3 min read
This is not one of those fictions I write and I am here in the hospital. 3 nights exact. There might be up and down herein. This writing may not be in sequence, but if you’re reading, please kindly keep up with it. It’s 10;53 in the night. Here I am staring directly at my grandma’s painful eyes. They are expressive… in a sense, they are the only organs that communicate now. If you could somehow remove the white layer off those eyes.. you’d believe death sometimes is the best option. I guess my blog would have been the best place to upload this. Well, I don’t know. It’s been only down and no ups past few weeks and please don’t confuse this for my sympathy seeking. NO. I am expressing myself. Only expressing.
The room is plain white. A common ward, 8 beds, 3 empty. Flowered brown and white curtains, I am on a three-legged stool, holding the hands blue by piercing zillion of times, swollen. Her grip is tight as if she never wants to let go of my hand.
Exact 8 bottles of liquid medicines are hanging on a high stand beside the bed, 4 of which active and dripping into one pipe, leading in her veins. A huge cylinder of oxygen lies tall at the bed foot, a pipe from which the gas flows into her mask is the only thing keeping her here beside her willpower and our prayers.
There’s a difference in knowing and recognizing. She’s an Alzheimer’s patient since 6years. Though she doesn’t recognize me, or my dad or my mom or any of us, she knows me and all kith and kins. Of all those who visit her now and then, her eyes always search for us… And her hands seek ours.
Anyone with a person 85 with Alzheimer’s in their home can know what was the scenario before this. Forget about excreting properly in proper place, she wouldn’t drink her water, eat, chew or swallow. Ever fed a year old? That is easy. Way too easy. Changing 2 bedsheets and mattresses every night was normal. You should have seen my mother washing literal tonnes every day. She’d shout for her own mother and father when we bathed her or even fed her. You’ll be laughing if you saw her teethmark on my left shoulder. She had been a little hard to handle for sure. But, who isn’t?
In no way, this Dashain could be a Dashain. Not that I am upset about it, but, riding at an ambulance at exact 11;30 in the day of tika and those glaring eyes while we were towards hospital… I don’t know how to explain. For that I consider nothing. Staring at the monitor with her pulse rate 33 for a long time and oxygen saturation of 46% for 3 whole hours is what I define painful.
Hope. A thin string of hope we live on. We continue to look, and work and thrive and do anything, for that string won’t break. Her huge struggled stretches, inability to even cough and inability to even drink water is always taken aback by the slightest of hope we live on.. the eyes. Her expressive eyes.
And the pain in it, makes you realize, sometimes, death is the best cure.
Written by Yugantar Paudel, The Chief Cynic