Over the weekend, I met up with a friend who had moved into a spanking new house in the up-market part of town. After the usual cursory formalities and niceties, I had a chat with her father who had been diagnosed to have a serious heart ailment.
He is a 77-year-old man who, after the recent passing of his wife of almost 50 years, is living between her three daughters' houses at his own leisure. After striving hard to bring the bacon as a police officer through the hard times of the nation fighting bandits' intelligentsia throughout the country, he is glad that his three children are self-sufficient and independent. He feels that his life and duties on earth are done, and he is living on borrowed time! (Especially after being a chronic smoker of 50 sticks a day for 50 years until one fine day when he developed distaste to cigarettes upon completing pilgrimage to Holy Land). Perhaps, he should have made the trip much earlier in life.
So, when his doctors investigated him for neck pain and found that, through a morbidly terrorising angiogram experience (for him, at least) there were five blocks in his coronary vessels, his decision was pretty easy to make. "No, sire! No intervention for me", he said despite all the well-meaning persuasions from doctors and nurses. "For all you know I may have had these blocks for years before. Thank you very much!"
Well, they are no right or wrong decision in these situations. After all, it is his life. We may have heard of complications during and after surgery.
I was just reading the other day of a doctor who had devised ingenious surgical procedures to treat a particular type of pancreatic cancer which itself had a poor prognosis, by prolonging life by 3 to 5 years, albeit with its poor quality. But sadly when he was afflicted with the very same disease that he had been treating patients for years, what he did was mind boggling to his peers. He called it quits. He closed his practice and decided to spend his remaining days with his family. Sure, he did spend a lot of quality time for the next two years before leaving the company of his family.
That brings us to the two ways of how people deal with sickness - one quietly without pomp and splendour whilst the other in an almost fiesta-like atmosphere. In the former, he would decide to deal with his trying time alone or with immediate family in secrecy. The latter would enjoy the attention, gifts, sympathy and self-pity conveyed by equally extroverted family members and friends from near and far who would have no bearing on the outcome of the disease! The only thing missing would be confetti!
Perpetrators of the latter would vouch that kind support, gentle touch and sympathetic attention goes a long way in the organisation of fibrous tissue and resolution. Call me weird but how is answering the same question on the discovery or detection of the disease, mode of treatment and the constant reminder that everything is going to be okay make you feel rejuvenated, get up, acquire Kryptonic supernatural powers and run?
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YeaH iTs MY liFe..!!!!!!!!! (Bon Jovi) |
So, when his doctors investigated him for neck pain and found that, through a morbidly terrorising angiogram experience (for him, at least) there were five blocks in his coronary vessels, his decision was pretty easy to make. "No, sire! No intervention for me", he said despite all the well-meaning persuasions from doctors and nurses. "For all you know I may have had these blocks for years before. Thank you very much!"
Well, they are no right or wrong decision in these situations. After all, it is his life. We may have heard of complications during and after surgery.
That brings us to the two ways of how people deal with sickness - one quietly without pomp and splendour whilst the other in an almost fiesta-like atmosphere. In the former, he would decide to deal with his trying time alone or with immediate family in secrecy. The latter would enjoy the attention, gifts, sympathy and self-pity conveyed by equally extroverted family members and friends from near and far who would have no bearing on the outcome of the disease! The only thing missing would be confetti!
Perpetrators of the latter would vouch that kind support, gentle touch and sympathetic attention goes a long way in the organisation of fibrous tissue and resolution. Call me weird but how is answering the same question on the discovery or detection of the disease, mode of treatment and the constant reminder that everything is going to be okay make you feel rejuvenated, get up, acquire Kryptonic supernatural powers and run?
The whole fundamental law of nature is survival. The millipede fakes death to survive. Humans in extreme hunger turn cannibalistic to live but why some lose the zest to go on?
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