the hospital chronicles

Let me, at the outset, thank everyone for their kind wishes. I am truly touched, and deeply grateful. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. My mother is doing pretty good after the surgery , alive though not quite kicking , but well on the road to recovery.

All hospitals seem to have a particular smell, a sickly sweet smorgasbord of acrid vapours that waft into your olfactory receptors,smirk at the sheer helplessness of your condition, and eventally pummel you into a numb stupor.

No scholarship interview, or major college-entrance exam I have ever written, can compare with the excruciating ninety minute wait outside the operation theatre. There is just something utterly submissive about an operation, about leaving the well-being of a human being completely in the hands of another.

As I spent three sleepless nights in the ward with my mother, my only company was a beautiful, moving book called 'Norwegian Wood' by the celebrated Japanese author Haruki Murakami, and it is perhaps ironic that it is in such unhappy cirumstances, sharing the ward with a dazed lady who gave birth 2 weeks before time to a 1.67 kg waif, that i finally discovered my fictional alter ego - Toru Watanabe be his name.

By the way, it amazes me how nurses manage to keep in such good cheer amidst such disease, despair and often, death. God bless their souls.

Another thing. As i rummaged through my mother's medical files, I noticed something funny; evidently she had had three previous operations, two of which I knew were Caesareans for me and my lil sis, and discreet enquiries revealed that the third was a miscarriage.A bloody miscarriage. And I didn't even know.
Maybe that's why I feel so lonely all the time.
I miss my lost sibling.