Gratitude - Part 2

So we pick up the thread from where we left out. The stoic doctors. The operation theater- families confronting the fact of death. The hospital Sri Ramachandra Medical College and finding humanity.


Well speaking of which I do not know how to begin. I so very much want to make it clear through my writing. I see them all interlinked. I do not see the beginning or the ending. One begins and ends into another. For the general practice to make writing a sequential progression of cause and effect will only make the subject more obscure. The problem is to strike a chord with those who read this piece perhaps person has to live through it to understand, I do not know. That was just a guess. This brain I am not the expert to know the functioning of the brain or its anatomy. I can only live it.


April 23 morning. I was waiting for the procedure of AVR (Aortic Valve Replacement) on my father to get over and was waiting to meet the doctors. 


(For those curious about AVR here is a link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmnzhuYRjz8)


Sometime in the afternoon I get to meet one of the doctors in the team and inquired about how the operation went. The doctor was relaxed calm and he said "Not to worry he is fine all the vitals are normal now he has been transferred to the ICU". For me that was a relief. Another family just came up to meet the same doctor and I heard him say, with the same calm in his voice, this as I head back to my room- "Sister tell them that the patient is no more...". Something hit me the relief I felt was gone. Thats life and death.


The hospital here Sri Ramachandra Medical college is a big system constituted by different departments further constituted by individuals right from the lift man to the man on top. Every body is doing his assigned task day in and day out. The insurance, the pharmacy, the nurses stations in different wards, the case files changing hands, the doctors investigating, studying and administrating treatment, the various labs churning reports. To this system people with different backgrounds seek treatment of myriad ailments, afflictions, recuperation, rehabilitation, to give birth or to breath their last. Good news and the bad news at the same time. Your brain does not know what emotion to ride on. One may describe it as a confusion in which case you make choice to feel happy or sad, a conscious choice. Or you do not choose. This brain of humanity evolved over millions of years can be unfettered, set free, let go. Mind you read me carefully. I state again the "Brain" and not your "Consciousness" is freed. Your Consciousness is your memory, what you state as self is your memory. What you know. Your Consciousness put it in its proper place. Freeing of the brain, now what the heck does that mean? Hear the sounds that you never hear, see the things that you never see, feel that you never felt before, smell that you never smelt and taste that you never tasted before. The anxious or surrendered faces, the medical students anxious before the exams, wheel chairs and stretchers and the squeak in the wheels, the resigned patient who would go under the knife, the prayers to the divine, all that pushing and shoving in queues, the first smile of a new born, the heart beat of a premature born through the incubator, the people in the shadows- those peons or more aptly hygienists, errand boys, the nerves of the doctors and nurses in the Emergency, the bleeding heads, broken bones, the bloody entrails, the fast response of the medicos, the relief of the ambulance driver having reached the hospital. Hear them, see them, feel them use every sense of body to listen to them. Thats the sound of the humanity breathing. The brain does not judge anymore not caught in duality between good or bad, life and death, it does not see any contradiction anymore, truth is not judged, the brain lives it. 


Its 6:00 PM in the evening and visiting hours to the ICU begins.My mother anxious but strong would be the only person to visit him for they allow only one person. 


I visit my father 6:00 PM on the 24th and the site of the ICU of all Cardio-Thoracic cases, a huge spotlessly clean and a sterile room, seeing my father gasping for air and all the monitors and lights bleeping away with lines and tubes running from arms, legs, chest. He loves to talk, speaking is his profession and passion no wonder his 30+ years in teaching in various capacities at IIT Madras. He was waiting the whole day for 6:00 PM to strike and to meet me and to talk. All the machinery and lines and his human body was more akin to an abomination, grissly experiment gone wrong. The Darth Vader breathing that ominous breath ...sshhhhshshshhshs... He was frail. The pain killers kept him going. I spoke little tried hard to keep it short, he spoke till he easily ran out of breath. This is surgical technology mastered by human intellect through ages and still refined and my father went through it. Life finds a way always.


Then there are other stories that I had only a glimpse. The nearest bed from my father's had this very little baby with gauzes and bandages, life support, sleeping. That little life is going through the juggernaut of medication and pain. I wonder how the face could be so serene? As I learnt later from my father, the child would only wail out late at night and not stop till dawn. There were many others going through the seemingly gut churning obstacle course in this game of life and death.


 All this only humbles. We will never fathom it completely in our understanding and any idea of that nature is only infantile. But we live with this miracle of our body or our organs and their organisation that we choose to name as the individual. Its quite funny, if you go into the etymology of individual


 from in- "not" + dividuus "divisible," from dividere "divide."


individual - the single, not divided.


Not divided into various organs, not divided into the mind and the body, not divided into the conscious, subconscious or the unconscious, not divided into any dualities- good or bad, me and you, your religion my religion, your loss my gain, communists capitallists, hindus moslems. We choose a word that denotes us but does not represent us. 


An Individual is the whole humanity if he is not divided both from the inside and the outside. The totality. You save one life you save the entire humanity. You free one individual you free the entire humanity. So are we really an individual?


I thank Dr Richard Saldanha and his team, the A7 ward staff and the entire staff of the Sri Ramachandra Medical college to have helped us through this medical miracle.