Page 56 - Till the Last Breath . . .

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Pihu Malhotra

Pihu looked around the room she had grown up in. The room on whose

walls she had always imagined she would hang her diplomas and degrees.
She looked at the photo frames with pictures of her as a toddler, the

bedsheets and the tonnes of books she had so lovingly arranged. She
wondered if she would get to read even a third of them. She was distraught.

For all the times she had craved to be in a medical school, she got only
three months. It had been nine months since then. The loss of sensation
meant she had to drop out of medical school as soon as four other hospitals

—one in Delhi, two in Bangalore and one in Mumbai—gave the same
verdict, each one with more finality than the last. Her disease had

progressed faster than anyone had anticipated. Within two months of
detection, she had trouble walking without crutches. Soon, eating had
become a problem and she couldn’t chew for very long. Fifteen minutes of

activity made her breathless and tired. Her muscles were slowly losing their
strength and integrity. The paralysis slowly set in. Life for her became a

constant battle for survival—to see the next morning. To see her parents
around her, to hold their hands and recount memories till it felt like she had

lived them twice. It became a constant struggle to forget what was coming
for her. She had committed herself to her impending death sentence. She

had just a few excruciating months to live.
All this while, she made sure she sent across a mail every day to the
young doctor, who was a part of the research team looking for a cure for

ALS, in New Delhi. Sometimes, it was about the pain of being an ALS
patient. On other occasions, it was something interesting she had read in a

medicine book. His mailbox had become like a personal online blog-cum-