Started With A Fiasco, Ended With A Smile

“That one!”, signaled the multi-tasking resident with a jerk of head.

Photo by Bianca Berndt on Unsplash

Lying on his bed and focused on a smartphone, I could hear his giggles even before it was audible. With the distance reducing between myself and his bed, the expected soon-to-be dialogue played in my mind.

I approached the kid and said, “Hello” in the most exuberant, childish manner possible but ended up overdoing it. The kind of behaviour that gets you to clench your teeth and go “Urrggghhhh” when your brain is on its usual recall of embarrassing memories the moment you are about to sleep. Luckily for me, nobody noticed except the kid.

“Hello”, he replied.

“What’s your name?”, I asked him.

“Thwaathik”, he answered with a broken-toothed smile. (‘th’, here, pronounced as in ‘thank you’)

“Take him to the bed outside”, intervened the pediatric resident, and so the coaxing followed.

“C’mon let’s go outside”

“Why?”

“I want to talk to you”

“Why?”

At this point, I felt like losing in the basic communication skills as is sometimes the case in Medicine clinics. But it couldn’t be worse than “It’s written in the file. Why don’t you just read it?” reply of a patient to my “What’s your name?” once upon a time.

Willing to divert the chain of events in my favor, I asked him “Don’t you want to talk to me?” like a parent does to their child in the very cadence of a silly babyish voice.

Smiling widely, he nodded with an enthusiasm that could put Noddy to shame.

“Let’s go then” I called him with a flick of hand.

I helped the boy step down from the bed, setting his urinary catheter (a tube that goes into the penis to collect urine) and urinary bag to one side while holding his other hand. Walking him like a penguin, we went outside.

There he was welcomed by other batchmates of mine. We began asking him questions and got to hear his funny, lisp pronunciation every time. Soon his mother arrived and eased our burden of history-taking.

The kid was talking and laughing merrily. With my stethoscope in his ears, he auscultated every possible thing ranging from his hand to the bedside table pretending to hear something that reminded me of ourselves in the second year claiming that we indeed heard a murmur every time the professor asked; only to realize that he was playing along.

The ambiance was jolly but right then, his mother started giving this history:

“When he was in my womb, doctors told me that his kidney was swollen but it would resolve on its own after birth”

“Did he improve after that or is it worsening?” one of us asked her.

“Had he been improving, he wouldn’t have landed in Kidney failure” she answered with a bang. Shiver went down our spine before we could consciously contemplate the escalation of the scene. But our dumbstruck faces were ignored by her with a seemingly effortless smile, constantly watching her child all the while.

Gradually, we arrived at milestone history and wanted to know if he could write. So we asked him to write his name. With trembling fingers, he held my pen in his left hand and galvanized this on the paper:

Author’s own image

That ‘Swastik’ you see? It’s his name that he drew. (It is the holy symbol of Hinduism and has nothing to do with Nazism here). Though he couldn’t write, this gesture from him was enough to blow our minds. Seems like we had a lesson on metaphysics more than Pediatrics.

Later in the day, Swastik left me in a state of introspection. How difficult would it have been for her mother to accept the fate? And more so, to mask her sorrow with an apparently constant smile? Surely, it takes nerves of steel to rise above the constant fear of impending death and both Swastik and his mother had championed this or maybe his mother alone because the kid possibly wasn’t aware of the gravity of the situation yet?

Perhaps his mother has exhausted her capacity to mourn? To sit in a dark corner and criticize the unfairness of this world all the while teary-eyed? Or maybe, for one thing that I want to believe, she exemplifies that happiness is a choice and it’s futile to repent for what has already happened. The kind of thoughts we read everywhere on the internet without even realizing how difficult it is to put them into action.

There is always someone happy to exchange his life for yours. The ineffable circumstances of one’s life teach a humongous lot of things, to them as well as to others. And for all we know, even little Swastik taught us that perhaps happiness is the default emotional setting. What started as a fiasco, it seems the family wanted to end with a smile.

TheUnknownDoktor