" It seems quite strange that you have been in the dark about your father's disease ever since it was diagnosed two years ago," Dr Yamini's unsympathetic words pierced through the smothered silence in the hospital. I lowered down my head and allowed impertinent tears to roll down my cheeks.
But my ignorance was neither strange nor surprising. I had been away from home for my studies and vocation since I was 15. Separation from the affinity of dear ones enkindled in me the passion to pursue new ideologies and ‘refined relations’. I read books voraciously, watched ‘unholy’ movies iconoclastically, and smoked away depressing loneliness ridiculously. The Spartan life I was leading was sharp enough to cut off the tight bond of umbilical cords. Eventually, I kept a distance, not geographical alone, but psychological as well, from home. Now my father’s disease has turned out to be a chance for me to repent my sins. In Sufi literature, it is said that fate intervenes uncompromisingly to take one back to home. Home, as for Sufis, is not a building erected with bricks, but one’s original self characterized by repentance and kindness.
Has the fate donned the cloak of heedless cancer cells to script a climax in my life?
*
Stocktaking
It is a crude joke that we seek metaphysical solutions to ethereal problems. It is this escapism that has perpetuated tyrannies and injustice. We point our fingers at our fate and the stars under which we were born, at the way our horoscopes were written, and at how the gods and goddesses play the game of chess with our eventless lives. But those who mastermind everything escape unhurt. So, dear believer, always take your stock, all the while you disappear into the smoke of camphor and agarbatti or into the sonorous hymns echoed in temples and mosques.
Here is an account of what has happened in my father’s case, or of what is happening in the case of many valuable human lives trapped in terminologies like ‘incurable’, ‘beyond any control’, which the medical science has coined to explain what seems unexplained.
*
Diagnosis
It rained the whole day at RCC. Raindrops that were splashed on the windowpanes rolled down to get collected somewhere beneath the hospital walls. They reminded me of the cancer cells, which form somewhere in a complex organism and multiply beyond the level at which a body can sustain them. Acclimatized with the organism at the initial level, they metamorphose into dangerous cells having high potentials to wreck damage to the foundation on which they exist. Like the extravagant offspring in a dilapidated ancestry, they will become self-esteemed paupers in no time.
I studied his treatment summary the day he was admitted at RCC. At Lourdes Hospital, Kochi, it started as an obedient ulcer. Some medicines and a strict diet, he came to normalcy in a few months. But somewhere in his sturdy body beaten to fragileness by the medicines, cancer cells multiplied unawares. Headaches and incessant coughing, he relied on the nothing-to-worry-about argument, until he vomited blood and fell unconscious in the shop. Biopsy and CT scan followed. Dr. Satyapalan at Lourdes gesticulated the possibility of cancer, which was undoubtedly proved at Lakeshore hospital.
*
Treatment
While I was waiting for an appointment with the doctor at RCC, a turbaned man with his barely- two-year-old daughter stormed into the hall and took the seat next to mine. He held the child closer to his chest. She was staring at his face with her beady little eyes. ‘A-p-p-a,’ letters blurted out of her mouth as if they were syllables of a symphony. He answered her call with an unusual grunting accompanied with a counterfeit smile. None can genuinely smile at RCC, especially a father, whose dear one has tested positive for acute lymphatic leukemia, the disease which we nickname as blood cancer. The result of diagnosis was clearly marked in the card he unfolded in his palm.
‘Appa’, she again called
‘Yes my little one’, words came out one by one
‘You should tell doctor uncle not to inject that big syringe…….I can’t stand it Appa’
A deep silence followed
Her aversion to injection (used connotatively for chemotherapy) is not peculiar to a child of her age. Chemotherapy, as per the level of its intensity, is potent enough to overpower the normal functioning of an organism. A good-looking, pleasant face of that girl may become an ignoble structure marked with dark spots all around. Her hairs, which after many years will bewitch gandarwas, may wither away.
The treatment of cancer, it is said, is crueler than the very disease.
Due to the cancerous growth in my father’s lower esophagus, it was cut off to be replaced with a plastic one at Lakeshore hospital. After hours of waiting outside the operation theatre, my mother was told that everything was normal and ok. Check-ups and medicines followed.
On an unfortunate day, he underwent chemotherapy, which claimed a good portion of his bank account. “The chemo can create wonders”, Dr. Sridharan said, “It will terminate further growth of cancer cells and the patient can lead a normal life”. Check-ups and medicines followed.
A severe headache reappeared in one of the hottest days of this year.
“No need of a check-up. Consult a physician around there. It is a climatic effect”, doctor’s ‘studied’ response to our phone-call. When we went to meet the doctor desperately, we were sent back with bag of medicines.
“Nothing to worry about. You are over-anxious”, Dr Yamini told my mother with a pleasant face.
Days after that hospital visit, he felt headache. This time he fell unconscious, while he was praying at the mosque. He was taken to hospital and admitted there. As per advice, a detailed MRI scan of his brain was taken. The smile of Dr Yamini’s face instantly disappeared, while reading the scan report.
“Now the cancer has spread all over his brain”, she told me, “It may be the fourth stage. Go to Amala hospital. Let him undergo radiotherapy. But a recovery will be unlikely. The disease at this stage is incurable.”
Knowing that we have planned to go to RCC, they tried to discourage us.
“It will be difficult for you to travel such a long distance with the patient. Amala is the better option.”
I was told earlier by a friend of mine that Amala and Lakeshore had a tie-up. Patients are transferred from one place to another on a regular basis.
I insisted on RCC. He underwent five courses of radiation treatment in as many days at the centre.
It was at RCC that I knew that the metastasis (the spread of the cancer cells into different parts of the body) had been so uncontrollable that the prognosis of the disease was getting worse. The countdown has begun. In six months, I will be fatherless. Medical science dictates everything in a stronger tone than that of the Gods.
A few questions remain unanswered. Not even by so great an oncologist as Dr Gangadharan:
1, in the treatment chronology, surgery is followed by radiation and then by the chemotherapy. Why is it altered in the case of my father? Is it because there was no radiation facility at Lakeshore?
2, why did the doctors promise my mother after the chemotherapy that everything was normal and ok? Was it because the fact that the treatment was in effective in my father’s case would deal a double shock to her after a huge amount had been emptied from her purse, or because the doctors themselves were unaware of the whole situation themselves?
3, why, with all the fact that my father’s is one of the rarest cases, was the first incidence of his headache not given a proper consideration? Why did their negligence and indifference give maximum leeway for the cancer cells to multiply at an unpredictable level?
4, why need a great physician like Gangadharan have the records and files of a patient like my father (his is a rare case, I repeat) all the time we meet him?
*
Post script
When the elevator went up and down in the pay ward section of the RCC, it jerked at times giving me the impression that it was silently crying. The gadget might have borne decades of excruciating pain. It might have shared much of the inexplicable anguish in the faces it carried up and down. What more, the bodies of little ones in whom the music of life one day ceased were taken to the down floor through the elevator.
On a Sunday morning, an ambulance was moving with wreaths of flowers all around
“It is a leukemia patient. A two-year old girl,” the security guard told me.
I thought of the turbaned man and his daughter.” It may not be the little one”, I prayed in that brooding silence.
My father is now having both homeopathic and Unani treatment at the same time. In the former, they say, the treatment is not disease-oriented, but symptomatic. It focuses on how the patient behaves, what his mental make up is and how he identifies with his predicament.
In Unani, the body regains its inherent strength to fight back the disease. That is the basic principle of modern medicine, ingrained in the famous Hippocratic Oath. (The pledge that the medical graduates takes in the name of Hippocratus, the father of medical science, at their convocation ceremony before the pracice turned out to be hipocratic oath).
I will again post on this topic on November 1. It is when I will be fatherless, if the prediction of medical science holds any substance.
