Fierce, loving, and beautiful

The smile and warmth, the frankness and nonchalance, the kindness and depth, not sure how it all came together in such a beautiful way.

Liver is a tissue that regenerates. This means that if you take a part of the liver it will regrow to its normal size again. I had no idea about this fact of the human body until that day.

The emergency door of the hospital rushing patients to the screen where vitals are monitored. Medical staff, many of them, tending to each patient in the emergency. Family members of these patients holding back tears, praying, looking around afraid, there are other unknown faces, a girl seemingly in highschool, crying, howling and I do not have the heart to know more. It is a loved one going away, and I am hoping it is only her fear.

We knew that but they confirmed. "We admit her to the hepatology department", they said.

The bed rolls through many buildings avoiding the OPDs and the queues to them. Restricted by the visiting hours, we stay in the lounge on the ground floor. Relatives rush in. So far, the news of in the need of a liver transplant has not reached them.

It has been a month now, the sea of faces in the hospital lounge have started to become somewhat familiar. The faces that seem known. Cannot remember from where. All of a sudden, my mind trips to the point in time where I have seen them. They are with other patients seriously ill, some even needing transplant.

While the patient needs an organ transplant and is waiting for it, I think, the meaninglessness of life is right there in front of her eyes. The endless needles, blood reports, the chart maintaining them, the hush hush talks, the let's talk in another room talks, the hope and dampening of it, and the pattern it follows, all everything at once. The world is coming crashing down, the eerie silence in the hubbub of doctors and nurses and visitors and relatives. The realisation of fragility of life and the sense of love as never felt before.

The darkness grows on every face. The long history of chivalry, the family values are all a lost cause today. The stories that I had heard from my childhood of bravery, courage and kindness are now fading. The noble doing, doing what is right and what all stories taught seem like a lie. A lie that I had lived my life thus far. There was no knight in the shining armour. There were no heroes. There was a certain sense of fear that spread in the atmosphere.

The other kind of loved ones who are not willing to come visit because "what if they ask us for the donation". The peril is deep, dark and looming in the atmosphere while quarrels, debates, fights happen between best of people, soulmates, siblings. These fights not just became rampant, they became with time more biting, more incisive with time as everyone grew impatient, restless with time ticking away. The time window that we could have the patient stable to operate upon is slipping away.

Realisation that nobody cares unconditionally is still dawning upon me. Everyone cares in a perimeter, a fence that maybe they will cross one day but not today. Or maybe they never cross it for I is the most important. Putting a limit and a number to things that are immeasurable, stoic and deep, maybe.

There is a sense of betrayal in the air. That everyone cared enough to let the patient go as they whiled and wallowed in their misery of how great she was. Ranting the good deeds she did all her life, how the persona would be remembered forever.

Innumerable numbers of calls coming in to ask "How was she today?" made absolutely no sense to me. Wanted to ask "Why bother?", but then it would be rude in my culture to say that.

I cannot fathom the courage and resilience the patient possesses. The will to live but more important the courage to smile and greet the same people who care in a perimeter. To be able to talk about mundane, laughing at family in-jokes like they still mean something to you. Like the visitors mean something to you. I do not know if I understand the feeling and more importantly understand it correctly but somehow it feels like this.

I see you go bit-by-bit in front of my eyes. The rushing of the bed to the ICU with the doctor calling your name continuously to keep you from fainting. The reconciliation is and will always be sought and will never be achieved.