Yet another good-bye…

Parting can be painful at times. For all we take to your grave is not any material wealth during the course of our living time in earth, but only some memories – sweet and cherishing, one would wish. I recently had to bid goodbye to my colleagues at work. The reason is obvious. I was leaving the company and them for what I considered was a better offer worth considering.

It was before I became bedridden for appendectomy – for a couple of weeks – that I decided to submit my resignation. Apparently, my boss did not want this to be revealed to anybody in the team and wanted me to be tight-lipped. Which, in all my earnest I did, save for a few colleagues whom I consider my friends. After all, workplace is where you spend most of the time of your life. The two weeks of bed rest after my appendectomy gave me a break from work and my colleagues were unmindful of the fact that I was not going back to work with them.

So when matters had to be resolved, I was in an embarrassing situation while visiting my workplace for separation formalities. People had no clue why I was at work when I was supposed to be bed ridden. And news – as invariably as it happens in these situations – seems to have spread and my next cubicle colleague was like -- Prathap you never told me that? It was quite palpable that they weren’t officially informed about my departure and that they garnered something fishy happening with my visit.

Then came the time to bid goodbye. Although I was only working for a brief period of time (I hope I can consider 8 months a brief period), the close-knit atmosphere prevailed at my workplace made me feel home quite often. Large number of female population in the bay perhaps could be attributed to this sentiment.

The next few minutes were filled with perpetual ‘all the bests’, ‘all the very bests’, ‘keep in touches’, exchange of email ids and telephone numbers.

I am not sure as to how many will remain in my memory, how many will be in touch with me for a long time or how long I will have the impact of parting with them.

Nevertheless, it is indeed a difficult feeling to part with something – the atmosphere, the people and the facilities – you have grown used to. Otherwise, life goes on and here I’m all set for a new life that involved making new friends and enemies, gelling with my new workplace, and of course taking on challenges.

Wish me luck oh Lord…

My date with scrubs

Never in my wildest thoughts would I have thought about a surgery on me – one that has to be performed urgently at that. Well, strange things happen all the time, they say – and I wished it not happened on a Saturday night though.

At first I did not pay proper attention to the sharp pangs in my lower abdomen on that Saturday evening. Since I had to go out with one of my friends to visit another common friend’s casual wear shop. The pain got intense at the shop making the situation embarrassing for me. For I couldn’t stand, sit, or even worse take a look at the clothing line.

Rushing to the nearby hospital, I begged the doctor to give me a shot of painkiller. The painkiller showed its might for another 10 long hours before which I was scanned and diagnosed of having ‘appendicitis’. ‘If the pain subsided you can postpone the surgery till your next attack,’ the doctor suggested. However, as it turned out to be, the effect of the painkiller subsided and my pain reappeared in the wee hours of a Sunday morning.

What followed was a one-hour long surgery inside the operation theatre over the musings and chitter-chatter of the anesthetic, the surgeon and the instructions passed on to the nurses. The anesthetic gossiped about the excess staff of anesthetics in a fellow hospital, the surgeon about the increase in cases of appendicitis and blaming the changing food habits, and the general physician about her independent business.

I was quite sure that none of them were oblivious of the fact that I was still awake. Earlier, before being dissected, I was given a shot of some drug in the spine that made me feel numb from the lower part of my body. It is a strange feeling, I tell ya, to be aware and not have a feeling of your body part being sliced up.

I regained my senses soon after and had to ask the nurses to give another shot of painkiller, this time to kill the pain of being operated. I was under observation for a couple of days after that with only intravenous fluid being injected into my veins.

What followed afterwards was loads of advises, friendly visits by neighbors and friends, and scar with 6 sutures in my lower abdomen. With what started as an acute pain ended up as a scar.

Two days later, when I was shown the specimen that was operated out of my intestine, the nurse said, “It is quite long and would have erupted if you hadn’t been operated at the right time.” Whoa, I didn’t want that to happen.

As I gazed at the curly, white and fleshy thing inside a fluid (formaldehyde?) I thought within - What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.