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.
