TINNITUS

Everything started with a ringing sound in his left ear. Being a medical student, he knew it was called tinnitus and probably would have described the case as a continuous humming sound, present at all times, especially when the surroundings were quite. No difficulty in sleeping, and no complaints of decrease in hearing and no associated history of vertigo. He never felt disturbed by the tinnitus, and at first attributed it to his newly acquired habit of spending long times listening to heavy metal and trance music on his ipod.

Soon, the sound became an invisible presence in his life. He was never consciously aware of it, but whenever someone suddenly switched off the fan in the room, or when the power went off suddenly at 3 in the night, or when a madam walked into the class ending the chirpy chattering-whenever silence came to his life uncalled for, he woke up to the knowledge of that something in his ears.

Since it wasn’t giving him any trouble whatsoever, he ignored it for as long as he could. But he had made the mistake of telling about it to his girlfriend. And when her perpetual paranoia and concern became more nagging than the actual tinnitus itself, he decided to see a doctor.

He went to op one day, and picked out a madam who felt was most approachable. She examined and said he had impacted wax, which of course was the first possibility that he had seen in his ENT text. Yet he was a little disappointed-impacted wax wasn’t the most stylish condition for him to say he had.

He used smelly drops for a week to soften the wax and had it removed. After the syringing, he closed his left ear with his finger for a moment to see if the sound had gone.

So that diagnosis was ruled out. He may get something stylish to lay claim to after all. That lead to a long lay off- madam prescribed a tablet and some tests to be done within a week- which, thanks to his inherent laziness and a series of university exams- he did in about 2 months. He went for review after another one month.
No point in prolonging in listing out the whole battery of tests he had to undergo since then. The final statement being he was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of intracranial tumour with a particularly bad prognosis. The doctors advised aggressive management procedures from a better centre.

It didn’t shatter him. What he felt was a deep sense of urgency, an obsession for all the things he wanted to do with his life and could have done and was undone. He had kept his friends and family in the dark about his condition; and at a later stage, while he had no choice but to involve his family, he still dint disclose it to his friends at college. The last thing he wanted was to miss all the fun that his friendships had to offer; to get all the fireworks soaked in sympathy. And also, he thought; if he were to go out, better go out with a bang.

Lying was one thing he was really good at. So he made up a nice little story about getting a great opportunity to go abroad; he left for a cancer centre for treatment, which the doctors had already told him, was always going to be more palliative than curative.

That was when he started writing. Equipped with a new laptop,(one thing that always put him off about writing was the mess that usually papers, pens and ink created) he started typing out his thoughts and observations, his take on life and contemporary issues and some very weirdly personal form of what could be called poetry. He had always believed himself to be reasonably good with words, and very often he had a clear picture of what to write, which he invariably used to put off for later. Left with a realization that he had no substantial body of work behind him to prove a talent, which he believed he had, and with a desire to leave a little imprint of his on something, somewhere, let alone a legacy, he started writing. Righting voraciously.

But getting people to read what he was writing was a problem. He wanted his work to be tested accepted and proven. That was when he discovered blogging. He created a blog for himself; but for some time the blog itself threatened to bring him down, the deserted comments section proving to be a periodic source of depression. But that was only until, through some sheer luck, his blog caught the eye of some of the top brass of the blogosphere.

To be frank his writing was by and large mediocre, or just above what you would call average. But one thing he did right was that, he had not revealed his true identity and had in fact revealed his medical condition and that he was dying. Let’s face it; most of the people are squealers when it comes to sentiments of a dying person death. And add to that the mystery factor of his identity; his blogs became an overnight rage. His writings began to be interpreted as ‘the voice of eternal hope’ and ‘the words of a boy’s never ending struggle with death and pain’ and so on. People read his posts with misty eyes and soon he was commanding the sympathy, admiration and prayers of thousands he had never met or heard. Thousands bookmarked his URL refreshed his web page every hour to catch his posts. He was well and truly leaving a thumbprint behind.

And then, one silent night, he died.In sleep.

To say shocked would have been an understatement. No one apart from the closest of his family had been informed about his disease, and when people came to know someone had been dying for months; what they felt was beyond the scope of any description. At his funeral, which was one of the biggest his place had ever seen, everyone was remembering only good things about him, some of them, before that day, even he would not have been aware of or believed he had. They frantically groped through the cluttered attics of their memories to find a moment, a smile or anything at all, they had shared with him. They also paused a moment to think of everyone they ever shared a moment with, to appreciate how precious they were; how precious their own lives where. There was so much love in the air; so much love that it easily eclipsed what they had ever given to him in his very short life.
And at the v shaped end of a pentagonal wooden box, someone was grinning widely. He had played those last few cards really well…
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About 6 months back I picked up a habit of hearing to heavy metal on my ipod.
About 4 months back I started having a ringing sound in my ear.
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The rest happened somewhere in between panophthalmitis an evisceration while preparing for my ophthalmology exams.
In a bubble above my head.