My New Year started on 31st January, 2024. To understand why, we have to dive head-first into 2022.
I have high-functioning anxiety, which simply means that if you measure my performance at work or otherwise, basis how many things I get done in a day, as averse to how many I don’t, you would be inclined to think there is absolutely nothing wrong with me. And there isn’t. Anything. Wrong. With me.
What is not wrong is not always right.
It is unfortunate that nobody understands the connection between bad physical health leading to bad mental health. And vice-versa. Nobody tells you how damaging physical stiffness/lack of activity/not letting your body breathe, compounded by everyday struggles, heartaches, dealing with dysfunctional systems can be. I am not saying that a physically active person, one who does one or the other form of workout, will have no worries or challenges. It is just that you might deal with the challenges, with patience and maybe even grace, if you are physically sound.
I started 2022 in a new house, after having changed/rented nine houses in as many years. My personal life was a mess. The financial heat was burning me. I had lost money the previous year to my own stupidity. Ten days into the new place, and lo! Six dogs – a mother and her five pups – took me hostage. The pups contracted a deadly virus called Parvo (I had never heard of it, until my husband and I took one of the ill pups to the vet). When the vet told us we had to take the pup in to give him a fighting chance (pup’s name Badaam), I am not sure I understood the assignment. Parvo smells of hell, it depletes the pups of life, makes them bleed 24 hours a day. They can’t eat, they are not allowed to drink water and the treatment is ruthless. Soon after we took Badaam in, in our backyard, his siblings started showing similar symptoms. I cried and wanted to run away, but with whatever little conscience I had left, I couldn’t look away. My partner and I took all the ill siblings in. We would get up at 4:30 in the morning (after sleeping at 1 a.m. sometimes) and take them to the nearest vet, at the vet’s house. The vet, young and ambitious, a government employee, would wake up so early, for us. I would change the diapers of the doggos, clean them to the best of my ability for them to be (barely) presentable to be in the backseat of the car. Before leaving the (new, blood soaked) house, I would clean our backyard with hot water and at least half a litre of phenyl. It would take us roughly two hours for the first round of injections and IVs. We would have breakfast, at a dhaba, near the clinic, before heading back home, again cleaning the pups, changing their diapers, cleaning myself rigorously to drive away the madness and then heading to work. We did the whole thing again in the evening. The pressure at work was intense. Our project was hitting a dead end. The donor was unhappy with our organisation’s top-brass (and rightly so, they made no contribution and had left all the heavy-lifting to me) and was looking for an exit. I was told to salvage the existing project, and, at the same time, pushed to lead a new project. The workload increased. My husband was working from home since March 2020. He is an IT guy, so you get the drift. COVID did him in. It helped in more ways than one. My body had started showing signs of extreme fatigue, my right shoulder was caving. Then came my maternal uncle’s COVID diagnosis. He could not pull through. The hospital visits, the responsibility of keeping everything together, made me go numb. I couldn’t process the present, much less foresee anything that would follow. By early March, my right shoulder had turned to slush. When not calling physiotherapist at home, I was visiting a physiotherapist after work, most visits ending in me screaming (and as Joey said in Friends, if it’s getting darker, it is healing) and believing I was getting better.
Then, one of the doggos, the pups who survived Parvo, met with an accident. Button is her name. She was MIA for two days and we were getting worried, until she dragged herself to our porch. Her rear legs were gone. Later we would come to know she was probably hit by a car. Even the slightest touch would make her wimp and scream. It was 10 in the night. No doctor. And I was already coming down with a fever. We brought her in. I kept awake with her. I left for work the next morning with severe joint pains, as my husband promised me that he would take Button to the doctor. My mother was in town. I completed work and wobbled my way to my nani’s house to meet my mother. I lay down on the couch and could not get up. I wept. The exhaustion, the realization that whatever it was that I was coming down with, was scary and would not go away easily. And it didn’t.
For the next 3 months, I kept shuttling between doctors to get my joints to work. It wasn’t just the illness or the rash. The whole mental and physical block, the lack of perspective, had come together to haunt me. Button’s tail, because of the severity of her injuries, developed gangrene. It took two surgeries to amputate it. The vet, the same young man, told us she would not pull through. My husband, angry as he was, at the untimely appearance of my strange joint-y illness, decided to take Button in. He would do most of the initial visits to the doctor alone. He would lift Button’s rear dead legs with a cloth so that she could relieve herself. I was just about able to report to work and make a living. Even lifting a sauce-pan was a task. My wrists would give away. Most days Button would lie at my side of the bed, both of us screaming in pain, hilariously in unison. The blood oozing from her body, made me trancey. I started imagining death, for her and for me. The bills were endless. It was during that time that a girl my age, someone I had grown up with, killed herself. She was also my neighbor and school-mate. We would go to the bus-stop together. We would discuss WWF and music. She loved The Rock. And because she loved him, I loved him. She was a lovely, overtly sincere girl. Her sincerity, maybe her integrity, did her in. Whatever little hope I had from my life, was sucked out of me. I remember sitting in my parental house, and gasping for air. A wail, stuck in some corner of my stomach, escaped. Followed by murderous rage. At midnight. That is when I was informed of her passing. I woke up the next day eerily calm. As if nothing had happened.
Button survived. I started putting my limbs back together. Things started looking up. Work was in full-swing. My husband and I were warring, on most days. The demons of our past, the elephant in the room (religion), the blinding pace of our lives, further drove us apart.
In the last quarter of 2022, my paternal aunt and her husband fell sick, followed by my husband. Just after my birthday, he woke up one day and said his joints weren’t working. The infamous joint-fever returned. He finally understood what I had gone through. And because he is heavier, taller, he refused to even get up from the bed for good ten days. We pulled through, there was no choice.
Once he got better, we dug ourselves a deeper pit, got two female doggos neutered. Button and Benny. If you look closely, Button had four surgeries in a span of seven months. But, it had to be done. Benny had already hit puberty. They were so dependent on us that we feared they would soon leave their kids to us, like their mother had left them… to us. We were not ready to foster more pups. There is no shame in saying that.
- We were killing ourselves physically (I had developed asthma)
- We had spent close to two lac on their treatments, vaccinations, surgeries and diets.
- I was on the edge
When all of this was over, Australia came knocking. Mother wanted to go, so I went along. We picked up our broken selves and headed down under to meet my sisters. It was a good get-away, at least the first few days. Then my demons came knocking and everything stopped making sense. I came back from Australia dazed, finally realizing that 75 percent of my immediate family (and 90 percent of my maternal family) now lived thousands of miles away, in another continent. That my septuagenarian parents and I were left here, to our own devices. That the darkness of my parental house was my burden to carry. It was a watershed moment. I was the third-wheel. The age-gap between my sisters and I had made quite a few things clear to me, at a very early age – their lives and life-choices would be more identical and closely entwined. I would have to venture alone, without a GPS. I had to find tools to keep myself sane, centered, to use my restless energy for something more wholesome. Focus more on the physical, hoping the mental would come around, in its own good time.
On the verge of separation, my partner sat across the table one dark evening, and said the only way we could make the relationship work is by working on ourselves. For the first time in many years, we shared a common sentiment. Other than, of course, that we still did care for each other. That was 25th of January, 2022. On 31st of January, I made a desperate attempt to find my feet. I started dancing. In the dark.
