Reflections on My Tenth Birthday

On March 30th this year, I celebrated the 10th birthday of my second life. 10 years ago, in 1996, I underwent a kidney transplant surgery on this day that gave me a fresh lease of life. The word "lease" here is, of course, both literal and figurative. :-)

I was diagnosed as suffering from chronic renal failure of the CGN variety in June 1994. Sometime in March that year I had volunteered to donate blood for a friend's relative who was undergoing some surgery. While checking my blood pressure, it was found to be higher than what you would expect in a 20 year old normal guy performing all normal activities. To cut a long story short, further tests finally confirmed my kidneys were failing, though when I would need to undergo transplant was still not clear. My kidneys could last me six months, or a year, or two. Ultimately, they did last me about 9 months, just about enough to allow me to complete my first year of MBA program, and take a logical break in studies. I still remember my thought process in March 1995 - I should be able to get the transplant done during the summer break(April-May),recover and be back at the school by June, may be a couple of weeks into the semester, but no great loss. Little did I know what lay ahead!

We had originally identified my mother as a donor for me. My father had a different blood group, and my two sisters were then both unmarried, and hence ruled out. However on discussions with the doctor, we found that my mother could not be a donor since she was a high BP person and the surgery would endanger her life. So began the process of searching for a "donor" -someone who would be willing to donate a kidney in consideration for a sum of money, ethics and morality be damned. The experiences during the next 12 months till the surgery - happy, sad, comical, frustrating, inspirng - can fill up entire blogs, if I some day decide to write about them. But this post is about celebrating the first decade of my new life - and the lessons learnt during those defining 12 months. Bear with me if I sound a bit preachy at times - I understand that the experiences, and hence the lessons drawn, are entirely personal, and just because I have survived to tell the tale doesn't mean they are universally applicable. But just want to share my thought and reflections.

Lesson 1: Things cannot always be explained. Life could not have been much better for me when the disease struck me. I had just completed graduation, and got admission to the prestigious MBA program at IIM Bangalore. Inferring from the past, a bright future lay ahead of me, at least in conventional terms - do well at IIM, get a good job, earn well, and so on. No one told me the script had been changed. Even after the diagnosis, I was hopeful I would emerge with minimum damage - get the surgery done during the summer break and be back, losing only the summer internship in the process. But ultimately I lost an entire year, and then suffered during my placements as companies were reluctant to hire someone with a recent serious medical problem. During this whole phase, I guess there were times when I wondered - Why Me? But somehow deep within I realized this question was meaningless - both from a practical as well as spiritual point of view. From a practical aspect, I was digging into a past about which I could do nothing, and ruining whatever my present had to offer. From a spiritual aspect, who was I to question the larger scheme of things? Could I say with certainty I did not deserve this? In any case, I guess I learnt that things happen to us for seemingly no reason. You can choose to spend your energy trying to figure out the whys, or you can accept your present situation and then concentrate on figuring out the whats - what can I do about it? Which brings me to the second lesson.

Lesson 2: Sometimes you cannot do anything about your situation. At least nothing that seems like "doing". Our former prime minister, Narasimha Rao, of course epitomised it. Do not do anything about the problem, and it will go away in its own sweet time. May be he did it by choice, I was left with no choice really. The search for a donor took its time. Unlike what movies like "Saheb" would have you believe, matching a donor to a reciepient is not a simple process -blood group match is the basic minimum. There are a whole series of tests that check the degree to which the donor kidney would be accepted by the "host" body. Only in case of identical twins is no test required. In all other cases, related or unrelated donors have to undergo these tests. They take their time, and money. You also need to check how physically capable the donor is of donating, i.e. what would be the effects of the donation on him / her. Obviously you do not want to take the kidney by endangering the donor's life. Anyway, essentially all this is a long process, and while my father and other relatives were busy with these, I had nothing to do except go for my twice (and later thrice) a week dialysis. It was frustrating to be so helpless, but by succumbing to my frustration I would have only made things more difficult for everyone, including myself. So I just reposed my faith in the greater scheme of things, and busied myself reading. I read voraciously in those 12 months - everything under the sun that I could lay my hands on (even sci-fi :-)), and I feel I am still reaping the intangible benefits of that today. The important realization was that sometimes we are indeed powerless. There is no point to rave and rant against the circumstances in such cases. Sometimes, just waiting the bad times out is the best strategy.

Lesson 3: Be Positive. Have faith - in yourself, in your well wishers, in God / Supreme Power / whatever you call It. I guess this is the most difficult part to articulate. The first two lessons probably have something that would appeal to the left side of the brain - over here, its purely a matter of belief. I do not know how or why, but I always had faith in God, even when I was confused about His existence, gender etc. :-) I had also always believed myself to be very lucky, in a sense, God's Chosen One (to do what, I didn't know or care). Somehow these beliefs survived the tumultous 12 months (and more) - and in turn helped me survive. :-) In addition, I started appreciating the goodwill of others - my relatives, my numerous friends, the nurses in the dialysis ward, the relatives of other patients undergoing dialysis - I have lost count of the number of people who wished me luck and recovery from the bottom of their hearts. And I somehow believed in them all. And that gave me strength when things looked bleak (they frequently did). I cannot explain it logically because there is no logic to it, but I just "knew" that things could not go wrong when there was so much positive energy around me. I have always been an optimist, but if that needed any fortification, this was the period that gave it. The head nurse of the dialysis ward cancelled her vacation because she wanted to be there to take care of me after the transplant. There were at least 50 relatives in the hospital when I was being operated on. A nurse performed a special service at her church and brought me a charm to be kept under my pillow while I was in the hospital. My batchmates and juniors (who had not even seen me) at IIMB collected and contributed a sum of Rs. 1 lakh towards the costs of dialysis, surgery, recovery etc. Apart from the material value of all these gestures, it was the spirit that really helped me. I could not have let all these people down by giving up, by becoming negative. Things could not possibly go wrong when so many people out there were rooting for me. Illogical - possibly, but what the hell - it worked for me! :-)

I guess I could go on and on. Experiences of one year, especially one as eventful as that, cannot be all captured in these many lines. But I have conveyed what I wanted to. Things go bad, sometimes for no apparent reason at all, and completely out of our control. All we can do is to stay positive, have faith in ourselves and the goodwill of our wellwishers, and battle it out. In this case, the end was favorable. I am not naive enough to believe that it always will be. But I believe it is the approach that counts. The results are not in our hands, to repeat the ultimate cliche, and the ultimate truth, from Bhagvad Gita. :-)