Recurring scary dreams in which I always found myself hanging between life and death, I knew something unexpected was taking a toll on me. The positive Mantoux test was simply a confirmation of it.
When I took the train to Jammu my intuition was providing me hints that I got Tuberculosis but my mind overpassed this thought with his own reasons and logic. But intuition is seldom wrong. So, it happens. After roaming one hospital to another, taking all the tests referred, at last pathologist handed the report,
"You are infected with TB."
All the hospitals we visited after getting the report were not worth my disease. I needed to go to the one specially built for this; Chest Disease Hospital. Spending one hour amid all the TB patients, who were worn out, fragile, some too old to be there for medication, and some too young to have that disease, and that included me also. The doctor read the report and prescribed DOTS for six months, "If there's no lapse you will be fine," he assured me.
"Stay away from him, separate his utensils, and don't touch his clothes otherwise you too will get it," while exiting the doctor's room a man behind us in queue warned my father. He was accompanying an old woman, I guessed she was his mother. As I was newly infected and in a league of patients, I expected sympathy from everyone, but his talk offended me and my league members. I wished a tight slap on his face. I looked at my father but he didn't approve, I traced the feeling of remorse in him. He walked out without answering that guy.
A long silence of one hour in our return journey revealed that that guy's words disturbed him. He spoke after a while looking outside the Matador,
"Son, don't mind his talk, these are illiterates who show their unnecessary knowledge unwanted. They receive what others say and then transmit it to others like radio, without spending a minute on what others said was right or wrong. "
His talk discarded my all reveries of self-loathing; of living myself all alone with no attendee, doing all chores, and crying at night.
CITEȘTI
A Beautiful Smile
Proză scurtăLakshy's life changed with a test like it once did in the past. He is a TB patient and tries to recapitulate one by one how his life has unfolded.
