Are you getting enough D?

A dramatized version of real events

Little Red Dots

The sound was distinct, a ‘tak, tak, tak…’ as the ring on Ram’s index finger knocked against the doors as he made his way to the mess.

The room reverberated with the sound as he passed my door. I quickly jumped out of the bed and opened the door.

Startled, he turned to look at me.

“I think I have chicken pox, Sir,” I said, addressing him the way all seniors were supposed to addressed, with due respect.

I lifted my tee and pointed at the little red dots on my chest and tummy. A good six feet tall, he bent down to take a closer look.

“Yes, looks like it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What the fuck are you doing here then, cocksucker? Get the fuck out before you infect half the fucking hall.” Students were expected to graduate to ‘fuck’ within six months and higher Tamil abuses before the end of the year. And Ram was in his third year.

Despite his language, Ram had a point. Being the Welfare Minister of the hall’s student council, it was his responsibility to dispense medicines, which somehow implied he was responsible for health and hygiene in the hall. It was altogether another matter that the hall’s annual budget seemed to apportion money for Spasmo every year; odd because it is supposed to be a muscle relaxant opiate for pregnant women; even more so when you consider that it is a Hall of Residence for men.

“Junkies, the whole lot of ‘em,” was the rumour among first years.

I found myself a full-sleeve shirt to hide any potential red dots appearing on my arm and took off to my uncle’s house in Anna Nagar, on the other side of Madras. “Itchy,” I said to myself, “you are going to be itchy all over,” and started scratching in advance. I started slowly, just a little rub with my forefinger over the designated itch area. By the time the bus reached Anna Nagar, I was using my nails, four of them, etching slow parallel lines through my skin, skirting around a pimply rash when a nail hit the bump.

My uncle was the chaplain at the Mission Hospital in Anna Nagar. He promptly showed me to the duty doctor who confirmed Chicken Pox. My cousin was immediately despatched to the railway station to book a ticket for home.

Throughout my childhood, whenever an acquaintance got the disease, my parents’ warnings to me had been suitably dire. I remembered one entire family in our colony contracting chicken pox when I was four. My friends and I didn’t dare pass in front of their house for weeks, always jumping into the big ditch on the other side of the road and crawling, with our heads down lest the virus spot us, till we were well clear of the house.

I nearly fainted in the train lavatory -- I thought I was dying -- as the fever peaked but that was about it. It itched for a while and I tickled myself with Neem leaves to keep my mind and fingers busy. The pock marks soon crusted over and they were all gone in a week or so, with barely a scar as reminder. My father insisted I bathe in water treated with more Neem leaves and then sent me packing back to college.

Fever and dizziness, not to mention paranoia

Second year passed without incident, as did most of third year. It was almost time for Hall Day, the anniversary of the Hall’s founding, the last big feast of the year.

It started with a fever at night which I thought I had sweated out when I woke up in the morning without it. But despite a good bath, I felt clammy pretty much all day. Everything seemed to take a little bit more effort. And there was that intermittent headache. I knew I had a problem when the fever returned in the evening.

I packed my clothes, enough for a few days, and took off to Anna Nagar again. Not including my chicken pox run, I often went to Anna Nagar in my first year to escape my sadistic seniors, being a thorough nuisance to my uncle’s family. But the frequency of visits had come down once I had become a senior.

My uncle was at home when I turned up this time. I told him I was feeling sick and went to sleep. When I woke up about two hours later, the bedsheet was wet with sweat. I quickly smelled the sheets and checked my shorts anyway to make sure I didn’t have a dream about taking a piss from the door of a moving train or something. I hadn’t, but I did have a fever, the body ached here and there, and more than anything else, I had the feeling that something was wrong.

It was dark outside. I went up to my uncle and told him I felt really sick and I think I should go to the hospital.

“Now?”

“Yes, now,” I said.

“Ok,” he said and we walked the short distance to the hospital.

The doctor checked my temperature – it was close to 40° Celsius.

“I think he should be admitted,” he informed my uncle and I was fairly relieved, I wasn’t sure if my uncle thought I was making this up to skip an exam or something.

They didn’t seem to have any vacant rooms, so I was put into the first bed in a long room which was partitioned into three with curtains; I couldn’t see if there was anyone else behind the curtains.

One of the duty nurses in the ward came over, looked at my file, and went out. She came back five minutes later with a plastic bag of what I thought was saline.

“Is that for me?”

She nodded her head.

“Doesn’t that involve a needle in my arm or something?”

“Mmmmm.” Then she took out the needle.

“Hold out your left arm…straight…clench your fist…you will feel a small prick…you are not going to cry, are you…you are a big boy…”

With the needle in my wrist, she wrapped it up with plaster so that it wouldn’t slip out and connected the IV drip. The tube, meanwhile, was inserted into a drip monitoring machine.

As I figured out later, the machine would squeeze the tube so that the saline flowed slower or released it if the flow needed to be faster, depending on the speed settings you chose. It had a meter which told you the current speed, buttons for adjusting the speed and a small red indicator light.

“What is that red light for,” I turned to ask the nurse but she had already left the room with her tray.

There was no TV, and I wasn’t sure I had the strength to watch it even if there was one. My body was experiencing cyclical fits of shivering and fever. One moment, I would be so cold that both the blankets wouldn’t be enough, another I was sweating in my hospital gown. Sleep was hard to come by. My mind, my refuge in times of extreme boredom, just wasn’t there anymore; suffering had somehow managed to leave no room for an imagination. I was aware of movement beyond the curtains, a cough by a patient, a nurse wheeling a trolley, flip flops in the hallway, but I lost all track of time and I slipped into a waking sleep brought about by a tired body and a restless mind.

I was jarred out of my haze by the clanging of the tray which the nurse kept on the table. The IV bag was almost empty and the nurse had brought a new one.

“What time is it…sister,” I asked with a heavy heart, the thought of calling the pretty nurse ‘sister’ made me pause.

“Three.”

“Great, the witching hour,” my jokes felt as weak as I did.

The nurse connected the new IV bag, changed the settings in the drip monitor and went out. I was wide awake.

The red light on the machine was blinking. I wondered if that was a good thing. It was connected to the mains, so it couldn’t be a low battery indicator.

Then I saw it. Bubbles. In the IV line. Slowly making their way to my arm. TV Images of dastardly villains killing comatose patients by injecting a pocket of air into the IV drip flashed before my eyes.

“I am so dead,” I thought, and tried to break the bubbles by squeezing the tubes while I quickly rang for the nurse.

“Sister, bubbles, in the tube,” I said breathlessly to the nurse who took forever to arrive, as I tried to burst two more bubbles. One bubble was very persistent, it just broke into two smaller ones and was almost at my arm.

She checked the tube. “Don’t worry, these are nothing, nothing to worry about. Go to sleep.”

“But…Sister…bubble…” I said helplessly as the two small bubbles went in. there was nothing to be done now but wait. The bubbles would travel through the bloodstream to my heart and burst, causing a heart attack. I searched for my phone. Maybe I had enough time to call my parents and tell them I loved them.

But the nurse’s nonchalance stopped me. She probably knows what she is doing.

When nothing happened after five minutes, I realised there was a God in heaven who loved me; and I was a huge fan.

But since God apparently helps those who help themselves, I decided to take things into my own hands and keep an eye on the monitor. The red light was still blinking. The meter said 120. I figured I should keep an eye on the red light. If it starts blinking faster, like a timer on a bomb about to explode, I will know I am in trouble.

I don’t know how long I stared at the light. I don’t remember if I ever blinked. My eyes began to hurt, but it was a matter of life or death. I couldn’t give up.

Suddenly, everything went dark.

“Waaaaah,” I cried, furiously pressing the buzzer.

“I have been blinded,” I sobbed to the nurse who came running. “I stared at the infrared light for too long, my eyes have been burned.” In my crazed mind, I had equated a red light with infra-red, forgetting that infra-red was colourless.

“Hold still,” the nurse was calmness and logic personified. Or she saw cases like mine every day. “That light is LED. You are just having a panic attack.” I could hear her jotting something down in my file.

“I want that monitor switched off; please sister, save me, is there anything you can do for my eyes.”

“Don’t worry, there is nothing wrong with your eyes. Try to sleep.”

“But…but…I can’t see.”

“You will. Close your eyes.”

“Please, please can you switch off that monitor? It may burn a hole in my brain next. What if it is emitting radiation?”

“Okay.”

I heard a switch being flicked.

The nurse left but came back after a few minutes.

“Here, have this.”

I was still afraid to open my eyes.

She placed a tablet in my palm and handed me a cup of water.

It must have been a sedative, because I was soon asleep.

The next morning when I woke up, the room was bright and my eyes were alright. I found the night nurse had already left. “Where is night nurse,” I asked the duty nurse. I figured I had to apologise for the night’s drama.

“Gone home.”

I was shifted to a room that day. I never the night nurse again.

The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. With every test result that proved inconclusive, I came up with my own diagnoses. My favourite was rabies.

There had been talk, though no one had seen it, of finding a dead bat in the Hall’s water tank. I had recently read that rabies can spread from not only dogs, but bats as well. In fact, the story I read was about a new treatment for someone who was not treated immediately after being bitten by an infected animal, a bat in this case.

Putting two and two together, I came up with, voila, rabies. Of course the doctor was not particularly impressed. “You are not a doctor,” he told me curtly.

Convinced of an impending painful death, I took to walking, when I had the strength, the sixth-floor corridors in nothing but my hospital gown, looking the part of the wraith I was soon going to be. The destination was usually the terrace, a windy and empty refuge from the hustle and bustle of the ward. I would rest my arms on the parapet and stare out and down at Anna Nagar, often contemplating the futility of life and thinking of reasons to end it. I would look longingly at the green lawn six floors below and wonder if it would make for a soft landing. The only time I nearly tested my hypothesis that it wouldn’t – not at those speeds, I thought – I backed out to cover my ass as a fierce wind gave me my own Marilyn Monroe moment, just a lot more hairy.

Finally, almost a week after I was admitted, the doctors finally figured out I had Typhoid.

Symptoms: Temperature fluctuations, malaise, headache and frequent delirium!

I thanked my stars I didn’t deliriously try to advance the cause of science by testing various hypotheses.

Despite the medicines, the disease took another 10 days to run its course. I had already missed Hall Day.

Goodbye, cruel world

I had been the black sheep of my family over my refusal to eat meat since I was a kid. They would speak in hushed tones about the blood of the Brahmins, who became the first Christians in Kerala after being converted by St. Thomas, running through me. Some went even further and told me not to worry, they would find a Brahmin girl for me to get married to.

But once I got a taste for beef, in the double cheeseburger at McDonad’s, there was no going back. It wasn’t all hunky dory though. I hated how slivers of meat would get stuck between my teeth and getting it out always seemed to take forever.

My teeth had been my pride and joy ever since Susan in class IX told me they were the only good thing about me. Of course I did not think that was the only thing but the fact that Susan thought my teeth were nice meant my teeth were seriously good looking.

The pearly whites did give way to a mild yellow during college but it was only noticeable when my teeth stood out against the really white froth of my toothpaste. But then, I still had a perfectly even set a person could have.

The problem, I told myself, was that my teeth were so perfectly aligned that there was hardly any space between them. So when a shred of beef did somehow manage to get stuck between my teeth, the fire force was needed to get it unstuck.

Except for the fire force bit, that’s exactly what happened one day.

I managed to get a sliver lodged between my lower incisors during breakfast. Try as I might, it wouldn’t come out. Since I was at work, all I could do was to keep trying to get it out using my tongue. For a good four hours, my tongue unconsciously attacked the space between my teeth, to no avail. The beef was still there when I went for lunch.

I had just sat down with my plate when it happened. The sliver was out, my tongue had finally managed to prise it loose. But there was something hard with it. I spit it out into my hand. It was white, like a very small piece of mosaic.

I was staring at the top half my tooth. My tongue had sheared it off trying to get the beef out.

I knew it was next to impossible. Teeth enamel, I knew, was extremely hard.

On my way home, I bought some sensitive toothbrush and paste. The next morning, I found a dentist nearby who said it could only be the result of some recent trauma and did not particularly cotton on to my explanation of my super-strong tongue or super-weak tooth.

She added she could cap my tooth so that my teeth were perfectly aligned once again, “only two-thousand rupees.”

The dentist had done nothing to ease my mind. I wish I could say the same about my wallet. So I came up with the worst-case scenario. “It has to be bone cancer, it has to be. My bones are obviously disintegrating.”

However, I decided to get a second opinion when I went home to Kerala the next week.

George Dental Clinic in Trivandrum is a suitably impressive place. Unlike the one-chair practice of the Bombay dentist, Dr George had three dentist chairs in his clinic, a degree from London, a visiting dental surgeon who peered at my teeth too before conferring with Dr George in hushed tones, not to mention the visiting endodontist, orthodontist and prosthodontist with MDs or higher degrees. I was suitably impressed alright.

“We need a dental x-ray,” Dr. George finally said.

“Isn’t there any other way, Doctor?”

“Why, what are you worried about, radiation?”

I nodded. I had just read an article in the Washington Post about a 50-year study that linked dental x-rays with brain tumours.

“Well, it’s up to you. We can’t get a good idea without an x-ray. Besides, the radiation from this machine is very little, almost equivalent to your daily exposure to sunlight over three days.”

I thought about it. “What was worse – bone cancer now or brain tumour later?”

“Alright, fine, please keep the radiation to gentle if you have such a setting.”

Five minutes later, the doctor and the surgeon were poring over the x-ray.

Finally, “it looks like your wisdom teeth are pushing the rest of your teeth inward.”

I was shattered. “What are you saying Doctor, my perfectly aligned teeth are the result of wisdom tooth growing oddly?”

“Yes, it looks like it. You better get them removed, your wisdom teeth. One of them has already pushed into the jaw bone. It’ll become painful over time.”

“So is this the reason for my chipped tooth?”

“I don’t know, we can’t say for sure.”

Not only had he punctured the aura around my beautiful teeth, he still didn’t know why my tooth was broken. It was maddening.

So I went back to Bombay with a hole in my mouth where my wisdom tooth had been and still no answers.

But God is great; I had another symptom in a week.

I run for about 20 minutes almost every day. A week after I got back from home, my left knee started giving away a minute into my run and this was accompanied by a good amount of pain for another five minutes. I found it hard to climb the stairs and it was particularly painful to put too much weight on my left leg.

“It’s cancer alright,” I told myself.

The orthopaedic specialist I went to was, however, still not convinced. He made me lie down on the bed and listened for noises as he bent my leg this way and that at the knee.

“Your leg seems to be alright. You only experience the pain when running or climbing stairs?”

“Yes.”

The doctor was scribbling furiously.

“Doctor, so you don’t think this could be cancer,” I asked, just to be sure, the doctor looked the sympathetic sort.

He gave me that look which said “the psychiatrist is on the fourth floor”, I had completely misread him. But he still said nicely, “no, I don’t think so,” and went back to scribbling.

“Ok, I need you to get these tests done,” he said, handing me the prescription. “Meanwhile, you can get started with this tablet,” he was pointing to his royal mess of a garbled prescription.

At least he was prescribing tests, even if they were in Urdu.

I went down to radiology, got an x-ray of both my knees, and then to the lab where I managed to get my blood taken without being too squeamish.

“You can collect your results on Monday,” the lab assistant told me.

The thought of a four-day wait was not at all appealing, but I didn’t push it.

I had been taking care of my left knee, not putting too much of my weight on it, carefully ignoring all urges to bend it as a pre-requisite for sleeping. I stopped going to the gym. I had stopped drinking, not even wine.

While I was convinced it was cancer, I did leave some room for other scenarios. From what I concluded after extensive research on the internet, excess uric acid in my body could have caused gout, which was my best-case scenario, while cancer was my worst; cancer and AIDS actually while arthritis was somewhere in between. I still had friends who would tell stories of how their friends knew someone whose friend had contracted HIV at the barbershop, from infected blades.

But the more I read about uric acid and gout, the more I was convinced I did not have it. And everything else was something too bad to have. Arthritis did not have a cure and would result in a life-long gradual deterioration in my quality of life. Cancer, on the other hand, meant my life-long wouldn’t be all that long; AIDS meant I would get an earful from my parents, not to mention the priests they would bring along, and long stories of how I am getting my just desserts for dropping out of Sunday School and walking the path of the Satan. I couldn’t figure out which was worse.

On Friday, things actually got a lot worse.

While my pain had been restricted to my left knee so far, I suddenly had aches in my fingers around my knuckles. Final confirmation, if I needed it, that I was going to die soon.

My orthopaedist wasn’t available for the weekend. I didn’t trust the general practitioners, they would just give me aspirin. Lying on my bed, my thoughts were full of death and the afterlife. But before that, I needed to take care of a few things. I needed to find a lawyer and make a will. The insurance money was to go to my parents, who I hoped would use the money to set up a scholarship in my name for needy students. That would be my legacy, my name will survive long after I am gone, provided the trust doesn’t go bankrupt. I had to ensure the trustees knew something about finance. I wondered if I could take out another insurance policy before they found out about my illness. Maybe I could buy one online.

I also decided I didn’t want to die in a hospital bed. I wanted to die in Goa, or Bali, on a beach, watching the sunset. That rules out the east coast. My sister and her friends had spent a good two hours on the beach one morning, waiting to catch the sunrise, before one of them realised they were on the west coast.

Or maybe I should kill myself before it became too painful. Maybe I should do it in the Himalayas, on one of the highest snow-clad mountains I could get to. I would dig a hole in the snow at the very top, where it would be snow-covered all year round. First I would eat 20 sleeping pills, which would, hopefully, make me sleep, if it doesn’t kill me. Before either of that happened, I would take off all my clothes. So if the sleeping pills didn’t kill me, the idea was that the cold would. Maybe after a hundred years, someone might discover my preserved body in the ice and they would have the technology to bring me back to life or clone me. The more I thought about it, dying in the mountains seemed all the more appealing.

There was also the matter of not leaving things unsaid. I had to write letters to everyone I have had a tiff with, apologising and asking for forgiveness. Of course, I didn’t want any pity, I would not mention I was dying.

Looking back, except for one fit of sobbing, I was fairly calm at the prospect of death.

I went up to the doctor as soon as I got my test results on Monday.

The doctor looked at the x-ray first. “Hmmm, the space between your bones seems to have reduced in your left leg,” he said, pointing at my joint. I couldn’t make out which leg was which but I nodded knowingly. It couldn’t get any worse.

Looking at the next slip of paper, he said, “ok, so you have tested negative for arthritis…” That was happy news indeed before he continued, “of course we have only tested for one type of arthritis, there are 13 in all.” The doctor obviously had no taste for theatrics. If it was me, I would started with, “there is some good news and some bad news….”

“Complete blood test…hmmm…all normal…uric acid…within parameters….”

My sense of foreboding increased with each negative test result. I couldn’t bear the thought of another wait as the doctor prescribed more tests.

The doctor frowned as he read the last report. It was over, I knew it, this was the beginning of the end. And with it came an odd sense of happiness. At least I had been right about the cancer. I was going to hear the words that every hypochondriac wants to hear. The doctor was going to say, ”I am sorry, it looks like you were right, you do have cancer.”

“You have a vitamin D deficiency.”

“What!?”

“Vitamin D,” he repeated. “The body needs Vitamin D to absorb calcium. When you don’t have enough of it, your bones start to soften and can become painful over time. It is actually fairly common among the youth these days, because of the kind of lifestyle you lead. The body usually produces all the vitamin D it needs from sunlight. I am guessing you haven’t been out in the sun a lot for a long time?”

This had to be a cruel joke.

The doctor was having a go at his prescription pad again.

“Take this tablet once every two days for 16 days. That’s a vitamin-D supplement. Once that is over, wait for 5 days, and then get this injection. On the 30^th day, come see me again.”

I walked out of the hospital into the sunlight and stood there, just soaking it in, as relief washed over me, relief with a tinge of humiliation at being diagnosed with a common ailment, but relief predominantly. It was over, my ordeal was finally over.