Every day in an Oncology ward, even as a bystander, reminds you that people dying or on its verge, fight the gravest battle…, and from them can be learnt the ultimate lesson in hope for the living — that to live is to take each day as it comes.
PALLIATIVE: One of the words we read sub-consciously as we hurry past white on blue hospital signages. A word so distant, it simply seems to complement its predecessor — PAIN.
But that day, ‘Palliative’ sinks in for what it means: PROLONG.
Is it fair? Prolonging the pain?
One never knows.
One never chooses in those moments. Between life and death, there is only one fair choice to make — there’s no choosing, mind you…
So it is that the week began. A week in an oncology ward — where cancer is the reality and ironically, the only life around you.
Here, more than anywhere, medicines leave a nauseating stench – especially when administered in cocktails that can be potentially lethal on a ‘normal’ body.
Like walking through clouds — that from far you thought you could hold in your hands — the unseen vapours of a chemotherapy session escape through the narrow gaps of in-patient wards and envelope you.
In every breath. In every stride.
Eventually, you try not to shake them off.
Like the painful whimpers that you thought you heard on sleepless nights, the vapours too become part of a routine.
The final battles of life, any life, are startlingly unsentimental. There is no emotional overload, no melodrama. Just the truth. Stark. Black.
A bystander in an oncology ward is expected to be stoic. The reality has to be understood, even appreciated. That is what prompts doctors to open up. To cut aside the medical-ese and talk in terms that needs no interpretation.
Acceptance of the inevitable can sink in easily. Then, there is no room for pretentions. The ‘how is her’ queries can be met with honest answers. The most subtle of which could be: ‘Taking each day as it comes.’
The bridge between an oncology ward and an Intensive Care Unit is not too distant as ‘condition’ changes with discomforting, appalling regularity. Stabilised. Critical. Emergency. Words that you learn to take in, and live with…
Life-saving ICUs also need the safety net of ‘security’ guards. Securing against what? Intruding relatives? Concerned brethren? Can they secure the inmates from the inevitable arms of death?
Security, here, is only against the living. So that we don’t step in to disturb the chilling calm of the ICUs, and its unmindful, unknowing inmates.
WAITING OUTSIDE the ICU, vulnerably alone, amongst several faces that defy scrutiny, the outside world, and its daily worries that you couldn’t dare to face in the ‘normal’ yesterdays, is a distant place.
Interrupting the steely cold silence is the occasional — and irritating — chirping of a cell phone. Heavy low-decibel sounds, in tones that are always the same – leaden with the weight of concern.
Occasionally, the door will fling open as frantically paced hospital attenders wheel in another ‘emergency,’ another ‘case.’ You can hear it coming. The sound of metal wheels on cement, a reminder of another life struggling to cling on — often, to unwilling bodies. An oxygen mask over the face, drip bottle held up, a bandaged head, drops of blood-red, a man or woman or child rushed in…
The bystanders stand up. You can’t resist but staring. Does an awful thought cross your mind? That it is not you there; not you, knocked down by a speeding bus; not you, who on the way to work broke into sweat and a seething pain that ran through the shoulders up through the neck to your feeble heart; not you, who took a deep breath and slumped back unconscious; not you, who has simply surrendered to age; not you, who decided that life is not worth the trouble…?
Well, those thoughts would come later. Now, in this moment, as you watch another person’s life in the balance, precariously tipped towards death, there is only a detached pity – and a fleeting thought that at death’s doorsteps, every one is the same.
But life in the ICUs has its routines too. There are playful nurses, who sifting around drugged patients, dream about their future. About flying to the US, that job in Saudi… Sometimes peals of laughter erupt as they pull the leg of a graduating house-surgeon with his baby-face looks and apologetic, ‘still-learning’ attitude.
Outside, awaiting news, the ICUs are a world of worry. When allowed to enter, and now looking back, it is only green that you recall. The green of bedsheets, curtains, the doctor’s robes… and the constant humming of machines — like the chatter of the incessant rain outside.
Finally, when the battle is over, another life passes away…
There is the emptiness, and the routine — of death certificates, the steel stretchers giving way to aluminium caskets, and the eerie calm of the night.
Then the realisation sinks in… that gone from your life are a thousand irreplaceable prayers.
Every mother is that — the prayers in our life.
(Rajeev Nair is an editor with Asda’a, a public relations consultancy in Dubai.)
Published in the Weekend magazine of Khaleej Times
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/weekend/2007/November/weekend_November117.xml§ion=weekend&col=
