Nursing Naturally

Being in a religious house, I understand, I am spared from much of pain and agony that my family members go through every now and then. After a few days, my father is not well again, and every time when one of the family members falls sick, it becomes a matter of concern for all the members. He had eaten only in the morning, and says he does not feel like eating; there is a sense of nausea, so typical of those who are sick for some days. But the fact that he has not eaten has worried my mother, sister, and niece. Each of them have their own load of worries, and when my father falls sick, all of them are deeply worried, and do what they can to get him alright.

I felt the words of my mother hard to digest; she finds it hard to see my father, who for the most part of his life had been quite healthy, lying down helplessly. My parents are used to fighting constantly, especially when my father goes hiding with his bottle, but at a moment like this, my mother is all caring. I had experienced her care when I was sick many years ago. I might have been some seven years then, but still remember quite clearly how she nursed me and made me healthy. She feels sad that my father is not able to eat, not able to contain himself. My sister had bought a loaf of bread after her school hours, so that he could eat something before going to bed. But he refuses to eat even that.

We become quite different when we are sick, especially when we are down with a relatively major sickness, including malaria, typhoid, pneumonia and the type. On the one hand, we become quite helpless, and require the help and assistance of people around us; on the other we feel sad to bother and disturb others to help us. While we may feel hard to swallow even the liquid food, especially when we lose appetite, others may think that we are just staging. Pretence is the last thing that any sick person would resort to, and what can work wonders is a greater dose of understanding and support to the person who is sick.

Sometimes I feel the importance of having a family, friends and relatives, when I am sick; there were times when my companions in the house did not even know that I was sick, even as I did not join the meals or other common community programs. Loneliness has haunted me at such moments, but I realize this is part of our cross. Some communities are lucky to have such a motherly person as ‘minister’, who would go out of his way to take good care of the members under his care. But such persons are only rare and exceptions. More than at other occasions, we need the love and care of community and companions at the time of our sickness, because those are the moments we feel ourselves so very vulnerable and helpless.

I know one thing for sure, that my father would listen to me, and that is the reason why I spoke to him a few words to encourage him to eat and go to bed. Knowingly or unknowingly we also like the little attention of other family members when we are sick. I remember how one of our senior fathers was so very delighted to have a cup of soup every day, during his 20 days of stay at a nursing home, and I would not be surprised that it was the soup and the loving care of sisters and friends which had restored his health so soon. More than medicine, what is required when we are sick, is the loving care of the companions and friends. This alone can do miracles when we are sick and bring us back to health.

Caring for the Treasure House

We often realize the worth of things and persons only in their absence. A father may be the worst kind of person and notorious drunkard, and the mother may curse him each day, why God is not calling him; but look at the same mother after the untimely death of the father. She would not be happy to have lost her husband; she would feel the pinch only when he is no more there. Probably all these years, she was able to look only at his drunkenness, and not any thing else. But after his death, she realizes that he was much more than a mere drunkard; at least sometimes, when he was sober, he used to be affectionate and loving towards her.

The same is also true of our human body; we do not realize what a treasure house we possess in our bodies; maybe a whole life will not be sufficient to understand the minute intricate mechanism which is operative in our bodies; the crisscrossing of veins, bones, flesh, and all of them perfectly linked to the mind, the central processing unit. When one of the body parts is dysfunctional, it affects the entire body, and that is what is so very obvious, when we look at one of our senior friends, who has spoiled both his kidneys, and is frantically on the look out for a donor, and a nursing home which will conduct the transplant.

Life is not the same when these kidneys have refused to filter the waste; he has to go for four agonising hours of dialysis, twice a week. When he returns after the dialysis, he is half dead; he has not much energy, and each day, as his body weight increases due to the accumulation of urine, he feels uncomfortable, and so cannot engage in any serious work. Life has come to a standstill for him, and therefore whenever there is a ray of hope for transplant, he gets excited, and sincerely hopes that something good will come out of this desire. When he neglected the care of his body for several years, he did not realize what could happen to him one day, and today he regrets for neglecting the care of his health.

It is illegal to even indirectly convince a person to donate one of his/her kidneys so that this friend of ours may live a fairly healthy life, for atleast another ten or fifteen years. It is also unethical, to imply that our friend's life is more worthwhile than the donor, even if it is a friend who has come forward to do this great favor. The moral and ethical questions are not easy to resolve, though it is easy to cut short the arguments on the ground that all lives are equal, and if one has destroyed one's kidneys due to neglect, it is for the one to reap the fruits of what he had done, but humanly speaking we cannot stop at that.

Most of us falter in life, not out of willful, deliberate action, but out of ignorance and carelessness. If only our friend had known for sure that if he did not care for his health, and take necessary precaution, he may lose his kidneys, probably he might not have landed at this stage. But could he be given yet another chance to taste and see what life has to offer to him? It is a big lesson for us, to realize the worth of each of the body parts, big or small, all of them have a specific role and function. Yesterday I saw a middleaged man, whose both feet have been amputated. Yet he looked quite happy, walking on his knees. He may feel envious of us, but do we sufficiently care for our feet?

Pleasure from Pain

It is hard to describe how much of inconveniences the mother and brother of a companion of mine go through in order to keep the father under control. The father in his late seventies, had been suffering from some kind of psychotic disorder, which the doctors are not able to diagnose and attend to it. Sleepless nights and days have become their daily routine, as the father begins to wander in his past glory, and imagines that he is in a different location and a different time. Anger and violent protests have become quite common, and to keep him under control is not an easy task, but this is something that they cannot help but accept. Often I hear the whisper of the mother that she is worn out and she would not live long under this kind of stressful situations.

Two things come to my mind. First, the care and concern the family has in attending to the old father, who is just not aware of what he says and what he does. Diabetes and swinging blood pressure have made his situation worse; when he was taking medicine to keep his head and mind cool, it had repercussions on the diabetes and blood pressure. Now that the hospital he was staying in has discharged him, my companion is blank as to what the family would do next. He keeps muttering that they are facing a dead-end, all the possibilities having run dry. I could see that he too has not slept well ever since the family brought his father to the city; he has been running helter skelter, trying to meet doctors, getting medicine, and at the same time attending to his office works.

Everyone in the family seem to be fully aware that they cannot blame or shout at the old man, who does things without fully being conscious of; they do not put the blame on him. Sometimes they are hurt by what he tells them, but they know that he is not aware of the words which spill from his lips. They try to be as gentle and nice to him as they can, and that makes the old man a bit soft in his dealings with them, but that is not the end. It would not take too long for him to get into his usual tantrums and put all of them into uneasy situation. Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I were in the place of my companion; it is psychologically not too healthy to live in such hyper tension day after day. It is sure to affect one mentally and psychologically.

Second, everyone in the family is a silent sufferer; we all suffer for the ones we love and care, and that seems to be part of the bundle! It would be quite unrealistic to imagine that we always have good time with the people we love. There are times when we may not have any other option than to silently suffer, while the other party may not even be aware that we are shedding silent tears. The other possibility is also there, when one party is indifferent and cold, the other party may go through untold suffering, and it may be hard to accept if the pain and suffering is inflicted on the other deliberately and willingly! This is yet another riddle of life, for which we may not have an answer.

Even as we suffer for our dear ones and those we care, there is an amount of joy and happiness we may experience deep within; this may be a passive pleasure, but it is real! But this pleasure may turn to self-defeating when it begins to submit oneself voluntarily to be persecuted and tortured by another. A pleasure which comes out of self-pity and self-surrender before sadistic and masochistic persons cannot be deemed real and authentic. Pain and suffering come to us unasked, and if we go seeking them, that may be the sign that we are going crazy, and may need some psychiatric counseling, but when it comes to us unasked, we can either accept it or reject it, depending on what we really want to do with it.

Sacred Salaam!

Sometimes I do feel it would have been better if I had a choice to voluntarily choose Christ. It is not that I have less respect for the gods of other religions; I have great respect for every spiritual being, because I am convinced that the fundamental principle that unites them is the same, and that goes beyond any religious coloring. For a person who is in search for the deeper principles which govern the universe, all religions are alike, however there are certain facets of a religious tradition which may attract one to it rather than to another. It is like a buffet meal, where you are presented with several dishes, and you may like only one particular dish, and after eating a little of it, you might feel your heart (and also your stomach) is full. But you have not said that other dishes are not as good as this one, and it is not possible for you to taste them all either. But you are happy to have what you like.

If someone were to ask me, what has Christ done to me - I am sure I will have something to say, something from the very personal angle, which one may accept or not! I am not much interested in the controversy between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, but would like to limit myself to what has Christ done to me, in my little life! Strangely Jesus has helped me to get out of the boundaries of the religious circle that had surrounded me all these years. The religion of Christ is a universal religion where all men and women of goodwill can find fulfilment. Christianity is an institution, which has the basic tenets of the teachings of Christ, but has over the years solidified the principles, and have become sacro sanct to them. But Christ goes beyond all religions, and in a sense he was the first humanist, who truly promoted humanism, based on fraternal charity and love!

Jesus has helped me to look at my neighbor in whom lies my salvation, fulfilment and the attainment of my aspirations. It is a call to community living, and he had taught it by example, living with people of different temperaments, different walks of life. I would like to imagine what three years of life with a terrorist (Simon the zealot), public servant (Matthew the tax-collector), agnostic (Thomas), man of temper (Peter), greedy and money-minded (Judas), innocent and too young (John), simple fishermen would have been, but at the end they were transformed men, who could think beyond their narrow peripheries! It appears that at the end, all these men were one in mind, and one in heart. That was the magic of living with Christ has done, and that reckons me to take side with him to transform me as he had done with his apostles!

Jesus was a medicine-man par excellence, for he treated people not based on symptoms, but based on the root causes, which prompted the illness. I tend to believe that those who were cured by Jesus might not have been sick again, because he went to the roots, and once the roots are healed, there is very little for the sickness to surface. He had medicine for all illnesses, most often to psychological and spiritual diseases too. In fact he understood that most of the sicknesses are related to the spheres of psychology or spirituality, and not so much to the body. Today we need to spend thousands of ruppes to diagnose the illnesses that huant us, but being an ace medicine-man, Jesus know what troubled people, just by looking at their faces. If only our doctors today have that ability, many lives of the poor and unaffordables could be saved.

But more than all, Jesus was the revolutionary, who reversed the age-old traditions which kept the human person bound with chains. He freed them from the clutches of tradition and conventions, and breathed in fresh air. He could be called truly a liberator, who placed realistic demands on his disciples, and demands which may even cost them their lives, but with the hope that it is all worth. He is a task-master who likes to push the student to the maximum limits of his/her capacity, but with love and compassion. He was the strange mixture of a demanding and a loving person, who valued people based not on what they had, but what they were, and that is the reason why all people were equal before him. Today I pay my humble tribute to this great person, who has made ripples in my life, and I continue to feel its vibrations as I continue to cherish what he is to me!