At a loss for words

Around midnight, while half of our workforce leaned back on cushioned hospital chairs and caught quick naps, a challenging patient walked in. Like how meat gets shared in a wolf pack, there is a pecking order on who gets more sleep in a night duty team. The more senior you are, the more sleep you are owed, and the alpha gets to sleep at home. He comes fresh in the morning to scold everyone during rounds.

The bottom rung of the wolf pack (a first sem JR and two interns) kept seeing cases like zombies, sleepless and sharing two working brain cells among the three of them. This was particularly congenial for us interns because it hardly required a quarter of a brain cell to draw blood from patients.

We had no trouble with the alcohol liver disease patients, the snake bite victims or even the non-lethal poison connoisseurs, but this case stumped us. It was unfortunate that the half that slept held more than 90% of the team’s cumulative medical experience and knowledge.

“Try, ma.” My co-intern was starting to sound like a parrot who desperately wanted a cracker. The thin lady had stopped trying long back and sat in her wheelchair with her head in her palms. Her husband wrapped his hairy arms tightly around his paunch as if to hug himself, settled into a wooden bench and gently closed his eyes. The hospital AC was too cold for him, but he managed to join in on the team nap.

I butted in, “Nod if you can understand what I’m saying” she looked up and nodded slowly. Reassured, my friend and I continued, “So you can understand, but can’t speak, right?” The thin middle-aged lady shifted in her red nylon saree, sat straight, and smiled a little.

We kept asking her questions and she replied in animated sign language. When I started asking questions in sign language as well, the resident let me catch a quick nap and took over. An hour later, a diagnosis was made, “Young Stroke with Broca’s Aphasia”. I’ve never seen a stroke case with just a language defect, but in a big government hospital with free treatment, common people come in with rare diseases all the time.

At the end of this dumb charade, she parted her thin curly hair, pointed at her husband with her eyes, took his arm and hit the top of her head lightly. He jolted up on the bench. A sheepishness crept into the dark bearded man’s face. He yanked his arm from her clasp and stood straight, like a child waiting outside the principal’s office. We stared him down, but he didn’t look up. The woman smiled, evidently enjoying his incrimination.

Even after our vehement disapproval, she stuck with the hypothesis that her husband had literally knocked the words out of her head. I’m sure that the clot in her brain was rather disappointed to see a slap take all the credit.

The child-like glee in seeing her husband getting scolded by doctors shimmered a little after she knew that her aphasia might never improve. She looked at her husband, enacted a barrage of wordless insults and hung her head back in her palms. A faint disappointment crept in and hung around her wordless mouth.

The half that slept eventually woke up. The team, now whole and awake, took the alpha’s verbal pummeling with a practiced grace. The lady stayed in-patient for a few days and left home when her thin arms with thready veins resembled pin cushions. We saw her a few months later in the OPD and with the entire OPD team cheering her on, she eked out a single word, “Aama” (Yes). She let out a radiant smile and almost instantaneously, the colour left her husband’s face, like air out of a balloon. He unfolded his hands and stood straight again, bracing himself for all the nagging that was about to return.