Unusual Symptoms

Ever since the day he was born, his health had been a decline. He had suffered 4 instances of jaundice, almost died of dengue in the ICU, survived a ship wreck in the Bay of Bengal and thrice suffered the fate of unrequited love. 

He had fractured his right hand at the age of 5, the left shoulder at 12 and then both his legs in a car accident on night of his 21^st birthday. When an adolescent, he had the misfortune of a ravaged teenage face with pestilential boils that erupted like active volcanoes and as an adult, every 1^st day of a new year, he had gone through the shame of puking gracelessly because of over eating and then over drinking the night before. 

Change of weather caused him allergic sneezing, and change of season seemed to open cracks in his memory. Humidity made him sweat, summers left him baked, winters gave him itchy skin and monsoons tormented him with an eternal sore throat.

He had undergone eye surgery on account of cornea and bad eyesight. He had begun to lose hair, in fact a lot of hair and his only recognizable trait of the past 4 years was the bald patch that was spreading about his head, consuming every blade of sparsely rooted hair.

The year he was about to turn 30, his body had begun to give unusual signs, symptoms that even a veteran like him was unaware of. The limbs had become stiff, inflexible and heavy. His chest felt bogged with the steel weight of an unknown force and thighs trembled with the weight of his body. His eyes had lost the vision of the former times and voice was broken with uncertainty. His heart thrummed with the anxious threat of the peculiar symptoms and his mind contemplated another round of hospitalisation. 

It seemed as if the old enemies he had resisted so well in the past had all attacked at the same time. Not wanting to crumble with decrepitude, he questioned himself of his past, time and again to make sure he wasn’t losing the sense of reality and that all his nostalgias were intact.  

He visited Mr. Rustom, an old Parsi doctor he had known since infancy who welcomed him in the ancestral clinic of his forefathers with his warm affection and grandfatherly wisdom. He checked the beatings of his heart, the pressure of his blood, the light in his eyes and the colour of his tongue and then suggested routine blood tests, a chest X-ray, sonography and a stress-test. 

Then giving him a tablet to ease his limbs, a pill to lower his anxiety and drops to restore the brightness of his eyes, he told him to come back next week.

After a week of sleepless nights, worn out by insomnia and fever, he arrived at the clinic with a sediment of bitter syrup in his palate to confront the inevitable.

“What is it?” he asked Mr Rustom with a breath of tragedy. 

“Is it jaundice again? Or tuberculosis? I have an urgent desire to lose the weight of my bowels…So is it diarrhoea…or anything else?”

Doctor Rustom was unperturbed. He blinked his ancient eyes several times while he analysed the results of the blood tests and X-ray and compared them with the sonography report and said after a long and implacable pause: 

“It’s something worse!” and then giving his long suffering patient a toothless grin, he concluded: “It’s Age.”