Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [181]
I gave him my word.
ABOUT THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, I remember very little, except that Ghosh's wisdom was revealed. It had been a blessing not to know for the last two years. Now that I knew, there was no turning back time or erasing that knowledge; it was as if he were back in jail again and, in a way, so was I. I read everything I could about myeloid metaplasia (how I hated that term which he loved). His bone marrow was quiet when I first learned of his diagnosis. But then the disease became more active, the volcano started rumbling, oozing lava, spitting telltale traces of sulfurous gas when the wind was right.
I spent as much time as I could with Ghosh. I wanted every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, “Seize the day! What matters is this moment!” Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize.
Now and then Ghosh would grin and wink at me across the room. He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.
SHIVA AND HEMA went about their days ignorant of Ghosh's condition. They were caught up in their own excitement. Shiva had coaxed Hema into a major commitment to treating women with vesiculovaginal fistula, or “fistula” for short. It wasn't a condition that Hema (or any gynecologic surgeon) relished seeing because it was difficult to cure.
Now I can explain why that little girl whom we'd seen when we were young children—the one who came walking up the hill with her father, her head bowed with shame, dribbling urine at every step, carrying about her an unspeakable odor—had such a profound influence on Shiva's life.
Unbeknownst to Shiva and me, Hema had operated on her three times. The repair broke down the first two times; the last one held. We never got to see her leave Missing, but we had Hema's word that she was cured and had left happy. The mental scars, though, would never heal. We understood little at the time of what ailed her; it wasn't a subject Hema would speak about to us. But now, Shiva and I knew. In all likelihood, perhaps before she was a teen, the girl was married off to a man who could have been as old as her father. The painful consummation of her marriage (more traumatic if circumcision had left scar tissue at the entrance to the vagina for the husband to batter down) would have ter-rifed her. She may even have been too young to connect this act with becoming pregnant, but soon she was swollen with child. When labor began, the baby's head jammed against her pelvic bones, the pelvic inlet already narrowed by rickets. In a developed country or a big city she might have had a Cesarean section as soon as her contractions started. But in a remote village, without the help of anyone but her mother-in-law, she would suffer for days, her uterus trying to do the impossible, but succeeding only in ramming the baby's head against the bladder and the cervix, crushing those tissues against the unyielding bony pelvis. The baby soon died inside the womb and the mother's death would follow shortly, most often due to a ruptured uterus or infection and septicemia. It was the rare family who managed to transport the mother to a health center. There the lifeless fetus could be removed piecemeal, by first crushing the skull and then pulling the rest out.
During her convalescence from that dreadful labor, the dead and gangrenous tissues inside