Every person on this earth has a decided fate and will eventually at a designated time achieve the inevitable goal of life, that is death. This has been commonly told to us. But still when it comes to your loved ones, you are somehow never ready. Especially when that someone is your parent/s. Parents are the first people you know, generally speaking, people you grow up learning and loving.
The idea of parents is enough to comfort you. Losing that sense of comfort is, at any point in time, very difficult, painful and traumatic. A lot of people also experience guilt after losing their parent/s, the guilt of taking them and their presence for granted. This guilt is felt by almost everyone as our parents envelope our lives even in an intangible way. As my counsellor put it, they are the source or origins of our life.
A year ago, when I lost my father, I had felt guilt too. But it was not because I had taken him for granted. Contrarily, I have been obsessed about his approval of my actions throughout my life. At the point, where he was proud of me and could believe in me to take care of myself on my own, when I wanted to experience this feeling that I have been longing for a really long time, he passed away. But his passing away was not peaceful at all. And that is the guilt I carry even after a long year without him.
My father woke up with a backache and chest pain in the morning of 25th Nov 22. He took a painkiller on the recommendation of the family doctor and when the pain didn’t subside, he was advised to get an ECG and 2D echo scan immediately. But as all the parents in the country, he waited because how can anything go wrong with him. As soon as my cousin got to know of this, he rushed to our home in Jalgaon and picked up dad and mom to take them to the diagnostic centre. They sat in his car and my dad started feeling uneasy.
A rare coincident was that one of my maternal uncles had accompanied my cousin and so mom and dad sat in the back seat. So, mom was able to immediately understand when she heard long snores from dad that there was something wrong with him. She raised an alarm and my cousin halted the car. Within seconds my uncle and mom sprung to action and started giving him CPR. Luckily, they come from a family with doctors and know how to respond in emergencies.
They were able to somehow get a little success in their actions, but there was no time to spare. My cousin jumped back to the driver seat and started driving the car to the nearest hospital with a phone in his hand and talking to my other maternal uncle who is a doctor.
Everything fell in place at the only hospital nearest to our place, as the doctor was someone some uncle of mine knew and had called to keep everything ready at the hospital. So, my father could be revived after the strenuous procedures that took up almost 2 hours. My brother and sister-in-law received the call and called me in my office. We three were in Pune at that time.
It was like the ground had slipped under our feet. We hurried to Jalgaon. But it was the scariest journey of our lives. I couldn’t imagine what my mom and my family had gone through in those few hours. Moreover, he was diabetic and that could make things worse for him. All the talks of asking him to control his diet, go for walks every morning and get his blood sugar checked regularly started coming back to me.
Had I pestered him every day to do all of that, would things be different now? – was what I kept thinking in my head. If he had listened and ate more veggies and soups instead of fried snacks and rice, could this situation be avoided? Indian parents have the tendency to deny that they age and need to look after themselves and their habits. They have been so obsessed with looking after their kids and their needs, that they forget that they are also vulnerable to sickness and problems.
Though he was revived, it took him 2 days to come back to consciousness and 5 days to respond to his name. There was damage done to his brain and he was on ventilator, so he couldn’t speak. Doctors said that the heart attack was quite major. The jerks in travel could also have made it worse than expected. The thing about Jalgaon is that the people are very tolerant and patient. For example, the roads in Jalgaon have been under construction way before my dad’s death and are still in a bad shape.
But nobody objects or demands that roads be repaired or haste the process. A lot of people have suffered backaches, slip disks and accidents because of the bad road in Jalgaon for a really long time. But how does it matter anymore? Dad is no more and the damage has already been done.
Dad was progressing fast and the neurologists and neurosurgeons, who visited dad on our insistence, were amazed at his recovery despite the reports of his brain damage. But it wasn’t easy, not even to get those reports. So, there are hardly any multi-specialty hospitals in Jalgaon that have all the radiological facilities available under one roof. So, in his serious condition, he had to be moved from the hospital to a nearby centre for getting an MRI done and later, for a CT-Scan. Moving patient with the ventilator on is a really challenging task with anaesthesia injected, and dad never regained consciousness from that last anaesthesia dose.
It was confusing, disturbing and painfully horrible to accept what had happened then. As initial rounds of blaming got over, everybody came around with the news and accepted the fact that he was no more. It took me three months or more, to get over the guilt. Guilt that I didn’t do enough for my dad, to force him to be regular in his food habits, his check-ups; that I couldn’t move the mountains to make all the facilities available for him at the door-steps; and that I couldn’t raise a voice against everything that is wrong in the society so that my dad could have been alive today, here with me, laughing, teasing and beaming proudly at us.
It has been a difficult year for all of us, and will be for the rest of our lives. I just wish that nobody else has to go through what my family, my mom and I had to go through during that time. I know death is an inevitable part of life, but dying a painful death in a hospital is not only difficult for the person, but also for everyone who loves them. It is a long process of unlearning this casual behaviour towards our health and health-care facilities around us. Do it for everyone you love, who love you and most importantly for yourself!