Page 30 - Till the Last Breath . . .

list of eighty-nine possible causes. She scheduled herself for a plethora of

blood tests the next day.
Venugopal had a horrendous next exam. Pihu and Venugopal had spent
the night looking over all the possible causes of Pihu’s loss of control of her

hand. They narrowed it down to twenty types of blood tests and visited a
pathology lab at night, rather late for them. She didn’t want to trouble him,

but he had insisted. Pihu waited for him outside his examination hall the
next day with her blood test results in hand.

Her blood work was clean, eliminating eighty-eight possible causes.

‘I never thought I would be the first person I would have to diagnose,’ Pihu

said on the phone.
There were no tests left to be done. Blood tests ruled out pathogens and
other common diseases, breathing tests to check the lungs, MRIs to rule out

any neck injury, electromyography to check the nerves in her hand, a head
MRI to eliminate other conditions and nerve conduction studies to sum up

the rest.
‘You can never be too sure,’ Venugopal said from the other side of the
phone.

‘I wish I didn’t have to,’ she whimpered and heard the rustling of pages.
‘Are you still in the library?’

‘No, I am not.’
‘You are. Go out, Venu! The exams just got over. Go out and party with

the guys.’
‘Not without you. I want you to be here,’ he said.

‘I don’t think I am coming back,’ Pihu responded.
‘You can’t talk like that. You haven’t even seen a doctor, yet. You have to
be positive.’

‘He must have read the same books that we have. I am sure of what I
have, Venu. I can’t be in denial,’ she lied.

‘You mean to say that experience counts for nothing? See a doctor. It
could still be something else,’ he argued.