“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”- Charles Dickens
It truly had begun to feel like that.
Worst of times? Clearly understood. Best of times? Metaphorically speaking of course. I mean who would like to lie down and sleep all day with horrible hospital food to eat, only white walls to stare at and minimal exercise. Definitely not what I signed up for when I entered the world .
The lying down part was already being taken care of by my highly conscientious physiotherapy.
I’m pretty sure all of you remember the extremely hilarious way in which I had gotten my voice back (LOG 8). One would expect that once I had gotten my voice back, I would not have left a single chance to speak out, considering the months of thoughts stuck inside my mind waiting to get out. On the contrary, however, I refused to speak a word. From the outside it would seem like I was angry with everyone. I guess my brain had gotten so used to creating conversations in my head that it decided to conveniently forget to switch off its silent mode. This was not something that was particularly helpful for my family and physiotherapists. They decided on using the one way by which even the toughest crack and start talking. As a part of my physiotherapy sessions, they would stretch my limbs, which quite normally does cause some pain. And even without intending to make me utter as much as one syllable, they struck gold and out came “PAIN”. Quite a big achievement at that time. This didn’t prevent me from giving my treating doctors the silent treatment though. It still took a few weeks for my brain to get used to the fact that conversations in real life were possible. At the most, I would utter a small sentence. This silence was to last for at least a month more. At this point of time, my family, particularly my sister, would keep count of the words spoken during the day and keep the logs. And every time we broke the record, it would be a celebration for all. From four words in a day to six was a celebration with all mathematical magic of “Hey, today there is an improvement of 50%.”
Then, there was the issue of the food. How were we going to be able to get real food i.e., non-hospital, non-patient – y, preferably home-cooked food, inside? The hospital rules on this were very strict, for obvious reasons. However, we managed to find a solution to this too. Home food could be brought in with a special approval issued by the treating doctor. With the help of my good doctors, we were able to get home made food in. The real effort though, was going to be taken my grandmother, uncles and aunts, and family friends, in actually preparing and travelling three times a day to make and get the food. And, I daresay, that my grandmother’s food, so infused with abundant love, despite being bland and overtly healthy, as should be for any “patient”, was dramatically increasing the rate of my recovery. All hail grandma’s food!!
In fact, it worked like nitros for my engine and boosted me so much that we reached a point where my doctor said that I could go home in 3-6 weeks if my recovery progressed at that rate! Exciting, right? You know, how some say that when everything is going good you should expect the unexpected? Well, turns out they were right in this case. Because soon after, I got my first seizure (there’s more to this story folks) for 5 minutes and it was a very intense one (eyewitness reports). I was to be affected very seriously. It was like we had just taken 5 steps ahead with my recovery, and were now 10 steps behind. It takes more than an internal earthquake to stop this boy though…I can be a bit stubborn, remember?… the race had just begun… my internal athlete was pushing me on to go the distance… would I or would I not? that is the question…