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Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
June 7, 2015
Never fall sick. Not if you can help it. Even for those with the person who is unwell the whole process is bleak and exhausting.
We are constantly trying to make ourselves unwell which is kind of ridiculous but then, the human race is pretty stupid, so easily do we hand over command of our lives to a bunch of doctors and nurses for whom you are pretty much a serial number and you cannot be anything else because they are so pushed. Everyone is on their case and everyone has influence and everyone knows someone who knows someone and they are at it non-stop but no one is happy.
Then you have the relatives, spending days in cramped and dank waiting rooms with muted TVs and the stench of despair eclipsing the whiffs of hope. And chairs that have the stuffing coming out of them as if the intestinal procedure had failed.
You are the least important element in the food chain, grasping for scraps of information from anyone including teaboys, guards, cleaners, passing nurses on missions pleading for a verbal peep from behind closed doors and squirreling it away for 10 minutes of peace of mind till it all starts again and you go foraging.
There are so many closed doors and there you are, men and women of the world, reduced to whimpering litigants ready to grin gratuitously and in that groveling, ingratiating manner at anyone who happens to whistle past without stopping. Forms and ominous ‘results’ of exotic tests, grey and forbidding x-rays and scans, like indictments nailed by the power of the light.
There are no percentages in falling ill. Your big houses and your art collection, your fleet of cars and your self-delusion of grandeur doesn’t add up to an aspirin when your loved ones are outside being told by the janitor to wait, sit here, don’t go in… not allowed.
Falling ill sucks.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
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