A little about my disassociation with my body is that I had little understanding about hunger (this resulted in most of my diseases) and pain (both physical and mental). I would eat what my mother gave and never ask for second helping. Due to an accident my father lost his senses for taste and smell when I was ten so I got into eating food without tasting it.
My first introduction to a Doctor was to our family physician Dr. Roy who was not keen on his medical practice and had switched to homeopathic treatment. My parents had immense faith in him and I would be sent to him for getting medicines. He would smile and ask what all my mother has given and with warmth would say why she sends for medicine as she is herself a doctor. My affection and respect for him was also based on his sincere respect for my mother and her ability. I would not budge without taking medicines and his prescription, so unwillingly he would give me both.
In 1977 I got measles and malaria at the same time. Human beings are products of their experiences. I am no exception. No medicines can be given during measles and malaria does not get cured without medication! I had to wait out getting 105 degrees everyday for five days at a particular time as part of malaria, and sweat the fever out. I lost appetite further and barely ate for a month other than drinking butter milk and slowly recovered.
My Marathi brother (Now a Neurosurgeon Dr. Ajay Nagraj in Raipur) was studying medicine 2nd year in Jabalpur Medical College when he got a new Blood Pressure checking instrument way back in late 80s. I was in my thirties. He checked my BP once and then again. He advised me not to show my BP to anyone and definitely not doctors. Much later I got to know that my normal BP is much lower than the general normal. I still have 90/60 BP and function around normalcy.
I look at medical practices with a pendulum like experience swinging between acceptance and non acceptance.
Glaucoma: I suffered from severe migraine for quite a few years but got it diagnosed only when Ajju, my brother came to study MCH in KEM Mumbai as I was staying in Mumbai then. He was studying for neurosurgery but he was and still is a doctor whom I could/can trust. Only after I was cured of migraine, I realized that I had some issue with my eyes and I started going for eye check-up. I went to ophthalmologists with private practice, in government hospitals and private hospitals with no diagnosis for three years. Eventually it was diagnosed in the latter half of 1991 by an ophthalmologist in Mumbai Homeopathic hospital and I got operated in Calcutta under guidance of my uncle’s retired Teacher Glaucoma specialist, who took one look and said that it needed immediate operation.
https://medium.com/@bula1957/my-tryst-with-glaucoma-64d4257380c2
I feel that I was given this experience to give me scope to search ways of knowing the body and learning ways to respond to its needs. I had to be careful of what triggers the pain. What my body reacts to is unique to my body. Each body is unique so the reactions too are specific to that particular body.
Arthritis: In 1994 three years after the glaucoma operation my knees started troubling me. They swelled and were extremely painful. None of the tests revealed anything, but orthopedic doctors said that it was a particular kind of arthritis and I would have to live on painkillers all my life, the so-called pain killers had no effect whatsoever, which means living with pain all my life — no way! Another matter altogether is that my disassociation with pain allowed me to read a big fat book (Vikram Seth’s Suitable Boy) in three months while I was bed ridden. My younger son studying microbiology found that there is a connection between eye operation and knee pain. A friend visited and said that the body can cure itself given a chance so I took to having seasonal fruits only (750 gms.) in the morning, salads 30 minutes before lunch, did meditation and listened to music on radio. I went again to Homeopathic hospital, this time to an orthopedic there. He gave me a bandage, rather layers of short bandages to be wrapped around the knees to reuse the body heat to repair, no medicines. I got cured.
I learnt that interdependence is a way of life while in bed when I could not even get up for a glass of water and going to the washroom was a struggle beyond words. We learn the basics of nutrition during middle school. Food is for growth and repair. Invariably the system of living does not allow scope to remember this basic repairing quality of food, as the lifestyle of so called modern world hampers this process. Dependence on medical treatment is so subtly cultivated that human beings do not realize when this becomes a habit.
TB: In 2006–7 I had a cough and loose motions. I was in the middle of documenting my travelogue. Somehow my mind was registering only loose motions and the cough seemed nonexistent. The hospital is quite far and there was no straight bus to Irla and so I resorted to taking homeopathic treatment from a doctor near my home in Kalina. As I was going to visit my infant granddaughters in Bangalore I asked the doctor if it was ok. He laughed and said you come to me so regularly, if there was an issue I would tell you that you have to be isolated. Then I planned to visit my sister in Delaware (USA). Then too he said it is ok. I packed medicine for four months and went. Already I was five months into treatment. My cough and loose motions continued. It was after a fortnight’s stay with my sister I coughed blood and it hit my thick head that I am having TB! As I did not get any response from my doctor back home I had to depend on treatment at the local level in America. In America TB is an exotic disease; I was in the fourth stage of TB; thankfully TB needed no insurance for treatment only isolation and the TB department staff came everyday to ensure that I took medication regularly. That and my sister’s care got me well enough to travel after the four months and I continued my treatment in Bangalore and Bombay thereafter.
Knowledge is not enough, timely knowledge and its implementation is a must. Connection with the body is essential but unlike me, people should have the ability to listen to their bodies. I could have saved myself a lot of agony had it occurred to me in time that I need to get tested for TB after a fortnight of coughing. I knew this but it took six months for me to register this too when I coughed blood. I am still surprised with myself. Since then I have been regularly feeding the body in time as I had to get another course of TB as it had gone to my brain during that time. That too would have remained undetected had it not been for the intervention of Dr. Kamaxi Bhati, Dean of Prevention and Social Health Department of KEM then, a part of women’s group in Mumbai, who refused to give me any medication unless cause was detected.
I would not want to comment or even suggest medical treatment as to which one is better. It is obvious from my examples that certain treatments have no options! I still believe that it is all in our minds; when we want to find options then only we find them. Dr. Kamaxi Bhati said that the human brain is so complex that medical science can only fathom what attempts it makes. When I had gone to meet her for tiredness she said she could not suggest any medication unless she knew the cause. I had written four pages of all my issues. When my son had taken me to the hospital it was she (she had read my sharing) who insisted that I be admitted in an emergency ward when the hospital people found no reason to let me stay in the hospital. There is no question — nutrition is essential for recovery, treatment and cure, whatever the medical treatment.
This issue is incomplete without referring to care given at home. After my five days in hospital for TB in brain two young girls, Suvarna and Shabnam, neither related by blood or marriage, quit their jobs to bathe me, cook for me, feed me and give me the required medicines as I was hardly aware of myself as I was getting seizures. Rahul, my elder son worked his way to become a successful business person after seeing the number of required tests that had to be done in Government hospital and the treatment at minimum cost, as he was pestered to shift me to private hospital.
Health issues were not issues till I started seeing them as part of women’s collective consciousness. Thankfully I never became sick, only the body became unwell; I have been either nonfunctional or functional.
