All it takes is one moment to change your life, forever…
While statistics say that 1.45 lakh road accidents occur in India each year, I had never thought I would fall victim to it.
It was a bright sunny morning and I was travelling to Mumbai by road for a work assignment. It was all going good until a truck driver who was driving wrong-side thrashed into our car, in a bid to save an animal under way. In haste, his truck barged into our car and I felt excruciating physical pain. It felt like a bolt of thunder and I thought it will subside eventually…but little did I know that it was just the beginning.
As I opened my eyes in the hospital and tried to move, I felt this numbness in my right limb and somehow I could not move it. On asking the doctor repeatedly and after unsuccessful attempts to try and remove the quilt placed over my lower body, I was told that I had lost the limb in the accident. However much my inner self failed to accept this, the look on the doctor’s face said that there indeed was truth to what she just told me. My family rushed to be my side, and this journey made me realize that they are the only souls that were truly by my side, irrespective of the glaring eyes of neighbors, or pitiful looks by colleagues.
While the treatment and diagnosis was a physical process, the pain and the anguish was more on an emotional level. Climbing stairs is a difficult task without one limb, no doubt, but when it is matched with onlookers who instead of sharing a warm look, greet me with sympathizing eyes, the helplessness intensifies. Every person started viewing me as a liability – the idea was not to support me, but to ensure that I don’t do anything by myself. I understand that it is a shade of concern, but what is the point of the concern which inhibits my well-being and crushes my self-esteem?
After months of feeling lost and clueless of how to go about making the situation better, the wave completely turned to my stride as we decided to get an artificial limb attached. A foreign object was to be part of my body – as much as any other and that filled me with both joy and nervousness. I didn’t know what to expect – but all I knew was that I deserved a chance to live life as a survivor and not a victim. Today, as I have my new limb as a part of me, I realized that things do seem to fall in place, and the journey however long it may seem, does have a happy ending.
Yes, I am still not used to this new part of me and I am guessing I will take time to get accustomed to it. But what fills me with immense joy is that I did not give up, and I fought as hard as I could. I wish to achieve all that I had dreamt of before that accident, with new zeal and vigor…because all you need to make your dreams come true is courage to fight for it and faith that it shall work out nevertheless.
