Cruellest Cancer

 As I wrote in the blog yesterday, I tried to write in quite some detail about health issues in my newspaper articles. Though I did try many other themes, literally there used to be an  article per day, this was one of my major topics. An example may suffice. In those days, the legal sanction to using morpheme for cancer patients in the fifth stage, though  under strict medical supervision mostly in hospices given the terminal condition of the patient, was a breakthrough.

A power couple in the medical field of Hyderabad, that is to say, both the wife and the husband were Heads of relevant medical departments in a major hospital, often gave me such leads. Once I had to meet the lady regarding one such article. I was waiting in the OPD for the appointment.

It was there that I first came face to face with the cruellest cancer in the whole world. Yes, the most difficult to bear cancer is the pediatric cancer, that is, the cancer a child suffers. Mostly, it is leukemia or retinoblastoma. There was this couple from somewhere in interior Andhra, and their hardly six months old baby was a case of retinoblastoma, that is, eye related cancer.

It is one of the most painful memories that even today, nearly two decades later, sears my soul. The baby was constantly whimpering. Imagine the pain to which there is not a word. Literally. His young parents, obviously from a not so very well to do family, lost to the chilling contexts of a multi-speciality hospital in a metro city, silently suffered the agony, their son's and their own. The living portrait of pain it was.

Later on, for 'Newstime' of the Eenadu group, I wrote two articles on pediatric cancer, and thus got to meet kids who after a chemo session played cheerfully not knowing exactly what was happening to them or were overjoyed because their ardent wish for something as trivial as a tricycle was fulfilled.

All these brutal brushes with destinies far far crueller than in any Thomas Hardy novel taught me how much pain pulsates in daily lived lives, and yet how many smiles sweetly bloom innocently!

Pratima@ I have written this piece because February 15 is the International Day of Cancer in Children. Yes, often our sweetest smiles are those that hide the saddest suffering. Shelley sure would forgive me the changes I made to his great quote.