[Two and a half years back, I had been suffering from this neuropathy affecting my left hand which continued for a year and a half.
Today while cursing through the pages of my old diary, which seemed to be a witness to events that had taken place in a time which looks hazy and unearthly and eons back, I came across this little sweet ancedote, which I had filed when my only daughter Khuku used to be with me, and grace this little small flat of mine to make into a princess's palace whiched on laughter, joy and Pure Love...
It seems weird that we aren't together now but I am sure wherever my little Angel is, there are angels are there to befriend her , only to smitten by her love anf grace.
I am just copy pasting my old post, do keep the time factor ibn mind..]
"....Clinically one would brand the nerve disorder as Left Ulnar Mononeuropathy - the ulnar nerve is one of the 2 main nerves supplying the arm and hand - in my case it is the left one and it is my left hand that has been affected. I've been experiencing an ever-increasing pain, to the point of being excruciating,and an almost constant, weirdly tingling sensation in my left hand, particularly in the ring and little fingers, and the area of the palm below them which do not exactly move the way I wish them to.
"The condition seems to have developed, according to my neurologist, due to extensive playing of guitar, an exercise I had indulged in with passion, in my late teens and early 20's, when I used to play in the college rock-band which had a rather brief yet excitingly joyous professional stint later on. I had formally learnt classical and folk guitar (like flamenco, Catalan folk)which is played finger-style,and that requires a 'classical' acoustic guitar which traditionally sports a much broader finger-board than usual. That necessitated my left fingers to stretch extensively,and all the more so when I used to hold the broken chords in the background when we played those Scorpions numbers (I still remember those initially painful hours during rehearsals as we played songs like "When The Smoke Is Going Down").
"Over the last few months the left ring & little fingers had forced my hand into a clawed shape of submission, the fingers getting contracted and flexed at the little bone joints, a seemingly eternal state of Spasm that was not exactly painless. I find that rather ironic as the name of my rock-band(well it was 'mine' just as it was any other co-member's) was SPASM too, a name I'd kept myself along with the other band mates, mainly with the bass-guitarist who went on to become a hand-surgeon himself later on. (Now that's one of 'those quirks' of destiny,isn't it?)
"Coming back to my neuropathy, the pain had,at one point of time,increased so much that even the strongest painkillers were not being effective, and I had become literally sick of pain-killing injections. Nothing seemed to work,and the fact that I could no more hold chords, or even use my left fingers while playing guitar (ultimately I had to quit my favourite pass-time activity) only added to my frustrated, depressing woes....
"Three weeks back, as I was having my morning cold coffee, my 21 month-old daughter tiptoed her way into the hall, nimble-footed, and stood in front of me, looking at me with her sparkling, bright eyes. I knew that look. She wanted to climb up and sit on my stomach, straddling her legs on the sides facing her father - her favourite "seat" in the morning, as she would excitedly tell me how the pigeons had looked at her from outside the kitchen window or how busily the crows had pecked at the crumbs on the parapet. That day I found it difficult to give her a hand to take her morning seat. The pain was too much in my left hand which found itself too weak to carry her weight. I knew she would be disappointed.
"As I looked back at her eyes with helpless apology written all over my face and with a tinge of guilt too, trying to shake my afflicted hand off the pain, I spoke to her in my mother-tongue, (that's Bengali) telling her,
"Aaj baba'r haate khub byatha je.."(which vaguely translates into - "But there is too much pain in father's hands today...").
"Now she isn't too familiar with that language as her father has got only a handful of relatives and none in Mumbai to pay the occasional visit so that the language is spoken.
"I really don't know what she understood, but she didn't show any disappointment. What she showed in her eyes was gentle and tender care. She took my hand in her soft, little fingers kissing it mildly, looked up at me and said in broken English,
"Baba?pain no...Baba?pain no no.."...................
"Well, my left hand hasn't exactly stopped paining since, but that was the last time ever that I felt the pain. I have not needed any pain-killers since then simply because I don't feel any pain anywhere, anymore. And as I watch my daughter growing up each day, every hour, every minute,I just wonder how beautiful life can be for anybody in the simplest of ways, in spite of all the pains & troubles, the aches and breaks it keeps on dishing out on a regular basis. No matter how much one cries, life always gets back to you as a great leveller, giving you something to smile about, and perhaps with a little reward at the end.
It is just only a matter of time. Let it be.............................
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------
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