Musings

Elephant in the room

Well...here goes. The elephant in the room is that my dear wife Sujatha has been diagnosed with Liver Cancer. This happened in November 07 and by all accounts it was already in an advanced stage. We decided to fight it as best as we could.

Manipal Hospital, Bangalore is where we went. It took us all of one day to get the verdict and the prognosis...that's one for technology. The doctors attending her jointly met me and in their own oblique way told me what to expect. Not that they needed to...it was written all over their faces and their body language said it all...the situation was bad.

Now what? Over the years, I have learned that most professionals aren't. I guess this hold for docs as well. (I wonder if anyone remembers the humorous Doctor series of books by Richard Gordon!) But then not having any medical knowledge myself, I was left no choice but to trust the doctors and be guided by them on the course of treatment.

The first thing the docs told me was that the treatment was going to be expensive (not if there was a chance of success, not the statistics of how other similarly placed patients have fared or a word of encouragement on how to cope with the devastating revelation they had just made....nothing....just that the treatment was going to be expensive!!!). Well...guess many years in the profession has made them immune to the finer human feelings...may be they just see a human body as an agglomeration of parts finely tuned to perform a function....forgetting that there is something called the human mind over which they have little understanding and hence choose to gloss over it...

I told them that I am not rich but can definitely afford the best for someone who has shared over 20 years of her life with me and given me two wonderful kids. They seemed relieved. In hindsight, I now know that it was similar to the glee that I have when I find a new gadget...software....car....the glee at being given a chance to experiment...only in this case there was a human life and the future of a family as we know it at stake!!!

More in my next......

Gururaj

# posted by Gururaj @ 10:48 PM