisha looked at her parents expecting them to protest about the “bad thing” that the doctor was about to commit. But they were quite calm.
Meanwhile, the doctor had taken a cotton swab and drenched it with a brownish liquid which smelled like alcohol. He then gently rubbed the dab on her left butt. The cool effect it produced was not that bad. But just then, and before Nisha could react, the doctor pricked her with the needle.
The pricking wasn’t that painful, but a whimper still escaped Nisha’s lips. She felt as if a thorn had stung her bottoms. The whole experience was too uncomfortable.
Nisha had felt exhausted. She remembered asking her parents to take her to the Marine Drive to enjoy the sea breeze. Her parents never said no. They happily drove her to the sea shore and watched her giggling with joy when the fresh breeze from the Arabian Sea touched her cheeks and blew her long brown hair.
Twenty-five years later, she had to visit a hospital again. For quite some time, she wasn’t feeling too well. Her cough had persisted for over three weeks. She also had a debilitating pain in her back and her shoulders. It was only Raj, her husband who had insisted that she visited a General Physician. The GP had taken a note of her symptoms and ordered a battery of tests including a CT scan of her chest.
This meant visiting the hospital again. Nisha also had to be kept with no solid food for almost a day before doing the scan.
On the appointed day, Raj took Nisha to the hospital. Instead of phenyl, the hospital was now using some other, presumably better, disinfectant. But it still smelled strange and “hospitaly,” again a word Nisha just coined up. The sight of doctors and nurses in white, flitting in and out of cubicles and operation theatres, made her dizzy. The place was also full of sick people. Some looked despondent and forlorn. Some appeared to be on the verge of getting a panic attack. While some were waiting in small queues, probably to get their test reports.
The lady at the reception asked Nisha and Raj to take a seat in the waiting area. Soon a nurse came, and after checking her papers, gave Nisha a bottle of red liquid to drink.
“Why do they make you drink all that stuff?” Nisha wondered.
The red liquid tasted like “Rooh Afza,” a popular drink in India which is sweet and rose flavoured. May be the dye, which was needed for the scan, was mixed with Rooh Afza—she didn’t know for sure.
When she finished the bottle, she was asked to drink one more. She looked at Raj.
“I cannot drink more. I’ll throw up,” she protested.
“It’s alright. I’m with you. Try to drink as much as possible. Do your best,” said Raj reassuring her.
That wasn’t enough to calm her down. So Raj continued:
“Remember the place I had proposed to you five years ago. In front of the Gateway of India?” he said.
“Yes I remember,” said Nisha taking a sip of that strange red liquid. Her face lighting up a little.
“That was the best day of my life. It was January and the moment I uttered those magical words, we were greeted by a gust of cool breeze. As if nature was blessing us,” he said.
“That nature blessing bit was my dialogue. You stole it. You rascal,” she said hitting Raj on his back gently making him squirm.
That was the thing about Raj. His calm and composed demeanour always put her at ease. No matter how stressful the situation was, Raj always had a way out. He had his own unique style of making her relax.
Raj never revealed his emotions publicly. What he was thinking, only God knew. He was quite a mystery. But that was also the biggest reason why Nisha chose to marry him.
As she was taking sips of that red liquid, her stomach grumbled. The damn thing was no doubt making her sick. And she had now been given a third bottle to finish. After trying hard, she gave up.
“I have had enough of this,” she declared.
“Alright. Let’s stop,” said Raj.
A nurse finally called her name and Nisha got up. The nurse gave her a white coloured hospital gown to wear over her blue Salwaar Kameez. Nisha did that and moved with Raj towards the CAT machine which was in another room. She felt nervous and was almost clinging on to Raj.
“Don’t worry. I’ll never leave you alone,” he said.
That was Raj’s way of calming her down. It soothed her.
They finally entered the CT scan room. It was cold like a morgue. The room was—depressingly yellow. The staff gave Raj a thick jacket to wear which was meant to protect him from the radioactive waves emanating from the machine.
Nisha was almost terror-stricken when she looked at the machine. It was so damn scary. It looked like a combination of a front-loading washing machine laid on one side and a time travel machine. It had a tunnel like appearance with a round opening, big enough to swallow any human.
The hospital staff asked Nisha to remove her glasses and lie down on her back. She did that hesitatingly. Her stomach was grumbling and she was working hard holding up.
There was a whirr and slowly a conveyer belt started moving Nisha inside the CT scan machine. The machine made a strange noise. It kept getting louder and louder and louder and louder and louder....
Eeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
And with the sound, Nisha’s stress levels too were going up. She was only hoping that the machine was scanning her chest and nothing more. But what if it was far more sinister than that...
What if the machine took her back in time.....
What if the machine wiped away her memories.....
What if the machine cooked her body like a kitchen microwave.....
What if the machine read her mind and altered her thoughts.....
What if.....
Just then, the machine slowed down and with it Nisha’s blood pressure also came down.
As she moved out of the machine, a male nurse came over and said something scary:
“We’re going to inject you with something. It may feel strange but please don’t panic.”
“How reassuring,” Nisha wondered. She had no option but to nod.
The nurse injected something in her veins. In the beginning she only felt a prick. But then the sensation hit her. Oh my God—it was burning her from within. She felt a strange heat in her arms, from where it moved to her shoulders and to her chest. The sensation was just unbearable.
Had the nurse not warned her, she would have definitely run out. She could have probably punched the nurse on the way out, while praying to God to keep her alive.
Just then she noticed Raj sitting in one of the chairs wearing a thick jacket and maintaining quite a straight face. He was the only calming thing.
Nisha again moved back into the machine and the same process was repeated. This time she was asked to hold her breath—for how long—she didn’t know. It was may be for only 30 seconds but it felt like eternity.
Nisha kept moving in and out of the machine. Whenever she went in, the machine made the same scary noise which kept on getting louder and louder and louder. With it her stress levels also went up and up and up. When the machine quietened down, so did she.
The whole scanning business took a lot of time. When it was finally over, Raj got up and came over to her. He held her hand and helped her sit up slowly. When she put her feet on the ground, she felt wobbly. A chill ran through her spine and she realised how cold she had been all this while. She was just thankful that the whole thing—the whole damn thing—was over.
A week later, she visited the GP with her reports. As the doctor scanned through them, Nisha saw his face falling. Uh-oh, this was not sounding okay.
“Do you smoke?” asked the doctor rather sternly.
“No. Actually I’ve never smoked in my life,” answered a startled Nisha.
The GP called up another doctor, a specialist she thought. When Nisha visited the other doctor, she realised that he was an oncologist—that is someone who specialises in cancer treatment.
Obviously, some more bad news awaited her.
The oncologist told Nisha that she was suffering from lung cancer. It was at Stage IV, which meant that it had spread to other parts of her body like her shoulders, spine and ribs.
She didn’t have enough time to live. It was all over...
