Doctors’ day it is!

I might have been a doctor. As a kid i liked to play doctor with my brother and my grandfather however as fortune would have it, i didn’t opt for Biology after my 10th based on several suggestions of elders and teachers. Not that i regret but that’s just a story.

Baba has been practicing homeopathy for years and he is my only doctor except for a few cases and one important one which i am about to pen down. Baba is not a certified doctor but back in Shillong we have patients visiting throughout the day ever since Baba started devoting more time after his retirement. This kept him busy but here in Delhi he doesn’t.

My dadu on the paternal side had been an Ayurvedic practitioner however several life situations didn't allow him to continue practicing for long.

For my aliments i hardly remember taking any allopathic medicines and it will be a great achievement on my part if i were to remember the name of a common cold allopathic medicine.

So when puberty set in, i had this rarest of problems i would imagine. I would say it would be just the opposite of what a normal cycle is supposed to be. I would be lamenting for most of the month except for 4–6 days when i would consider myself trouble free. And it was just not normal flow but very heavy flow and stuff which i shiver to write here. So much so that once in school, my skirt would be stained to such extent that i had to wait for the rest of the class to disperse before i managed to stand up to leave. And i studied in a co-ed school. i had to cover with my cardigan to get back home and do the needful.

Baba had never handled this type of case and so several doctors were referred including Ma’s gynae however it didn’t yield much results. From Allopathy to Ayurveda all seemed to fail. What these medicines would do was stop the flow for 4–6 months and the next cycle would bring pain, pain and trouble and excess of blood loss. And side effect like hair-fall.

This continued for all my school life since class 6 up to the first year of my graduation when one day the pain was too much to bear, I cried and told Ma to find a homeo. She skipped her office that day and met a Homeo doc the same day. He just happened to live in the same colony we did and his house was like about 15 mins walk from ours and i don’t know yet why we didn’t think of him till then. Dr Ravi Bhattacharjee was in his nineties then and the first thing he asked of Ma was patience; one year minimum was the time he said he would need to treat me.

Ma got back home with medicines for immediate relief and asked me if i was ready to undergo the treatment for this long a time to which i had said ‘yes’ without any hesitation.

What followed was medicines for 4 days, then a visit to him and then get fresh doses of medicines based on what i reported of my condition. This went for days and months and at times Ma would be tired to come back from office and then take me there. Even though i was comfortable talking to the doctor by then i would always ask Ma to come along. He was ‘Dadu’ after all but i still wanted Ma to be with me. The results were varying, better one day and worse the next day but that’s how homeopathy treats you. Between keeping patience and losing patience, me and my parents allowed the treatment to continue.

The results would show up slowly and when my final year of graduation was done, and we were looking for options for higher studies, Doctor Dadu told me that he wouldn’t have allowed me to go out if i had thought of the same the previous year but since improvements were showing, he let me.

I would keep medicines handy, took them only when needed and every visit home i would visit him and take the medicines for the next 6 months. It was during my post graduation days that Dadu passed away…he was nearing a century. His daughter-in-law by then had known my case and she was assisting him and knew what medicines to give me to take back. But something she said struck me and remains with me for ever. She said don’t ever think that you have medicines with you because then you will have the urge to take those at the slightest discomfort and this will have a psychological effect of your feeling that you are not well. Few months later i stopped visiting her to take my medicine stocks.

The almighty and the lovely people have kept me blessed since but I will never forget Dr Ravi Bhattacharjee for being my life- saver so as to say.

And Baba is ofcourse my daily doctor. And i wish i had learned something from my grandpa…

Someday i might want to be on a healing path…