DOWN THE MEMORY LANE: SOME BRUISES

There he was sitting, as if he had just woke up……feeling a little dizzy. He was glad he could get a seat because he was tired. He felt weak. He looked around. He saw people with their family members, people on wheelchairs with expressionless faces. He saw the big queue in which his dad was standing. He frowned to read the board displayed on the counter. It said ‘Appointments for MRI scans, CT scans, USGs and X-rays’.

The queue was long. Suddenly a thought pinched him. It was a realization about his dad. That it was this man who had been there to catch him or pull him up every time he fell. He felt deluged with gratefulness with an intensity never felt before. After about one hour his dad came and said, “Let’s go”. He then followed his dad. On the way he gazed around so inquisitively, not just because the place was new to him but also because he was trying really hard to understand the place, its geography, its functional divisions, all cognitively. He saw his report which said ‘Minor head injury’ with medical terms like hematoma, contusion and hemorrhage. He folded them back as he didn’t get much of it.

After the normal physician checks and some cognitive tests by the neurologist, he met a lady named Jenefer Rose who happened to be his therapist. He found her attitude genuinely friendly, without any tint of diplomacy. She gave him a paper which was something like a question paper. He read (with effort of course). The paper had questions like: Which is your favorite color? What are you pursuing academically? There were options given to tick. He ticked the ones which his injured mind could best procure on the benchmark of correctness. The last question was to write a sentence in English. He wrote ‘I want to get well at the earliest’. Jenefer read that sentence aloud as her eyebrows rose with hope and care. (She was giving him similar looks that Aamir Khan gave Darsheel Safary in Taare Zameen Pe). After that she asked him, “How are you feeling now?” He raised his eyebrows in frustration and replied with pauses “I wanted to do a creative writing course. And now I have to hunt for words to even express myself, how would I feel”. She was silent for a moment. Then she said “Come”. She took him to a ward adjacent to the occupational therapy ward where she spoke very warmly to a boy (of about 10 years). The boy was lying down in ventilation with oxygen pipes, food pipes all attached to him. She told him what had happened to the boy. The boy was happily cycling back home when he meet with an accident with a car and injured his spine and brain. With the spine and brain injuries, he couldn’t move his legs nor could he speak. He had to be feed via the pipes. She turned to him and said “Now you should feel lucky”. He stared back while he was trying to feel the depth of her words. She took him back to the occupational therapy ward and gave him a simple puzzle to solve. He grabbed it. He was determined. He found speed and accuracy hard to bring to a common platform. He was slow, yet further slowed down. He finally solved it but found his bile rising up his throat at his inability to solve it at the wink of an eye. He literally had to slog for it. Then she asked him to do something like a cat walk, i.e. walk on a single continuous line longitudinally with subsequent steps touching each other. He again started with determination but soon tripped off due to his disturbed muscular co-ordination. That moment he felt the pain of a hundred knives daggered to him. But what was strange was he smiled sarcastically as if he was smiling at his present, what life had brought him. And then his facial expression became intense and his body language became stiff. Seeing this Jenefer said “It seems like you want to say a lot of things but you are not able to”. He closed his eyes and tried to swallow the agony. She understood the pain. She said “Do how much ever you can….Leave the rest……But don’t give up…..Don’t panic, stay calm”. He nodded affirmatively.

 That was a day in his life.   And that day is reminded every time he hears any incidence of any injury leading to hospitalization, especially of the CPU (head). He and his cool life style are brought to a halt, dragged into awkward moments of time dilution, make him go back into these moments (powerful flashbacks of his past) and he has no control over them. But there is some meaning to them too. They teach him how precious life is and how blessed we “normal” people are.