Page 53 - Till the Last Breath . . .

Zarah had lunch with a girl intern that afternoon, like the many afternoons

before that. She liked her. She was sweet, caring and very hard-working.
She liked that. But the best part about her was she didn’t talk about boys or
marriage or family.

‘Hey, listen …’ she said.
‘Yes?’ The girl looked up from her files.

‘What do you know about Lou Gehrig’s disease? ALS?’ she asked
nervously, even though she knew.

‘Fatal. Multi-organ failure. A nerve-related problem. You can’t really
expect a patient to live beyond five years. Why are you asking? Do you

have a patient?’
‘Yes, a girl.’
‘A girl? It’s not seen in anyone less than fifty years.’

‘She is nineteen. First year, Maulana medical school.’
‘Are you serious?’ she asked, shocked. Zarah handed over the file to the

girl, who pored through it from behind her blue-rimmed spectacles.
‘Yes. She is getting admitted here. It says here she experienced a lack of

sensation during an examination. I just googled her name. She was All
India Rank 3 this year.’

‘That’s sad,’ she whimpered and handed the file back to her. It was no
secret that the patient was dying.
‘I know. I hate these diseases. No underlying cause and absolutely no

fault of the patient. I wonder how she must be feeling,’ Zarah said and
sighed.

‘Don’t get too attached to the patient. Remember what Dr Mehra taught
us. Be emotional about the disease, not the patient.’

‘Yeah, right,’ she replied and shook her head.
‘I am serious.’

Zarah kept mum and they continued to eat their food in silence. She
flipped through Pihu’s file to go over the basic details of the disease’s
progression in her case. She spotted something very uncommon, if not

downright strange. None of the effects of ALS on the body are reversible,
but Pihu had regained some use of her hands, and her speech had become