Part 1:
On the 13th of October, I was on my way back home from the factory when it started raining. Now when I say raining, it means it was literally pouring down and Pune was under the risk of being flooded. I had resigned to the fact that it was going to take a long while to reach home so I took out a book and started reading to kill time. The book was about guy who was undergoing a time of personal confusion regarding his love for a girl and how he was stuck in a friendship lagoon he was not being able to get out of. As I was reading the book, subconsciously I started relating to the situation and my head started aching. All sorts of weird thoughts started coming to me, right from school time, to college to my first job in Accenture, MBA and the last 6 months spent in my current company. Maybe it was all the pent-up frustration that was all getting collected in my head which was receiving a trigger.
I reached my place, I put the book back in and all I could feel was anger, sheer, raw anger. Anger at everything, my life, my job, my way of looking at things, my knack of getting played around with… everything. It got so nasty that I even shouted at a guy on the road who was driving on puddles without realizing that the water was being thrown on bystanders.
I walked over to an Udipi restaurant, had dinner in that catatonic state, reached home and slept off in the hope that this day will pass off and I will start afresh. When I woke up the next morning, I realized that I was shivering and was feeling very warm on my forehead. My ears were burning as well. Like old times I didn’t think much about it and went for a bath and left for office. While in the office I was sitting on my desk when I started feeling really cold. It was a new assignment and I was expected to work on it. I went through the paces, set the meetings up, read through the docs that were to be discussed and prepared for the meeting. All through the day I was feeling a funny sensation of warmth on the forehead and ears. I ploughed through the meeting and rushed towards the bus to go home.
On my way back, I slept off. My eyes thankfully opened when the bus had reached my stop. I started feeling very weak and reached my home. I threw my bag and fell on the bed. As soon as I kept my head on the pillow, I felt my forehead becoming really warm and my vision started spinning.
I just closed my eyes and just lied down for 2 hours. When I woke up the temperature was still there in the forehead and I realized that I was hallucinating when I closed my eyes. I saw weird things and weird shapes bombarding my mind, making it difficult for me to sleep. I decided I had to get a check-up done. I reached Noble Hospital where a regular check-up was done and I received an injection. The doc there said, my temperature will subside by the next morning. I went back and slept off. The next morning I woke up and realized that my temperature had actually subsided so I prepared to go to office. When I sat in the bus to go to the office, my forehead again started feeling warm and the heat had returned to my ears. I reached the office but my supervisor realized I was in no position to work so he arranged for me to come home. I reached home and lied down again with the forehead and ears almost burning now. I called up my parents and they found out that I wasn’t doing really well. The call was a pleasant change from the constant headaches and lack of sleep.
I continued taking medicines as was suggested by the doc but they were not helping the temperature subside. The next day I took a sick leave and decided that I need to switch to simple food like fruits and milk to get back to normalcy, This was after going without normal food for three days. Due to the medicines and lack of food, my body had started showing signs of weakness as I was finding it difficult to sit up for a decent amount of time. In the afternoon I got a call from the office and I was surprised to hear that they had arranged a doctor to come and see me at my place. The doc came and suggested that it maybe a little more serious than what the initial diagnosis suggested. He gave me 4 medicines and left with a smile saying , you will be all right. I took the medicines as per the prescription and started having fruits. The next thing I realized was that my digestion had gone for a toss. I developed a permanent pain in the abdomen and whenever I had to stand or walk or even lie down, my stomach would wince. I decided then and there that I won’t have any more medicines and whatever check-ups or tests needed to be done will be done in Delhi.
Part 2 -:
It had been 8 days since I had first felt that idiotic sensation in my forehead and ears. I had somehow managed to pull through these 8 days and finally boarded the flight to Delhi. Truth be told it was the most painful flight I had undertaken due to the constant pain in my stomach and the refusal of my body to accept any sort of food. Even drinking something as seemingly harmless as water had become a pain. The flight landed at T3, New Delhi. I had only read and heard about the sheer size of that terminal and I literally hated it for precisely the same reason that evening. It took me about half an hour to get out of the terminal and reach the exit gate where my parents were standing. I was limping all through and they didn’t miss it. I reached the car with my mother and collapsed in the backseat.
The next day I was taken to the hospital for a check-up and was diagnosed with Jaundice and Typhoid. Now, I had heard these two words many number of times but never ever had imagined that they will be used in my context. For me at that moment it meant an end to all the plans for Diwali and a long time to be spent in the hospital(something I always dreaded..).
Getting admitted to a hospital is an experience in itself. You wait in the lounge as the paper work is done. Then an attendant comes towards you with a wheel-chair and puts you on it. Then you are pushed into a lift and taken to the ward where he next 10 odd days of your life are going to be spent. Once you reach the ward you are made to stand the wheel-chair is pushed back. The attendant helps you lie down on the recliner –bed which can be reclined to aid patients to sit –up or lie down without moving a muscle. The ward looks like a 2 star hotel room with white dominating the color palette. To add to the effect there are weird looking bottles hanging upside down from stands. Of course you don’t know yet that these bottles contain life-saving fluids that will be routed to your body through a drip arrangement. A drip basically means a needle that will pierce your hand at a location where it hurts the most and be kept there so that it can act as a ready-made funnel for all the fluid to enter your body.
Once on the bed the ‘Angels of Death’ (nurses), dressed in all whites start their duty. They always carry a BP machine and a tray with needles and tapes. The drill goes like this -:
They ask for any one of your hand, tie the BP machine strip to your hand and press it as hard as they possibly can and check the BP reading. It’s an altogether different matter if the level of the arm and heart are same for an accurate reading. Once done they will check your hand and see where they can find a nerve to place the drip there. For me they checked both my hands and tried to find a nerve in five different points. It basically means I got injected 5 times on my left hand and my agony had no limit. Finally they left the left hand and moved to the right. Voila , they found the nerve in one go and placed the drip between my thumb and right index finger. Once the drip started , the pain subsided And I lied down and slept off due to the sedating effect of the fluid.
The worst part of these diseases is the loss of appetite. The body’s refusal towards food intake of any kind creates a double problem of weakness and more sedation. The docs saw it and put me on a liquid diet where I had to take coconut water and a full glass of Glucon-D every 15 minutes. After a point I could actually feel the water jump in my tummy due to so much intake. I understood life’s irony in those 10 days because whenever I used to sleep the only things I could think of was super delicious food that I was missing out on, being in the Hospital. I remembered how a month back me and mom had discussed what all we would do and where all we would go during Diwali and all that had been reduced to rubble due to this illness of mine.
Another disturbing part of getting admitted is if the nurses don’t know their job well, your life can be turned into a living hell. One fine morning I realized that my hand had swollen to two times its size and I could clearly see red blood vessels on my forehand. I jumped in my bed and called the nurse. They concluded that the drip was put incorrectly and the fluid was collecting within the hand making it swell, so it had to be changed now to the other hand. Hence, the agony of getting the other hand injected with a big needle with no clarity of where the nerve would be found this time was about to be relived. My mom was next to me and held my hand through that. This time call it luck but they managed to fix the drip in one attempt and correctly as well.
After about 6 days in the hospital I had my first decent meal of Rice, Dal and curd. I ate very little but it felt good to be returning back to normal food after a month of having nothing really. I was asked to begin walking a little within the ward to start the recuperation process. On the 8th day the doc came to see me and was happy with my progress. I had grown very impatient and was desperate to get the hell out of that hospital and go home. But the doc requested another 2 days in the hospital to be doubly sure about discharging me.
On the 10th day I finally reached home and immediately felt better. I realized that since the time I had landed in Delhi I had not spent any time at home. The next two weeks were absolute bliss as I spent time at home, did nothing and just soaked in the warmth.
Now I have recovered decently to start working but the horror story that started on that rainy day in October keeps reminding me of the fickle nature of things we take for granted. Imagine a thing like sitting up on bed which is a normal activity no one thinks much about, had become a pain to carry out. And to think of it, all this was started by one supposedly clean(?) glass of water.
