Relief

The clock struck three. She hadn’t slept all night; the pain had spread in her limbs. Starting from her right hand wrist, she could feel a physical presence of the pain within her bones that seemed to travel to her shoulders to left hand and then to her legs. She was lying, facing towards her left squeezing her left limbs as much as possible for a little relief, at the edge of her double bed. It was the same bed that had felt her body circling in her sleep, covering every inch of the mattress every night when she had began sleeping alone five years ago in a room that she called hers. If someone asked for proof, she’d point to a wall in the room where her name was angrily scribbled in blocks with a pencil as opposed to her brother’s personalized creative decorations for his room. She was swaying her body, back and forth, lying in the same position.  The speed of swaying depended on her fluctuating belief that it can make the pain go away, as if swaying her body were witchcraft to shoo the devil. Her face bore the traces of dried up tears. She had been crying on and off all night, silently. She wasn’t sure if vocalizing the cry into shouts would help in getting rid of the pain. Every time she felt that physical presence stop at her joints --- like a train that has reached a station ---- the pain increased exponentially. Her mother’s silver Nokia 3310 was under her pillow. Her parents, sleeping in the adjacent room, had told her to call them if she needs them at night. She could have called them, but they would have been helpless. What could they do when ten different doctors had no diagnosis but prescriptions of different painkillers for their daughter?

A view from/of some place in  CMCH, Vellore

             The night was perhaps that of a Saturday, in January 2008 or maybe April 2008. By English calendar, it was a Sunday but by Hindu calendar, it was still Saturday because the sun hadn’t risen yet. The technicalities of days and beliefs evaded her mind. She had a competitive exam, NTSE or NSTSE, at around 10 in the morning. It’d have been the last weekend of January then, perhaps 26^th of the month. But then, it would also mean that it had been merely two months since the diary of her travelling pain began filling its pages with hospital visits, from medicine to orthopedics, x-rays that every doctor needed from his own radiology department, and injections and painkillers that, at times, helped the pain subside for a while. The question was, had the pain reached her legs in two months already? Perhaps... for February saw a loss of appetite, March saw  continuous vomiting, April witnessed stomach aches, enlarged kidneys and misshaped liver, and May… May found her as an immovable breathing corpse that lay in front of TV. She was moved for doctor visits, blood tests, ultrasounds and eventually for her first flight to get a kidney biopsy done. May ended with a solution to her travelling pains that knew no boundaries; a solution to her screams that were no longer silent because her agency to choose and think about bothering others had left her. She was happy when the calendar was flipped to June, because the pain had finally ceased. She was told that she had infection in her blood. The pain that she felt was the infectious cells circulating through her bone marrow and accumulating near the joints before slowly moving further. As I mentioned, she was happy. For, leukemia acted as a signifier of a painless body after six months and medically signified catastrophic-in-the-life-of-her-family disease had no coherent presence in her brain, whatsoever.

            However, at a little past three on that uneventful January night, she tried to get up from her bed. She was prescribed a painkiller that could give instant relief, by one of the several doctors she had seen in the past month. It was prescribed with strict instructions – take it only when the pain is unbearable. Unbearable. Was there a scale to measure the pain?  Wasn’t the term subjective to a person’s tolerance? Why would a doctor prescribe medicine with such an abstract condition? Medical science was beyond her. The closest she ever went to medicine was drawing labeled diagrams in her biology notebook to get excellent from her teacher. However, as swaying her body didn’t lure her into sleep; she decided that it was time for the painkiller meant for unbearable state.

             She pulled her body up with leftover energy that hadn’t been drained fighting the pain all night. She climbed down the bed, standing near it for a moment to gain her balance. She was in no state to stand upright on her own. So, she leaned towards the wall for support and dragged herself slowly out of the room. The dining room was right outside her room. As she entered the dining space, she quickly scanned the area to spot her medicines in the dim light from a yellow light bulb in her living room. The medicines were placed on the washing machine at the other end of the room. Before she realized, her cheeks were wet again. For a moment, she considered turning right to her parents’ room. In the next moment, she turned left. She had to cross their six-seater dining table in order to reach the washing machine. She took small steps, carefully. She moved holding the spine of one chair after another. When she reached near their old, faded green, Videocon washing machine, she was no longer able to stand. She grabbed her painkiller with trembling fingers as her crying became audible, yet not enough to wake her brother sleeping in a room diagonally opposite to her. She tore the packet, pulled out a tiny orange tablet and put it in her mouth before crashing by the machine.

                    The pain didn’t subside instantly as promised, yet she was relieved that the tablet didn’t require water – it dissolved on her tongue.