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Illness and Man




Some illnesses can make us feel totally helpless.  You just can’t do anything except lie down and suffer.  The viral fever that kept me bedridden for a few days is one such illness.  I know there are worse things than a viral fever that can torture the very marrow of your bones. 

This is the first time in my life that a disease left me totally enervated.  This is the first time in my life that I slept for some sixty hours continuously except for the essential intervals in between.  The sleep was a balm for the tortured body.  The mind too sodden with the side effects of all sorts of tablets I shoved down my throat needed rest.

Eventually I fell in love with the rest.  I didn’t need sleep anymore.  I just needed to lie down and stretch the body lazily. The various pains had abated though every now and then a bout of cough would erupt pulling every nerve in your lower abdomen in a thousand opposing ways. 

Except for the coughs, I fell in love with the rest.  A lot of images flash through your mind as you lie in bed with eyes closed.  The follies and blunders you committed all along, how people reacted to them, the games some people played with you, and a whole lot of other things.  Your life appears before you like a flashback.  Not everything is clear.  There are mysteries.  One of the things I have never understood, without all this flashback also, is why I drew so much attention of so many people who played a lot of games with my life.  Maybe, some things are destined to remain mysterious.  Maybe, that’s how life is: people play games and their motives vary.  And people like me are sitting ducks.

I fell in love with the ease of my rest after my Rip Van Winkle sleep.  I wished to prolong that ease for ever, for eternity.  But I know that’s not part of human life.  I had to get up and get going.  However, I was pretty sure that my experience was a presage of how things would be in the last moments of our life.  A flashback, an intense awareness of self and a lot of realisation.  Ah, too late it would be!

  

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJune 22, 2017 at 9:04 PM

    Isn't life all about making peace with its sea and are we not the old man still hoping to catch a big fish for the last time? I have always wondered how the definition of that fish change from people to people but then at the end we all become the old man!
    I hope you have recovered to set the wheel rolling. Warm wishes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 22, 2017 at 9:10 PM

      Very apt metaphor. We all love to go on chasing the fish, our special fish, until it will take us away.

      I'm OK now, more or less. Thanks a lot for the wishes.

      Delete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathJune 22, 2017 at 9:50 PM

    "A flashback, an intense awareness of self and a lot of realisation"- It is interesting that you got a glimpse of it in the present time and liked the process....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 23, 2017 at 10:26 AM

      Sometimes illness may have such positive sides too.

      Delete

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