by Gautam I. Menon
Across the period of a week, starting around the 8th of August 2023, I transformed from being someone in reasonable, if not perfect, health, to being a patient confined to a hospital bed, effectively paralysed waist-down. That I knew that my condition could possibly deteriorate even further, to the point where I would have to go into an ICU, added an inescapable layer of stress. I managed to camouflage this concern, but it never really left my mind.
This is a personal story of an illness and subsequent recovery. I’ll narrate events much as they unfolded in real time, but I’ll also weave my narrative around the condition itself, its treatment, and lessons from my experience.
The back-story starts in July, 2023, overlapping into early August. This was a period of intense travel: 11 airports in about a month across and outside India. This travel was largely on work. Delhi, where I stayed, was a fixed point to which I kept returning. Along the way, during this period, I had acquired a persistent cough, largely dry, accompanied by what seemed to be a barely noticeable fever. This lasted a while, 2 weeks or more, exacerbated by the stresses of both incessant travel and work. I recall feeling drained of energy through much of the time. (A meeting we’d organized, on data science in health, and in which I’d particularly wanted to attend all the talks, was washed-out for this reason. I stayed in my room for much of the time, emerging only for select talks by friends and the group photograph.)
The last leg of my travels was a brief trip out of India, at least partly to recharge before beginning to deal with the rigours of a teaching semester. The cough wore off and so did the exhaustion that had accompanied it. I threw myself into simply being a tourist in a foreign country, walking long distances to see places I hadn’t been to before. This was a country I had grown to love, across two previous visits. It helped that there were a number of friends there, old and new.
The weather was, as usual for that time of year, glorious. The cafes were brimming with people. The ferry trips were exactly as I remembered them from previous visits, with the summer light glancing off the ripples and waves, in shades of blue, seemingly as if reflected from a mirror shattered into a million pieces. My first inkling that something was wrong was a persistent tingling, a pins-and-needles feeling, on the soles of my feet, on August 9th. The sensation stayed with me. It was a more intense feeling than I had ever encountered previously. By the following day, the 10th, the same sensation had spread further. It was now but also in my hands, particularly in my fingers and palms. Read more »