Hospital

I think of Ma at the hospital and I think that was not my mother. Reduced so much by weakness. Inattentive. Indifferent. Ma was never inattentive and indifferent. 

When I first saw her on October 9th morning I didn’t know the extent of her illness. Neither had I grasped what Baba meant when he said she wasn’t talking. She had just stopped talking. Communicating. She didn’t meet my eyes. Didn’t ask me how I was doing or how Arhan was doing. She woke up, smiled at me and looked away. I just stared back. I messaged my friends and husband about it but like me, they didn’t grasp the intensity of that either. Something she’d snap out of. 

She was weak. Couldn’t walk. Couldn’t hold her balance. 

She was indifferent. In her mind she was commissioned to be here. Since she had no control, no freedom, she had lost her will. Perhaps she talked to her Gods then. To ask them to relieve her. 

And then two days later she got better. She spoke. I forced her to talk to me. 

The days melted into nights. It felt like Groundhog Day, the movie. Everyday was the same, just a little different. I came to the hospital around 7.30-8am. Baba or Didi would have spent the night. He would return at 7 am. He would wake me up and tell me to hurry to take her breakfast. Sometimes Didi would pack her breakfast. Some days I’d take her a croissant from Starbucks with a coffee. You see, we had this precious food pass that allowed us to take vegetarian meals for her. They’d check our food pass at the door. And ask us if the food was vegetarian. It felt like living in a saffron fiefdom. My mother who enjoyed meat and fish all her life was forced to eat vegetarian food in her last few days. I have nothing against vegetarians or vegetarianism. But my anger at the denial of her taste to her, now when I think that was her last meal - is outrage. 

I would get to the hospital and first serve her breakfast. She sometimes ate it all. Sometimes nothing. It depended on how she felt. Sometimes it would come out in her pink puke basket. A window there she felt great and ate the breakfast heartily.

And even today I can’t look at some foods and not think of those days. Grapefruit, croissants, pomegranate, corn, kadhi, rasam, paneer cutlets contaminated with eggs (smuggled). 

By 9.30 am we went down to get her chest x-rays. I would get help from the hospital staff to move her from the bed to the wheelchair. She would always ask for the pillow in her back. We would strap her in and take her in the interminable elevator ride to the ground floor. I would wait and then I’d help hoist her up to stand with her chin rested on the X-ray machine. Then I would go into the room where they managed the machine. They would yell instructions at her. I would tell them she was hard of hearing. They would yell louder. After that sometimes we went to the sonography. She would be propped up on a bed and they would take sonograms of her back. Both times I would be watching, keenly to see if the loculations were back. I would ask questions. If this was the US, the staff would have helpfully answered questions. But this was India. Everything was shrouded in secrecy. Nothing could be divulged. Only the senior doctor was allowed to speak to us and even then he would tell us in brief chunks how we had absolutely no control. Not he, not Ma and certainly not us. We couldn’t take her home because the loculations chained her to that hospital bed. 

I’d head back at lunch time. Bring her lunch. Sometimes rasam-rice. Sometimes curd rice. Ironic that my mother ate tam brahm lunches. The doctors would return at 1.30 pm. They would administer the urokinase. The bag of fluid would continue to fill. There was no respite from this routine or the fluid. The doctors would return at 7 pm. Several times Didi and I would meet with the senior doctor to ask whether she could go home. And he would dangle a carrot with many potential thorns. The message was clear. The risks were high. She needed monitoring. Notwithstanding the lungs, her kidneys were also weak and she had already had irregular heartbeat. Did we want to take that risk? They meant that if we took her home and her lungs filled up with viscous pus, it was our responsibility. Who wants that? My father was afraid and I didn’t think it was a great idea either to take that risk. Only Didi valiantly fought for her to go home

When they took her back to the ICU, my mother broke down. She wailed against her punishment. She said she didn’t think she would go home ever.  She begged to go home. But my sister, the eternal optimist, promised to take her home. 

And then that early morning  of Nov 1, when we came home at 6 am having battled with the decision to let go; after realizing we had lost her, my sister who never cries, who gets things done no matter what, was devastated that she couldn’t keep her promise to our mother.