Sickness…

Do not Burn the candle at both the ends, was what we learnt in our schooling days. A lesson that i seemed to have forgot as i grew up. In the quest of achieving the growing needs, which sometimes, i feel is our own creation, we end up working more harder. I had lived without calculator and today i vie for each and every new gizmo that pops up on television.

So, here i was working tirelessly for almost two three years now, the morning began at around 6.30 am and the day ended at around 02.30 am in the morning. The mad rush of city life, the growing pressure at office, the social and other assignments that i took after office hours and on weekends tied me up completely for these two three years.

Alas, age was catching with even faster a pace, it gave enough indications, which i ignored quite often.

So about two week ago’s my rendezvous with my sickness began. It began with a tingling pain in the right side of abdomen. Painkillers were the first resort which i took, and it gave me instantaneous relief too. But, soon, i realized that something was going wrong inside me, my body was not supporting me, i started feeling tired and worn out. Frequent complaints of mild fever, cold etc got me to the doctor quite often, his reaction was too mild for the sickness, i suppose, everytime i would visit him, he would say, it was nothing but seasonal illness due to weather. He would give some medicines, which would cure me or atleast make me feel good. But, still, it was not the right medication, i found in the hindsight.

Last wednesday, when i got a bout of unbearable pain in the right side of the abdomen, i took a painkiller, as i had to rush to the office as some very urgent work was pending there. Come thursday, again at the same timing, the pain arosed, this time it was more unbearable, the painkiller failed and i was unable to walk or sit straight. The doctor was called and he gave some injections and asked me to get the X-rays and Sonography done on urgent basis.  Somehow i went to the diagnostic center to get the tests done, i was already feeling very tired and was feeling very hard to take breath. The tests were done and the reports in my hand,  medical language as it was, beyond my reach, i went haplessly to the doctor to show the report and he said that fluids had accumulated in the right lungs indicative of illness like tuberculosis or pneumonia, back here tuberculosis is looked down upon as a taboo and a person suffering from it is looked down upon. I was like, shocked, and did not knew how to react, my wife was with me and the doctor advised to get the CT Scan done. Till the time the exact diagnosis was not done the doctor could not prescribe exact medicine. The CT Scan was scheduled the next morning and i was told that before CT Scan a Blood Serum test needed to be performed as they would be injecting some medicine while performing the test, negative serum report meant that the medicine would harm my kidneys and in such a scenario CT Scan was not possible. So in the morning, on friday, i took the serum test and after two hours a call came from the clinic that the report was ok and i can undergo CT Scan. It was the first time i underwent the test and to be frank did not even knew what it was, so when i went under that circular dome shaped machine my heart was beating louder than ever. They injected something and i could sense a very cold medicine rushing through my veins to my heart and my body. The report was available in the evening indicating that there was indeed accumulation of a small quantity of fluid in my right lung. As I was not having any cough or other symptoms indicative of tuberculosis and my symptoms like uncontrollable chills of cold was more or less indicative of pneumonia, the doctor advised to get the fluid removed and tested for confirmation. He recommended a hospital to get the “tapping” procedure done.

In the 38 years of my survival on this mother earth, this was the very first occasion when i went to the hospital for my own treatment. At about 11 am in the morning, the nursing staff asked me to lie on a bed in the operation theatre, the consent form was filled in, the nurses started bringing in all kinds of needles, cotton, medicines, tubes etc, it sent shrills down my spines, i shred to even take injection and here i was going to get injected by a 20 mm needles, the needle would go deep into my lung and remove the fluid. It was all very terrible for me. Soon the Doctor arrived, it was business as usual for him, he injected an injection for local anesthesia and said the needles wont pain much.  But, he was wrong, it pained and pained much. But, i had no other option, but to bear the pain, the doctor removed the fluid, said there was not much fluid in there. The dressing was done and i was asked to rest for an hour or so.

I returned back in the afternoon with my wife rested, the fluid was sent for testing. Later, it was confirmed that it was a bout of broncho-pneumonia  God knows what it meant, but it made me very very sick.  The weakness still prevails the medicines is making me all the more sick due to acidic nature of it.

Sometimes, illness is also good, i now feel, for the care, the attention that we get, never ever in the last decade or so of my marriage, i found my wife so caring as she was during these last fifteen days, she cared, she nursed me like a kid. Friends, who cared called, visited home,  Is’nt that a silver lining afterall. But, no, i would not like to fall sick again to see this silver lining again.

More Confusing….

Being bookish was never in my genes, so reading books, novels was an outlandish question in my case.  A friend, though was exactly different, he would chew every character of a book. He was perhaps more than concerned about “Self Development”.  He made sure he attended all kind of Seminars and Lectures in the Town. Once he requested an admission in a Beauty Parlour Course (which was organised by my Office for Ladies).  My doubt that too much hunger for knowledge has turned this good boy into a confused man ( i meant to say an insane one, was just trying to be sober), never remained a doubt thereafter.

Somehow though as I looked back at myself, i find that I too had started getting more and more inquisitive about knowledge.  About learning more and more things. High Speed Internet and loads of material on Internet and availability of internet almost everywhere from pc to lappie to tablet to mobile made it easy. Just to kill time i started watching videos (reading was never my forte) on sites like youtube. Videos ranged from Spirituality to Evil Spirits, from fun to science, from 2012 Apocalypse to Motivational Videos on Self Development.

Now Self Development was my weakness, I always kept on learning and still believe that I am a student even junior to my kid. I learnt techniques to read face, how to identify body language, how to kill stage fear, how to start conversation, how to stay positive etc. It was necessary for me as I used to conduct training programmes on self employment in my social group. To keep myself updated I used to watch loads of these videos.  Somehow though, i got inclined to watch the videos of  Modern Motivation Gurus. They claim to change lives by their speeches. Their powerful delivery of speeches combined with aggressive body language makes you feel different. You too get into the zone, the motivation level increases, though momentarily in my case at least.

I was not a fan of any one motivation guru, the modern money minting business, one guy in his typical broken Hindi spoke about total self transformation (lest he should have transformed his power of the language in the first place), the other guy told the power of hard work, to contradict this, yet another motivation leader taught that only donkeys and labourers do hard work, hard workers never succeed. Now, I understood why my dear friend was like this – confused.

On close analysis one can say is that these modern age gurus do not teach you rocket science in the first place, they teach you what you already know.  One must feel shortchanged actually after listening to these deliberations. The only person who benefit from these deliberations are the speakers themselves as they rake in millions by organizing these motivation talks. Most of these speakers speak about their own personal experiences and how they succeeded and then sum it up as a success mantra. Why to rely on prescriptions that others used, you are genetically different your DNA is different and you require may be different then what is prescribed.

Sometimes, it makes me wonder whether these modern day Motivation Gurus are the mirror images of our Spiritual Babas & Gurus ??  Their similarities are strikingly similar – both use their gift of the gab to mint money, one is dressed in vermilion colored clothes, the others mostly suited booted in blacks. One uttering Sanskrit Shlokas intermittently the other quoting difficult terminologies both of these are not understood by common misnomers like me 😦  Ultimately both end up with claps and return with good bank balances. The audiences feel they have become more happier, more motivated. But for how long ?

To succeed I guess the formula is very simple, I learnt it from my trekking experience, we succeed in our trekk because we are focused on our target, the pinnacle where we are destined to reach. We are aware of the route that we will be treading, the dangers of it, we remain focused and we spend our time, money and energy. The joy that one receives after reaching the pinnacle is the joy of success, the feeling of winning the world. This is the simple formula for success, aim at the target, compete with yourself, do swot analysis, take unbiased decisions and keep moving. Have belief in just one person, and that is you. Do I sound like a motivation guru in making. No I have many other better vocations 🙂

Yes modern life has been more than stressful and people do take recourse thinking that they will benefit from such discourses in their professional lives.   Acquiring Knowledge per se is a good thing, one has to be a keen learner all through his life, but you don’t need  to take a middleman to tell you.

I stopped watching these videos when i first saw the contradictions and preferred to watch  Tom and Jerry instead, atleast those characters bring back smile and not make you look confused.

PS : Just a One liner I read on one of the T-Shirts recently – I was Intelligent… Education Spoiled me 🙂