In our heart of hearts we know we are fooling ourselves. One day, we too will be bound to a hospital bed—rubber tubes poking out from every orifice imaginable—and completely reliant on someone else to take care of our ailing bodies. But that day is so far into the future, we tell ourselves, we need not bother about it, not yet.
I, for one, was an early recruit to the White Halls. I was only two when I started to have episodes of 'violent, gurgling breathing', I am told. The doctors in Kathmandu reliably informed my parents that I was a goner. But parental love triumphed and I was whisked away to the Christian Medical College in Vellore, just in case. There, they successfully operated on me and removed the tiny air bubbles that were clogging my lungs. I survived.
Since then, I was a sickly child. I wouldn't be able to walk for half a kilometer without feeling like my lungs were going to burst, the alveoli exploding out of my pressured eardrums. My hypersensitive bowels wouldn't allow me to eat out, or to eat right. All in all, standing at 6'1'' and all of 45 kilos, I was an emaciated bamboo stick.
No wonder I came to see all white-coats as my saviors. But some of them turned out to be worse than Dr Dolittle. Once, I was in Bir Hospital to have my wisdom tooth removed. A youngish-looking lady in white quickly jabbed in some Novocain. It hurt a bit, but nothing serious. But what followed might have been extracted straight from the sets of Saw. She took up a small metal hammer and a chisel to match and began pounding away at the back of my mouth. The suction pump was struggling to soak up the oodles of oozing blood. I fought to hold back my tears, in vain.
This ordeal lasted for a full half an hour when a senior doctor finally put in an appearance. He had one look inside my mouth and then, he exploded. A dentist who couldn't perform a 'simple' extraction should not get a license, he thundered. The young lady simply smiled. I was seething. It was another half hour of constant hammering before the 'impacted' tooth was levered out. It's been more than a decade since that fateful day and the left side of my face is still numb from the wannabe dentist's hatchet job.
Another senior doctor diagnosed me with an obscure, potentially life-threatening illness and started me on a heavy dose of medication right away. He wouldn't pay any attention to what I had to say. Nor did he speak much, which, in my perverse imagination, made him an even better doctor: still waters, after all, run deep.
As luck would have it, after taking his medicines for five years, I happened to be examined by another doctor. I had been misdiagnosed, the new doc told me, and all those medicines I had been taking over the years were wrecking my body. A third doctor confirmed the misdiagnosis. Much to my dismay, this quack, who happily pumped all those dangerous medicines into a young boy, continues to rake in money from his legions of gullible patients.
Modern medicine really has its own logic. As I write this, I am surrounded by in-patients in this cancer ward, each one of them with a stage three or four cancer. They don't have much longer to live. But they still come, by the droves, at the expense of hundreds of thousands rupees, to have their lives extended by another three or four months. If I was in their place, I would do the same.
But, my word, there are so many hospitals in Kathmandu these days and, apparently, all of them are in profit, cancer ward or no cancer ward. It means either the medical establishment has convinced us that our health is wholly dependent on them; or our modern lifestyle is so unhealthy and the couch-potato syndrome so common, catering to lifestyle diseases is a foolproof business.
So back to the cancer patients who surround me. What brings them here? What did they do wrong? Did they drink a wee too much? Or smoke a packet too many? Or did they not exercise enough? I know the answer. I just don't want to accept it. Most of them are here out of pure chance. They didn't do anything wrong. In which case, even if I do everything right, I could be in their place tomorrow. This is one thought I try to banish with all my will whenever I roam about this ward of mortals.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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