JAB JAAGO TAB SAVERA

It’s never too late to change course and start afresh!

My wife was not even thirty when she learnt about her diabetes. It was genetic in her case. Yet, when she learnt about it, her initial reaction was denial, which caused in her a lot of sadness. She took time to accept the reality that she was diabetic and she had to learn to live with it. As usual, many people gave many suggestions… do this and do that… eat this and eat that… don’t do this and don’t do that and don’t eat this and don’t eat that. The doctors, too, could be so different in their approach to this desease… Some could be conservative and some, brash!

In the process, a diabetic patient’s body would become a guinea pig for all sorts of experiments. My wife, on the advice of one of our well-wishers, Dr. (Mrs.) Kapadia, an Ayurvedic doctor and a yoga consultant, one afternoon, decided to consult Dr. Anand Gokani, a well-known Diabetologist from Bombay Hospital. She had been consistently losing weight and getting into frequent crying bouts. She complained of a unbearable back pain. So, when Dr. Gokani was examining her, he noticed a big lump on her back, and he said, “Sweetheart, let’s keep your diabetes on hold for a while and see what this lump is.”

He immediately got in touch with Dr. Bhagwati, the senior Neuro Surgeon in the same hospital, who, quickly got all the tests done and diagnosed my wife’s condition to be Pott’s Spine – the tuberculosis of the spine. She was operated… and sent home after a month in Bombay Hospital. The next six months she was horizontally confined to the bed… The following two years, she was allowed to walk with a cage-like support from her neck to lower spine. Our son was barely four-year old and I was overloaded with work. Suddenly, I could sense the reaction in my own body… I began to look at life and relationship with a fresh perspective…

Dr. Gokani was a godsend and, literally, a guardian angel for us. His approach to diabetes was extremely different and a lot conservative. He believed in treating the patient emotionally first, then medically. He knew how stressed I was and, often, advised me on dealing with my wife’s condition. His advice helped me understand, empathize and cope. Those were not the days of mobile phones. One night, around 4 a.m., our landline phone rang. Dr. Gokani, in the midst of his travelling, was calling from the Calcutta airport. During that day, Dr. Bhagwati’s team had performed the surgery on my wife. Dr. Gokani wanted to know how it had gone!

Somehow, after my wife recovered from her spine-related issues, we couldn’t follow up with Dr. Gokani’s line of treatment. During these twenty-two-odd years, my wife tried all sorts of diabetic doctors. She gulped so many tablets, which, so often, got changed by each doctor she saw… While some put her on Insulin, some took her off it. Thus, as I said, her body remained a perpetual guinea pig!

So, fed up with what was going on with her, and triggered off by a shooting neck and shoulder pain, we, finally, landed up, today, where we had started off – Dr. Gokani’s consulting room at Bombay Hospital!

Both my wife and I were surprised when Dr. Gokani recalled those days… He remembered my pet name – Gerry – and said that he still has my Dawn Club booklets with him, and, he reads them, often. I had taken some latest Dawn Club books for him, which, he was delighted to receive.

Today, when I reminded him about his 4-a.m. call, twenty-two years ago, Dr. Gokani became a bit serious and said, “Well, after so many years, I can, probably, tell you why I was so anxious that night… Spine surgeries can be unpredictable. Just a few days before your surgery there was a big mishap following a similar surgery.”

My wife was a bit apologetic and said, “We should have followed up with you, doctor… Twenty-two years is a real long time!”

“Never mind sweetheart… It’s morning when you wake up!”… That’s Dr. Anand Gokani, our grand-old guardian angel… who, by a sheer co-incidence, is, also, the great grandson of another great soul – Mahatma Gandhi!

“Jab jaago tab savera!”… It’s never too late to change course and start afresh!

GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: Enfantsdutamilnadu.com