This particular Memorial Day weekend, far away from home, I found myself standing next to my comatose mother in a hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh struggling for her life.
It is in the overcrowded and struggling streets of Dhaka, where she taught me to deal with life’s adversity as she took me to school every day riding on rickshaws. “Look at those rods on the construction site”, she used say all the time. “They bend and twist with fire and ice, but never break. Be that rod and stand up…”
Gosh, how I need her to be that rod now!
Her frail body and brittle legs make me hope for divine intervention…
What followed over the next few days will forever ground me. In the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), the hospital tries to take care of a host of patients side by side in the ward without having much privacy. Over night some patients don’t make it. The dead remain unattended for hours next to the living. Outside of the ICU, anxious families wait to see or to learn about the fate of their loved one. To make matters worse, they can not get in touch with doctors as the disproportionate doctor/patient ratio overwhelms everyone involved. Even in a private hospital such as this one, where many have sold their last belongings to treat their family members, service is less than adequate. Communication is non-existent.
I have hard times controlling my emotions and frustrations. My Western spirit takes over…I rebel…demand explanations…expect attention!
But at the end I manage to wheel in my resources and connections…and get better attention. And as I do get the attention, I feel ashamed and self consumed since most others don’t get any.
As the days turn into nights…and the next morning comes in…like others I wait in front of the ICU and listen to the sad stories…
More than 70% of the global population suffers like this…life hangs in the balance every day. Is it indeed a good day here if your exhaustion for the day comes in part from going to the market…putting breakfast on the table…and a maybe having a few minutes to yourself. Children, families, and elders all fight to live every day in the dead heat of summer where dust kicks up to blind you as you cross the streets. Obtaining medical care is a privilege.
A long time ago, I was part of this fabric…but I guess my privileged life over the years has spoiled me. This level of adversity to save my mother is nothing that I was prepared for. As I sit there outside of the ICU, a woman comes up to me and tells me how she is struggling to save her husband who got into a road accident a few days ago. Bleeding from his cracked skull, he fell into a coma in her arms waiting for a doctor for hours in a public hospital, and now she has moved him to this ‘fancy’ hospital where care is not much better. She fears for his life….wonders if he will survive the night.
This isn’t a war zone – just another day in one part of our small planet in the year 2010. After three days of being there my mother finally gains some level of consciousness. Disoriented and disillusioned, she does not recognize us, but she somehow senses our presence. Before too long she says, attached to an array of support systems and tubes…’I hope you are not frustrated with the hospital staff…and are behaving yourself.’
Today, she is still lying in a hospital bed in Dhaka trying to stand up…recover….to be that rod that she wanted me be…
At the age of 12, William Ernest Henley fell victim to a bone disease. In 1875 from his hospital bed at the age of 25, he wrote in Invictus…
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
I pray for that unconquerable soul that exists within each one of us! I find myself uttering….. ‘I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. I am the master of my fate…I am the captain of my soul’ …for all of us to become victors!
