Since I suffer from claustrophobia, so I decided to go up by stairs. The wide and long staircases of the majestic SKIMS Srinagar tested my legs and strength to climb. I reached a spacious corridor, gasping, with my tongue hanging outwards. The crowded passageway leading to the ward, which I was intending to visit, sent shivers down my spine, because the term “cancer ” is enough to make your sweat glands secrete quicker. A sign board at the end of the corridor, above a big aluminum door header, froze my feet when I read “oncology department”. I was in a state of perpetual horripilation because the carcinophobia stimulated my adrenal gland to release abundant quantity of cortisol. I was terribly frightened and depressed, yet I gathered courage, and resumed to tread on the path to the ward.
I entered the ward by lifting a thick woolen curtain. There were four patients in the ward. My eyes straight away caught sight of my relative who was undergoing a dose of chemotherapy. He was in a semi-conscious state, trembling and panting with pain. I stood by his side for some minutes, watching him battling with life. A young, energetic and healthy-looking thirty year old man, with lots of unfulfilled yearnings, longings and wishes, was entrapped in ghastly leukemia. Watching someone clenched in the harsh clutches of death, is somewhat awfully horrendous. My sympathy for my relative mounted to manifolds. My eyes turned moist, my heart sank deeper and a feeling of evanescence spread throughout my nerves.
Meanwhile, I sat down on a stool with my back against the bed of the patient. In front of me was a young, beautiful and fairer girl whose mother was spoon feeding her. She had lost her hair including her eyebrows to the cruel chemo. I forgot my relative because the plight of this young girl was more heart-wrenching. I couldn’t stop gazing at her. Her black eyes as deep as ocean were filled with dejection, despair, disappointment and dismay; yet she was aspiring to fight the deadly ailment. An untold epic of agony was visible on her face.
Noticing my gaze at her, she spread her hands for dupatta to cover her hairless head. She felt a bit embarrassed because hair is the most important ornament of a woman which immensely enriches the grace and elegance of a lady. Though men can afford to lose the hair of their heads, but women can’t, because feminine charm and beauty is subservient to her long hair braids. Losing hair is one of the most horrific tragedies for the fairer sex.
Well, her mother who was lovingly feeding snacks to her, helped her with some headgear to hide her miserable conditions. She was occasionally peeping through the window by her bedside. The view outside, visible from the elevations of the fourth floor, was quite ambivalent. People were busy in their routine works. Some were celebrating success while as some were mourning their grief. She asked her mother to raise her bed to a fowler’s position so that she could have a broader glimpse of the world outside her ward. I began to feel her pain. She wanted to live, but the fear of cancer had dwindled her hopes. I began to empathize her. Though I had read lots about empathy, but the moment gave me the best experience of it. The deadly ailment had crippled and confined her to the bed. I could imagine her wounded back because the prolonged stay on the bed had given intensely painful sores to her.
Her ordeal fixed my feet to the tile floor of the ward. I wanted to console her, but, how? She too, probably, wanted to share her predicament with me. Her parched lips were trembling too frequently to utter her emotions out. She probably wanted to tell me that she had been beautiful and gorgeous prior to her disease, and perhaps wanted to narrate the saga of her shattered dreams. The sweltering chemotherapy had diminished and blemished her beauty. I could see a photo album by her right side. She took up the album in her hands, and began to look at the photos. Tears were silently rolling down her face. She paled, sighed, sobbed, and finally, fainted.
Her mother straight away ran for the doctor. A group of doctors accompanied by two to three paramedics reached the ward. One of the doctors began to assess her pulse and placed an oximeter in her index finger to check her oxygen saturation. Sensing trouble, another doctor started pressing her chest forcefully. I grew perturbed, and couldn’t resist my urge to know about her wellbeing. I went closer to her bed. A senior-looking doctor said, “Her pulse has gone down to zero”. Her mother was probably illiterate because she didn’t react to this bitter statement of the doctor.
A stream of tears was rolling down my cheeks as if I was about to lose someone close to my heart. She opened her eyes miraculously, and started staring at her parents and other relatives. She was in her last breathes. Horror of death had spread over her face, and I could notice a long exhaling breathe through her nose. One of the medicos closed her eyes, and a pal of gloom descended the entire ward. Alas! The callous cancer made her to depart to the eternal world. I couldn’t join her relatives to take part in her last rites because she was a stranger to me. Meanwhile, my better half drew my quilt from my face, and consequently, broke my bittersweet dream.
(Author is a Teacher and a Columnist. He can be reached at [email protected])
