I no longer feel my tears when they roll down my cheek on the left side of my face. It is a rare feeling per se, for when a teardrop does fall, it remains stranded on the precipice of my eyelashes whilst my eyes don’t close.

This little waterfall is an alien experience primarily because all my life I had been blessed with the human reflex of catching such falls right at the edge which would then spread across my eye blurring the vision, thus making me realize that I was crying. I would then wipe my eyes for clarity to see ahead.

But now they fall like beads falling out of a machine. I barely know when they squeeze out and only become aware of their presence when they hit the only feeling part of the cheek, or occasionally when they hit my hand carelessly.

The second round of diagnosis returned with nothing less than apprehension. For I was told I could be headed to another war.

All the problems from the first war kicked in, and my anxieties got the better of me. Some things can’t be controlled, but there are some that you have complete control over like keeping a straight face, smiling through the adversities, denial, and pretending everything is fine. I think humans are wired that way. Half of the world lives in denial. They do not believe anything until it begins to happen around them. The Ukraine-Russia war is one good example of that. Nobody in the world, hell even in Ukraine, people didn’t take anything seriously until the onslaught.

Wrapping your head around the inner workings of a body is something that eludes even the doctors. They can’t tell you ‘why’ something happened, they only know how to get rid of it. But in my case, even the latter doesn’t hold true. The doctors are clueless about this second wave.

Why? The biggest question that we have been asking throughout the lifetime of our existence. It kind of drags itself out every now and then. If I try to beat my head against the wall about the million dollar question, I conclude that the only outrageous anomaly that had happened to my body throughout my life was the ligament injury that had happened during my college days. I haven’t got that operated yet. But the doctors seem to disagree. That has nothing to do with this one. It could be hereditary, coming from my mother’s side, since my maternal grandmother had cancer that took her life, and my mother too at one point dealt with an obnoxious tumor.

I am scared to death about revisiting the painful aspects of surgery. I am not worried about what happens after the light goes out, I am worried more about the before and the after. The part where they treat your body like a sack. Inserting needles as and when they please, the intense pain that follows owing to the blood clots. The fact that they completely forget about you after surgery, that you are not allowed to drink even a single drop of water. The inconvenience of the nasal plugs, the fact that they don’t even let you breathe. You have to literally fight for every breath.

While my body experiences two distinct kinds of pangs, I am able to discern which one’s which. While there is the welcome one that tells me that my nerves are feeling the stimuli, that they are reviving slowly, then there is the same old crazy pain that reminds me of the tumor. There is something terribly wrong there, I feel it in my guts.

Now the reports check out every fearful apprehension that I ever had, inadvertently pushing me towards a familiar hospital bed that I have grown to loathe over time not because of the impending discomfiture, but for the sheer fact that it would render me powerless again, and leave me at the mercy of some strangers.