He's her mother's father

She was born again. Not strictly in the evangelical sense but born out of a process that included the regeneration of the human spirit. I dread to explain the process but would like to call it a remarkable coalescence of medical and spiritual certitude. Not necessarily in equal measure, with the latter part mostly in empirical form.

There is some form of divineness about life-saving medical procedures and surgeons are considered demi- gods in many parts of the world. We refuse to admit such mob psychology until we are confronted with a similar predicament in our own backyard. We then scratch the credentials of our surgeon to find a semblance of humanness and devoutness behind the gravitas he commands. In him or her, then, we trust.

“I don’t want to remove your hair. So beautiful are your locks,” Dr Gopalakrishnan said in the same vein as he touched upon the medical procedure. For a moment, she forgot why she was in the neurosurgeon’s consultation. She felt as if she was sitting in a salon, ready to get a costly makeover.

“A small incision to get rid of the junk in your upper storey. That’s all it takes. I am more worried about the aesthetics than the procedure,” he joked without cracking a smile, a signpost to his alternate persona..

She sat tight like an Indian villager listening to a fortune teller under a bodhi tree.

“Are you ready? Take it as a staycation. Five-star food in a deluxe room. And, of course, some much-deserved rest,” the surgeon said, infantilising a neurosurgery for the patient’s benefit.

“I’m game for it.” The patient seemed to be under his magical spell already.

A lack of such clinical confidence has been responsible for many deaths across the world, especially as it was seen during Covid. At the peak of the pandemic, the daughter of one of my friends called, requesting to talk some sense into her dad. The multimorbid person bet his life on WhatsApp forwards and shunned doctors and medicines. And when the deadly pathogen caught up with him, it was too late to beef up his vitals.

When a jolly good fellow in my sister’s office reduced his carb deposits by half, I told him, “Your bony avatar worries me. What’s happening?”

“I am on naturopathy for the five cardiac blocks I am living with. No medications.” And one evening, he collapsed and died at a deserted bus stop.

What matters most in a life-threatening situation is the fides acquisita in someone — a surgeon in this case. That is what I had done in the past — joking with doctors and flirting with nurses in green scrubs minutes before anesthesia knocked me off in seconds. When life seems to slip away from our hands, what is our option except to laugh or to pray?

suresh@khaleejtimes.com