Blabbering About Illness Generally

As magically/mysteriously as I had fallen ill, I have recovered. One side effect is partial amnesia: it took me five minutes to remember the name of my apartment complex, and frankly, when I saw my parents’ and my husband’s face, it took me a little while to figure out what they REALLY looked like. It’s the end of an era of taking my temperature obsessively, looking up terminal diseases on Wikipedia, reading books and watching movies, and lots of medicines and delirium.

I’m going to take some time to regain my strength and fit into the “fit” world, most importantly the job about which I seem to have only vague recollections now…

People use their illness to rethink their lives and priorities. I don’t think I used this opportunity well enough, but I did manage to get some thinking done. That’s confidential, of course, but what is quite public is my fantastic experience at the very multicultural and very bumbling-idiot-like hospital in London, from where I emerged no better, with no medical guidance, with a painful hole in my arm where a very inept Mallu doc inserted one of those contraptions that make a semi-permanent input-output channel into your bloodstream, and a painful hole in my ankle where the X-ray lady rammed my pretty yellow wheelchair in (ow!). The hole in the ankle persists feebly, while the four inch purple bruise on the arm is now faded, after excellent service as Voldemort’s death eater mark in my Harry Potter reading days.

Also, what is it with putting you in that nangu hospital gown???? I mean, it’s all strings, and after I took ten minutes to tie it up, they came and told me it was backside-front and whatnot! They expected me to tie a million knots behind my back??? When I am sick enough to need emergency treatment?? Loonaticks! The gown was not even pretty!!!! And they gave me a cheese sandwich in unopenable packaging for a snack in the evening, which looked oh so tempting but my drip-waali right arm was no good at opening it, so it just lay there…

Compare this with the Emergency section at the Delhi hospital where my parents took me in Delhi as soon (I mean AS SOON) as I landed. The nurse knew more about everything than any doc in the London hospital, told me which tests would be negative even as she drew my blood, put me in a wheelchair that was not yellow but which she did not ram into my ankle, and packed me off in an hour, while in the neighboring cubicle a young man was reassured that he DID have heart disease at his young age, as did a lot of other people, and that the swank hospital could not be funded by the heart diseases of the elderly alone… It is another matter that the hospital’s thermometer recorded 103 degrees temperature in my left armpit and 98.7 in my right (Hello!) and there is some reason to believe they messed up my samples. So basically, when you are ill, you are in the hands of God Almighty only.

So children of the world, rest adequately after a baby viral or momma viral and granny viral will come get you…do not mix your paracetamol and ibuprofen…stay away from Wikipedia when ill, and trust in God. Change your path labs till you get normal results, and try and have whatever fun you can. And I am serious: No Wikipedia!!!!