Only one thing is worse than having to deal with severe illness. And that is a sense of failure - of having let down someone who is very close to you. In my case it was my mother.
As some of you might know, I have studied medicine. Hence I could often see ahead, things that others could not. When my mother first started losing weight, when she would just have an orange or an apple for lunch, when she threw up if we forced her eat, I knew where we were all headed.
Nearly three years have passed, but in our minds it is still happening, very much in the present. I guess some wounds remain raw, they never heal. That’s different from what jilmil says.
I can never forget the morning I got a phone call from Calcutta at about 7.10 a.m.; it was my father telling me that my mother had collapsed! An hour later, another phone call - this time from a hospital two thousand kilometers away.’Tell him she’s been put on a ventilator!’ I heard someone else say, while my father struggled to speak. I took the next available flight and reached Calcutta just in time.
Later I came to know, the voice that prompted him was that of his older cousin, and a retired pathologist himself. Another lesson - it takes one doctor to understand another. But tell me, do medical people really speak another language?