Will and Grace

It takes my breath away. Sometimes you get a glimpse of the elaborate machinations that go into assembling the many seemingly arbitrary moments of life into a meaningful purpose and you are awestruck by the miracle of it all.

At first when we took papa to a neurologist, the doctor sort of mumbled to us that he had early stages of Parkinson’s disease, hydrocephalus (water brain), and dementia. If it was not for God’s grace, I would have completely missed the significance of this. Somehow the word dementia caught my imagination and I started reading about it profusely. There were so many types of dementia and papa did not seem to fit the bill with any of them. Then God goes ahead and takes my breath away by bringing LBD to my attention. I could not believe how much all his symptoms matched and thus began a jihad to clinch the diagnosis.

It is not easy being totally unqualified and trying to tell a medical professional or anyone who thinks they have half a brain that you suspect your father has a major neurological disease called LBD which is seldom diagnosed because of its complexity and uncertainty. I felt like Galileo trying to bring the truth to an obstinate world and almost got ostracized. Thankfully mom and Zak immediately saw the merit in this and backed me fully.

I would take papa to different neurologists and freeze midway whenever they asked for his history. It was so complicated that I knew I was not able to articulate everything and God knows I am not the most lucid conversationalist. There was also the problem of letting the doctor know all the facts without hurting papa. I was getting desperate but I knew it would be unethical to force a diagnosis. I had to make them see what I was looking at and let them come to the same conclusion on their own. Meanwhile time was running out and it was imperative to get the right diagnosis for the wrong drug administered to an LBD patient can kill him (which is often the case) and this thought was haunting me.

I am humbled by the guidance that God gave me then, how He steered me through numerous obstacles, and made it permeate through my thick skull that I had to just write it all down. The solution was so simple that it was brilliant. Already the years that I slaved at medical transcription had armed me with all the right terms and format. I had already collected all the information that I had about papa. All I had to do was put it all together into one medical file with all the history, symptoms, records, test results, etc. something that would automatically have been done in a developed country but here it was unheard of.

Even the most mundane act is seldom that. One fine morning when I set about to write this document I felt like I was finally serving God’s will, fulfilling my destiny. Zak joked that I looked like Karate Kid preparing for the final battle! And what a war it has been!