Words stolen

I have not written much

Months have passed as the writer in me withers away, silenced under all the time spent back bent into question marks. It has been the most tiring mornings to wake up to.

I have not written anything in months.

Medical school has stolen the time I would savor to think of words. Now words are how much time I can afford to think. My vocabulary has since been replaced.

Before, I write about the aching pain in my chest- the unfathomable mass evolving inside, pushing against my rib cage, slowly but so surely..any minute now, I wait..for it to consume me. It only does so slowly.

Now i write about the heart and its cardiac output. We do not talk of whirlwinds inside the thoracic cage, instead we talk of stroke volumes and afterloads- pressures the heart has to overcome to pump blood. And no, we are not talking of the way he puts pressure on your heart with the way he looks at you amidst a crowd of beautiful things. Not the way he makes your heart skip a beat when he walks towards you in gentle steps, taking his time, taking the universe’s awe with each step. No. We talk about tricuspid stenosis. We talk about arterial plaques, the possibilities of embolisms, myocardial infarctions. Death.

We talk of death in anatomy. Not the way time ticks so fast with life and yet freezes at the moment of death. Not the way we write about it in suicide notes- impulsive, indecisive, incomprehensible. Instead, we dissect death. Talk about the likeliest bone to be fractured when you jump off a 10 storey building. We do not talk of the life escaping from your last breath. No. We study rigor mortis. The biochemical basis of how your body stiffens after death. The muscles refusing to relax, until lactic acid sweeps away the myosin from its cross bridge.

We talk of health in numbers. The amount of protein in the diet. The blood count. The tidal volume not the tidal waves of wrong decisions hitting you straight in the face the morning you wake up. The oxygen dissociation curve. Not like the linear pattern of how we equate our worth with number of failures.

Here we do not have time to celebrate the wins. We fixate on the failures. Think again and again. Why. How. What else.

How many more hours to sacrifice. How many more birthdays, weddings, do we need to miss to get things right. What words we need to know. What parts of us we need to shut off. What pain we have to accept.

We have to get it right. More than words we have to get it right. A life depends on it.