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It’s true I don’t remember most of what happened during the flight, a regular flight after all, but my memories of what came after are crystal clear. This is probably because I was wide awake from the time we left Dubai. After the landing, what happened after got the stone rolling. And like they say, a rolling stone gathers no moss. Surely, from here on, just as my family believed, my recovery graph showed only one direction and that was getting better. The inside of an ambulance is not quite as bad as  you’d expect. As soon as we landed, no time was wasted, and I was shifted to the ambulance. My doctor aunt accompanied me in the ambulance and we set off for the first hospital where I would be resident for one week until I would be shifted to another hosplita where I was to be resident for… They had told me to sleep in the ambulance. This was a near impossible task, partly because of the excitement, and partly because of the unholy siren that accompanies an ambulance. Thankfully though, the ambulance ride was uneventful and comfortable. We reached the hospital’s terribly overcrowded emergency room. In fact, if I remember correctly, it was so crowded that nobody had attended to me for quite some time. It was after nearly half an hour later that they had completed the formalities and eventually shifted me to my room. And, oh my god, what a contrast to my room back in Dubai. There I had a whole room to myself, a view, good lighting, etc. And here I was now, in a twin sharing room, with barely enough bed space, deficient in lighting, and a tiny sofa for my attendant. It was not much but more than enough to get us through the one week we stayed at the first hospital. Although our stay was short, there were quite a few crucial events that took place here. First, I was completely rid of all of my tubes. They started with incredibly intensive physiotherapy, and how I dreaded seeing the physiotherapist back then. You see, the pressure in my incomplete skull felt way too much for such escalation of physiotherapy. I also experienced my first MRI scan, which was just terribly noisy. My speech therapy paid off as well and I was able to drink my first sips comfortably & utter my first word. After a month of silence and valiant efforts by using different means, my family finally managed to awaken my hibernating voice box with the best incentive of all time – food! Being fed for nearly a month through a Ryle’s tube(NGT or naso gastric tube), I was pretty sure I had forgotten how good food tasted like, and yet the desire to eat everything around me lingered. We received amazingly tasty looking food from all visitors. Who numbered in double digits on the second day already! One of these food consignments had a box of home-made brownies. My sister, who had been majorly continuing my “speech therapy”, offered them to me on one condition, “If you say brownie, only then will you get one” – goes a long way to show how difficult elder sisters can be at times. I had hated brownies for all my life but strangely enough, when she said this, and I suppose I was like a drowning man grasping at a straw to save his life, I spoke. Spoke with a lot of effort and out came the word “BROWNIE”, hoarse but clear. And Eureka!!! We had just struck gold! Needless to say, I got to have my first morsel of true non-patient food after what seemed like an eternity. What happened after this was no different from me being treated like a baby who just uttered his first words – OOOOOH! HE SAID IT! OH MY GOD, DID YOU HEAR THAT?? Ok, now say “Milk” … oh, oh! It works! Ah, now say “waaaa-tttteerrr”. It was a circus out there! Oh, and how can I forget? If you remember correctly, until now, I was being fed by a tube from my nose to my stomach. On getting to taste the brownie, I ventured too far out in euphoria and ate an entire bowl of brownies. I guess I wasn’t ready for it that time – and I vomited everything along with my tube out. Thank god, that was the last time I heard from it ever again. A small victory for us, the battle was yet to be won. These were good signs, small victories like these can sum up to big battles being won. Although we had anticipated only a 3 month-long stay in India, little did we know, it was going to be much longer and what lay ahead was going to be even harder…