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| March 2016 |
So, both Mahrukh and I had to do whatever it took to acquire a
comfortable lifestyle for us. Not having – and not wanting to have – a car
helped immensely. The resultant sacrifice – of long commutes, which tend to be
horrible in the winter, and an utter ignorance of the self-realisation inducing
long drives on the highways.
I was being factual when I responded to my family physician.
I genuinely couldn’t afford to be tired. Dr. King was worried about my kidneys.
But I got caught up with a million things and health was put on the backburner.
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| June 2016 |
Then four years later, in 2016, I went to get my foot checked.
I’d sprained it and the pain continued seemingly endlessly. He recommended blood tests and when the
results came in, he immediately told me to go see Dr. Melvin Silverman, a nephrologist
– a kidney specialist.
Dr. Silverman saw the test results and told me that my creatinine
levels were abnormally high. As the kidneys become impaired for
any reason, the creatinine level in the blood will rise due to poor clearance of creatinine by the kidneys.
Abnormally high levels of creatinine thus warn of possible malfunction or failure of the
kidneys. It is for this reason that standard blood tests routinely check the
amount of creatinine in the blood.
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| September 2016 |
Dr. Silverman said I had Glomerulonephritis, which is an
inflammation of the glomeruli, which are structures in one’s kidneys that are
made up of tiny blood vessels. These knots of vessels help filter blood and
remove excess fluids. If the glomeruli are damaged, the kidneys will stop
working properly and one can go into kidney failure.
Glomerulonephritis is a serious illness that can be
life-threatening and requires immediate treatment. The condition is sometimes
called nephritis. There can be both acute (sudden) glomerulonephritis and chronic
(long-term or recurring) glomerulonephritis.
Apparently, the only manifestation of this abnormality is a sudden loss of weight, and 2016 at the Annual Gala of the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce, everyone commented on how thin I'd become.
The specialist recommended biopsy just to check the problem
wasn’t malignant. In September 2019 I was admitted for a day at St. Michael’s
Hospital for a biopsy. Fortunately, the kidney failure wasn’t cancerous and was
only a localised phenomenon.
However, it forever and almost completely changed my life. For
starters, my diet changed. I was no longer supposed to have a protein rich diet
because my kidneys couldn’t process protein adequately. I changed over to
having salad for lunch, and fruits. I was instructed to exercise, which I did
for about a week and then stopped.
My kidneys were smaller than they were supposed to be, and
perhaps the only reason I could think of for their malformation was the serious
bout of pneumonia as a baby; apparently it was so severe that it caused swelling
of my kidneys. The illness had two long-lasting effects on my health. The first
was my teeth, which didn’t grow normally after my milk teeth fell (and about
which I will write when I come to 2017), and the other was the failure of my
kidneys.
The biggest impact of this condition was mental; almost
overnight, I became mentally old. My outlook to life changed. There was a
growing impatience but also a sense of acceptance of life in its many and myriad
forms. I was no longer eager as before to change my circumstances and strangely
I wasn’t willing to accept them either.
My condition had a salutary affect on my relationship with Mahrukh
and especially with Che. Mahrukh has taken pains to ensure that I get the right
diet every day, and for that she has worked hard; Che grew up to shoulder more
responsibilities. Gradually, over the next year or so, he also realised the
necessity for having a proper training and education.
2016 was to become a big year for me in Canada. It was the year
when I finally became a published novelist.
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