I don't always have to know the ending. Given my work, I always find myself in the hilt of the war. It's a constant war between living and dying. I never know their endings and I certainly don't know much of their past. I'm facing, everyday, the personal tragedies of absolute strangers. Do I like it? Not always.
I meet the elderly couple who have no one to support them, help them in their major war. I watch the old man crying through his Gandhian glasses. He says he has no money. He is literally watching himself die day by day. His wife runs around searching for money at every possible opportunity. Poor people, they claimed they earned more than they did for appearance's sake. Now, the government says they do not qualify the free treatment. So he will watch himself die a slow, painful death as the disease spreads it's tentacles in him.
I can't say where my job ends and when do I begin. I remain unscathed (for the most part) by the everyday reminder of impending death around me. It's there, you can't dodge it for long. Yes, if you are really lucky you will get away 90% scot-free. However, if you get it once it will always lurk in your mind like an inconvenient ghost.
I met wife who hides the truth from her educated husband. She does it well. Much like a fierce lioness guarding her little ones. She said it was to make sure he had the courage to fight the disease. She was right. He did completely believe that he just did not have cancer, just a disease which was uncommonly similar to it. He will fight this apparition, he said. She, on the other hand, said she will watch him fight it like a brave dying knight. How terrible for her, I had thought. To be the protector and the ultimate victim.
Often, as soon as I set foot outside the hospital...well, actually into my car, I consciously leave my experiences where they came from. Sometimes, however, they haunt me. Cancer is a word you say in a whisper, lest you might get it. The treatment is so immensely painful and unforgiving. A cancer diagnosis literally shakes the very ground you stand on and makes you appraise the life you have led so far. It makes you numb, it makes you cry, it makes you want to curse out loud, it makes you miserable and it strips you of anything to believe in. It's a gut-wrenching, dreary, lonely experience. No one will ever know how much you suffered. Your story will die with you.
I bump into an elderly couple every 3 weeks of my visit to the hospital. They break my heart, but then again elderly couples do that to me. The old man was in tears when he told me his life's story.. 5 children, 2 sons and 3 daughters. They did right by their children and lived off their land for the past decade. Now she has a rare cancer. He is in tears as they are depending on their eldest son and his difficult wife to take care of them in the vast city. They don't know what the diagnosis is, they don't know what hospitals are like, they don't understand the city people, they don't have any freedom, he doesn't have a mattress to sleep on, they are unaccustomed to the cold/fan. They are like bewildered sheep infront of a hungry lion. Oh. They break my heart into a million pieces. I wish I could promise them a happy ending.
Life presents us all with so many options. But what options would my patients pick? To watch oneself die? To fight a fake disease? To struggle with limited resources? What makes our life this special that we'd do anything to try and keep it? Why is our love so great that we will battle it with our ailing one? What great human emotion makes us do the crazy things we do when faced with our mortality?
Each time I step into the hospital, I feel a queasiness engulfing me. I'm going to meet another unhappy patient, or another patient who is unarmed with information, or one who is grappling for hope. Often they numb me into a professional poise. This is one of those rare times when they evoke such basic feelings in me, that I wish to get rid of them. They wrap their stifling stench around me and remind me of how ephemeral we are. How meaningless our essential existence is. We fill our life with the noise of love, laughter, dreams and family. They are snapshots of the mirage we are. In the end of the day, nothingness pervades. We become a nothing and therein lies our answer.
We had no end, so we will have no beginning. We didn't even begin..we are just a part. Our state of being is the only thing we know. And our state of being is often a state of suffering. Our suffering emerges as an corollary to happiness. We chase happiness like it is real. Reality is what we deem it to be. So we are mini-worlds constantly colliding with other mini-worlds. Sometimes we glide past each other, other times we bump into each other. So what? We are pointless because we weave our own realities and we won't disentangle from them. We're busy creating our realities when they won't exist after we're gone. We, suddenly, will become smoke in the air. And just like that, we will become another state. of. being. And that will repeat itself. So we always land in the thick of things, never at the start or at the end.
I wrote absolute bullshit. Coz I hate my job as much as I love it. I loathe my patients as much as I admire them. Knowing their tiny worlds makes mine a bit bigger, but a little less manageable.
I meet the elderly couple who have no one to support them, help them in their major war. I watch the old man crying through his Gandhian glasses. He says he has no money. He is literally watching himself die day by day. His wife runs around searching for money at every possible opportunity. Poor people, they claimed they earned more than they did for appearance's sake. Now, the government says they do not qualify the free treatment. So he will watch himself die a slow, painful death as the disease spreads it's tentacles in him.
I can't say where my job ends and when do I begin. I remain unscathed (for the most part) by the everyday reminder of impending death around me. It's there, you can't dodge it for long. Yes, if you are really lucky you will get away 90% scot-free. However, if you get it once it will always lurk in your mind like an inconvenient ghost.
I met wife who hides the truth from her educated husband. She does it well. Much like a fierce lioness guarding her little ones. She said it was to make sure he had the courage to fight the disease. She was right. He did completely believe that he just did not have cancer, just a disease which was uncommonly similar to it. He will fight this apparition, he said. She, on the other hand, said she will watch him fight it like a brave dying knight. How terrible for her, I had thought. To be the protector and the ultimate victim.
Often, as soon as I set foot outside the hospital...well, actually into my car, I consciously leave my experiences where they came from. Sometimes, however, they haunt me. Cancer is a word you say in a whisper, lest you might get it. The treatment is so immensely painful and unforgiving. A cancer diagnosis literally shakes the very ground you stand on and makes you appraise the life you have led so far. It makes you numb, it makes you cry, it makes you want to curse out loud, it makes you miserable and it strips you of anything to believe in. It's a gut-wrenching, dreary, lonely experience. No one will ever know how much you suffered. Your story will die with you.
I bump into an elderly couple every 3 weeks of my visit to the hospital. They break my heart, but then again elderly couples do that to me. The old man was in tears when he told me his life's story.. 5 children, 2 sons and 3 daughters. They did right by their children and lived off their land for the past decade. Now she has a rare cancer. He is in tears as they are depending on their eldest son and his difficult wife to take care of them in the vast city. They don't know what the diagnosis is, they don't know what hospitals are like, they don't understand the city people, they don't have any freedom, he doesn't have a mattress to sleep on, they are unaccustomed to the cold/fan. They are like bewildered sheep infront of a hungry lion. Oh. They break my heart into a million pieces. I wish I could promise them a happy ending.
Life presents us all with so many options. But what options would my patients pick? To watch oneself die? To fight a fake disease? To struggle with limited resources? What makes our life this special that we'd do anything to try and keep it? Why is our love so great that we will battle it with our ailing one? What great human emotion makes us do the crazy things we do when faced with our mortality?
Each time I step into the hospital, I feel a queasiness engulfing me. I'm going to meet another unhappy patient, or another patient who is unarmed with information, or one who is grappling for hope. Often they numb me into a professional poise. This is one of those rare times when they evoke such basic feelings in me, that I wish to get rid of them. They wrap their stifling stench around me and remind me of how ephemeral we are. How meaningless our essential existence is. We fill our life with the noise of love, laughter, dreams and family. They are snapshots of the mirage we are. In the end of the day, nothingness pervades. We become a nothing and therein lies our answer.
We had no end, so we will have no beginning. We didn't even begin..we are just a part. Our state of being is the only thing we know. And our state of being is often a state of suffering. Our suffering emerges as an corollary to happiness. We chase happiness like it is real. Reality is what we deem it to be. So we are mini-worlds constantly colliding with other mini-worlds. Sometimes we glide past each other, other times we bump into each other. So what? We are pointless because we weave our own realities and we won't disentangle from them. We're busy creating our realities when they won't exist after we're gone. We, suddenly, will become smoke in the air. And just like that, we will become another state. of. being. And that will repeat itself. So we always land in the thick of things, never at the start or at the end.
I wrote absolute bullshit. Coz I hate my job as much as I love it. I loathe my patients as much as I admire them. Knowing their tiny worlds makes mine a bit bigger, but a little less manageable.
