Caution: Gross reading
A catheter is like a deformity, a vulgar protuberance jutting out of one’s body without permission. And yet, it is surprising how quickly one gets used to it. It is like dentures, a foreign object in your mouth. I have the former these days—a catheter—but not the latter.
My eighth day into it today, it has become a part of my body. The tube that carries the discharge—remnants of abscess from my colon—is always hanging out under my shirt. I keep the receiving pouch in my pocket. One looks at it and understands how under the thin veneer our skin, packed is a jumble of wet, gooey, oozy, throbbing organs that keep us alive. They do their essential duties as we go about pursuing our hubris in the impossibly thin protection of our skin. We pay attention to them only when a sickness takes over, as is the case with me currently.
The packaging of the human body is astonishing, Consider this simple fact. The colon or the large intestine is five about feet long and three inches in diameter. It is, of course, our sewer line/sewage system without which we will not survive too long. It is dirty, smelly, sticky stuff that passes through it. The packaging ensures that we don’t see it while inside.
When you consider that everyone of us humans—no matter how strikingly beautiful or the opposite of that, how rich or poor, how powerful or powerless, how liberal or bigoted, how successful or not—we all pack inside our skin organs that do their jobs for decades irrespective of the harm or the good that we do to the world.
While recuperating in hospital last week, I was contemplating whether we are a sum of organs or there is something more. Evidence suggests that there is probably something more that vanishes with the death of any or all of our organs.
In the context of the universe, which is 13.8 billion years old, our life span is akin to the bursts of fireflies. We were not there, then we were there and then we were not there at all, never to become again. What we have is it—including with a catheter hanging from one’s stomach.
यह हंगामें कुछ देर के मेहमां हैं
फिर तो बस एक मुसलसल काली ख़ामोशी है
--मयंक छाया
