The surgical faith

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The first time we met was at a barber's shop. Technically, it was just four chairs fastened to the ground within a hole in a wall in the by-lanes of Hindu Colony, Dadar. He was the CEO of Eureka Forbes and I was an accomplished neurosurgeon. But, as Parsis, we were both loyal to our barber despite it seeming that the roof might crumble upon us anytime soon. For over a decade, we visited the same shop but our paths never crossed, until the day we found ourselves sitting next to each other and having a conversation through a slightly cracked mirror in front of us.

The barber knew I had trained at CMC - not the Chowpatty Medical Centre but the Christian Medical College, Vellore - and introduced us, as Marzin, sitting next to me, had gone there to get treatment for his leukaemia. "I was given three months to live. My bags were packed for the US, to enrol in a clinical trial there as a last resort, until someone told me about Vellore," he narrated the story of how he eventually underwent a gruelling bone marrow transplant there. His wife and son stood solidly by his side all though his treatment.

"But what was even more challenging was that I had cancer in one kidney in addition to leukaemia, and the doctors mentioned that the kidney would have to be removed, which I didn't want. So, I took it upon myself to leverage the power of the subconscious mind to cure myself," he told me of his mantra to get better and not bitter. "I used the visualisation technique along with lotus meditation and imagined the tumour shrinking every day," he described, amidst the background noise of scissors snipping and water spraying. "The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it. I believed I caused my own cancer, and I had full faith that I could cure it," he affirmed. When the doctors did a sonography a few months later, they were shocked to note that the cancer had disappeared. It will be a decade of being disease-free next year, and he continues to help people afflicted with the big C.

Modern medicine is fraught with stories where it doesn't have an answer. People who have been given a finite time to live have often outlived their decree. People who have been told that nothing would happen to them have collapsed and died. Healing is multidisciplinary, and just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a holistic approach to well-being. It takes faith, it takes love. The food we eat, the water we drink, the words we speak, and the thoughts we think all have the ability to heal or harm, and hence, we must choose wisely. It is not without reason that Zarathustra professed good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.

Rajesh fell off a 40-metre crane while working on the coastal road project. He was rushed to the hospital paralysed waist down. All of 25 years old, his scans showed a fractured spine completely transecting his spinal cord. We did an emergency surgery to fix the fracture, realign the spine, and decompress the spinal cord, but based on the damage I saw at surgery, I told his mother it would be unlikely he would ever walk again. "Not only that, he may also be on a lifelong urinary catheter with no bladder bowel or sexual function," I had to give them an honest expectation. "You did your job, doctor; now, we will do ours," she told me as she took him home on a wheelchair. They were from a poor fishing neighbourhood, but her conviction was well-to-do. When the duo returned one year later for a follow-up, I did not recognise them until they recounted the backstory. I was agog to see him stride in unaided. "Besides vigorous physiotherapy," which I had insisted they continue, "what did you do?" I asked, staring in amazement. "I recited the Hanuman Chalisa 108 times every day for a year," she told me with gusto, convinced without a doubt that this would cure her son. The best news was that not only did he regain strength in his legs, but his bowel and bladder were working well too, and his wife was pregnant with their first child. Even though Hanuman professed celibacy, the prayer had worked.

When I wash my hands carefully before every surgery, a term we call "scrubbing", I always say a prayer to help my team, the patient, and the family have the best outcome. If I ever find myself faced with uncontrollable bleeding during an operation, I say the Ashem Vohu prayer- sometimes I need more than one - and I have always been able to salvage the situation. "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind," Albert Einstein had - rightly - once said.

Two decades ago, my own mother was afflicted by a deadly virus that paralysed her neck down, requiring her to be on a ventilator for over a month in the ICU. Doctors were uncertain if she would come off it, but ambiguity was not something her then 85-year-old mother understood. She sat outside the ICU for 12 hours every day saying a silent prayer, sure that God would look after her daughter. When my mom walked out of the hospital, I asked my grandmother if she had been scared about losing her second daughter, the first having died in the Handloom House fire in 1982. She looked at me stoically with a kaleidoscope of faith, trust, hope, and optimism. "My God would never do that to me!" For only love - the tenacity of it, the belief in it, and the infinite shapes it can take - makes life more stubborn than death.

This article was published in the recently released coffee table book Waternamah: 300 Years Of The Bhikha Behram Well.

The writer is practicing neurosurgeon at Wockhardt Hospitals and Honorary Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at Grant Medical College and Sir JJ Group of Hospitals mazda.turel@mid-day.com