Reason

As I walked down the endpoint hill drenched in sweat, I see a sparrow bringing down a wriggling worm to its death in fury putting to torture as a part of the prey predator completing the cycle of hunger. The worm gave away in no time and left it’s flesh and blood for the sparrow to feed upon. The sparrow now flies away as it notices me nearer abandoning its hard earned food for it’s own life and spirit. I looked at the civilization from the hill. As these mere living forms fed, mated and struggled to survive; man made bows and arrows to tame the world, made BMWs and Benzs from class C to E and made the world the world a very big place to live in and then made telecommunications to make it smaller again. Cut trees and started the Global Warming campaign to save earth for its children tomorrow. Every bad act results in an inconspicuous vicious cycle that inevitably results in something bad unless intervened upon.

I frequently lose my thoughts to understand the meaning and purpose of things imagining a beautiful destination, a beautiful answer but mindlessly wandering through the streets without knowing directions. The time spent on such an adventure in all our lives have innumerate examples each of us constantly ending up somewhere that we want to believe is our destiny or reach there and then accept it as our destiny or nowhere NOWhere questioning destiny and still wandering hoping to find light at the end of the tunnel.

Through all of mankind’s survival, the thought to reason I feel has been the most significant change that altered the very essence of survival and progress we made across our existence. There is something in the evolution of the human brain that we have developed to understand, logically reason and prioritize a particular fact or statement. Tagging a reason to any interpretation of the many from the most complicated human brain validates it over its counterparts. Eason is all we look out for. Why? Reason again!

We find those reasons in different things, every one of us in different objects, persons in love and other abstract emotions and in passion. Irrespective of a possibility that this all could be a meaningless existence we constantly endure pain, suffering and seek the ‘Pavlonian’ pleasure consciously or subconsciously in search of the purpose in our lives for reasons many.

How does it happen that all life you believe in something or someone and suddenly it all crashes into abyss like an ambitious wave shattered as it dives into its own waters only to be embraced gently as it returns again. Is it that a person acts superior to make up for his inferiority complex or is it just that he is superior. Does somebody say something to mean it or acts like to mean it or because it sounds best in a given situation or may be for no reason at all only to be interpreted, analyzed and talked about by people who are themselves so lost and confused.

To me, we are desperate to find patterns cramming up our Anatomy, Physiology and Medicine ultimately trading it in an attempt to fulfill another man’s need in an existence wanting to mean something to somebody in life or after death perhaps only to return again.

On a very broad perspective we see that life isn’t in its whole in our hands despite our best efforts and most serious thoughts from, to whom we were born to whom we meet and to where and when we meet our awaiting death. The best I understand we can do is to accept things as they are and to make the best out of life in being a good friend to a friend, a good son to a father and a father to your son, a husband to a wife and a master of yourself all as an ‘expression of HappYness’ to make tomorrow, a ‘better’ tomorrow.

 

Autonomic dysfunction!

14/01/2012, Manipal.

Yesterday’s night was one of the most dreadful nightmares of my life. 3 weeks ago when the grand finale was finally about to commence I wished for just a few things. One, I should not fall sick or meet with accidents, both in and out of hell. Two; Nobody I know (or don’t know too, if possible) should fall sick (and need me). Three; Let me be a machine and just pass this phase.

2 days ago as I was walking up and down the corridor trying to master the science of Carpentry in the given day, I suddenly felt a strong surge from the inside. This surge was no enthusiasm or the spirits or the usual episodes of exacerbated palpitations that have been in last 3 months and in not less than 2 minutes, I was staring into the washbasin, vomiting out everything I ate since morning. I never vomited even the times I got drunk and wondered if it was food poisoning or the force-fed excessive knowledge to the brain in the last few months.

I continued to roam around the house to keep myself just enough distracted with a book in my hand but ran to the basin every 20 minutes. I ate nothing so I guess I had to vomit ‘just water’. The nightmare of unknown origin [MUO] healed magically by that mid-night. Love from the housemate and the neighbors fastened the cure. The next day, after a satisfying theory exam I came home and convinced myself to take a short nap to freshen up and start preparation for the 5 specialty Surgery paper-2 subjects for the next day morning. The aim of revision was to basically turn the pages without reading much but the latest I got a look at those pages was 2 weeks before, since I began with Surgery paper 1 and Medicine followed since. As great God would have it, my landlord aunty happened to take her first dose of Tramadol for her usual backache and suddenly felt dizzy and I had to respond. They were very sorry for the disturbance but I wouldn’t pass it either, at least not after they fed me with easy digestible Idlis before I left for exam today as I was on an empty stomach since yesterday morning.  It was not only a social responsibility but also the word that 2 to-be-docs live upstairs and none of them around when the need arose; at the least to call it an emergency and to respond to the moment. I thought of it more of a moral responsibility that presents itself with greater complications than answering on the blank papers and scoring marks. That night, running through the incessant names of surgeons and their surgeries and distances from the anal verge, I found myself at the verge. I was lost and then like always began to worry about nothing. I finished, closed and then the next day filled the 16page booklet served to me. The paper was easy, so simple that our immediate seniors who had to face the brunt of the previous year paper and sat to write the exam again with us were seen literally jumping with joy and hitting their chests and fists against each other as the bell rang and I only thought to myself that I survived this- a nightmare.

I have always believed that the body finds wonderful means to cope up with anything presented to it. During our classes and clinics, I was amazed to see how an infant adopts a squat to tolerate a cyanotic spell, how a man with a varicocele walked into the OPD wearing 2 undergarments to alleviate the dragging pain (though the increased temperature due to the double wear might exacerbate a lil’ bit). Stress too precipitates something of a similar response making our body go nuts and finding ways to ‘let go’, both through voluntary (movies and addictions) means and involuntary (autonomic dysfunction) means.

A friend of mine said over stress manifests in him as allergy/ hypersensitivity reaction. Another friend said he and his roommate had to be on Proton pump inhibitors for their gastritis. Mine usually being insomnia and a lil’ worry, this time was accompanied by a few episodes of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, not to forget palpitations, pale stools (steatorrhoea) and high colored urine that resolved spontaneously with the last exam giving me no chance to see which one of my differentials were correct! 

WHAT’S YOURS?

   

Night mares and hares

Owing to my yet to heal broken shoulder and the recent radiculopathy, I sat at home and just like any other exam season I began to question everything in life. Where was I headed and what I was doing.

It’s about 2 into the dark. I ran out into the balcony hearing a ‘scream of death’. It was the second of the 3 kittens that Tony, the landlord’s dog downstairs has killed in the past few days. I stood there in strange agony wondering if it died the same way as it’s sibling; the same foul play along the narrow edges of the roof?! The last one among Kitty kitty’s (the name of the cat that adopted us) litter tremblingly leaned over the edge and looked as the dog bit the body of it’s dead brother again and again. Do they ever learn from their mistakes like we do, I thought in curiosity.

Maybe, the key to our evolution is that we learn from the mistakes of our ancestors not only through history but also very quickly than other genes and species that need greater Pavlovian conditioning.

As Kitty kitty jumped on the roof to return home with a fresh dead rat, I wondered if she realized that all of her litter is reduced to one. Not surprisingly she did more than I thought she would, she purred in agony all night long searching for the missing kitten, the same purr that the black cat owing to its unlucky color gives away in the neighborhood. Only now did I know what the sound meant. A dose of Alprazolam or Diazepam in the night’s milk could be of some help to her, I thought. The last kitten with blue eyes was fear struck with the death of it’s 2 brothers and didn’t let her mother leave to go hunting for food and played with it’s tail all day. The next day everything seemed fine again and Kitty kitty got herself pregnant again! The black cat helped. 9 weeks later, not in my house Kitty!

p.s 9 weeks is the gestational period for cats.

p.s.s Cats eat rats and eat them with delight but why do dogs have to bite cats when they don’t eat them?!

p.s.s. Do they experience love as the same way as we do?

Insomnia- I

After sitting hours straight and have accumulated enough toxic gases, my head erupted in a yawn and I was glad that sleep was coming because if the human brain truly had any limit or capacity, I think mine just exceeded the limits. When the altered consciousness says that it can’t take it anymore, sleep is a wonderful thing. It makes everything go away and gifts you a new silent start tomorrow.

I turned the lights off and holding my 14week potbelly like a pregnant women with lardosis and wondering what I would be dreaming today, I reached my bed 4.5 feet away with great difficulty. May be one of those Richie Rich dreams where I get to be the king and have to play a 3D virtual ‘Game of scratch’ to save my queen and the kingdom or oh ooh, one of those where the world is about to an end only to survive at the climax of the dream where the whole of mankind spent all of it’s money, resources or finished off with it’s ‘bucket list’ that many of us had nothing to live for after the unexpected survival! Death as a whole, when it comes it all, at once, doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all now. In one of those dreams which I still vividly remember, I was at Marine drive when the skies began to crack open and spill down avalanches and I ran to save myself all across the globe, from the Pyramids to the Red sea and the Alps of Europe all at once. Ooh! I think I even spotted a few dinosaurs! 

But it’s been a while I dreamt in sleep. Actually, I have to admit that I began to have trouble sleeping. It’s not the barking of the dogs or the cats that find way inside the house that disturb me anymore but my own pounding heart. It beat so hard and gave me a constant company like pain during my post-operation that I worried if I would have to lay in bed all night awake until the first rays of the morning would forcibly make me throw the blanket off. I doubted even if any sleeping pill would be an antagonist to this disease. A few years ago, I enjoyed a 7-hour sleep even before my 1^st year university exams and there was never a problem before either. Oh good great sweet killer education, I ask thou, what have you done to me?