The Crucible

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

It was late March or early April in 2013 when my mum land and I were waiting at Jehangir Hospital for the results of a CT scan she had undergone at the advice of her gastroenterologist. We were anxious, since none of her previous tests had shown up anything, and the gastroenterologist had seemed worried when he recommended the CT scan.

The test result arrived and indicated many lesions in my mum's ovaries, uterus, liver and lymph nodes. I had no idea what lesions were, but they sounded scary. My mum's response was better informed. She immediately said, "This is cancer," and before I had even gotten my head around the report, she was on the phone with the two oncologists she knew, Dr Shona Nag and Dr Anand Koppikar.

Our meeting with the gastroenterologist that afternoon gave us both the fright of our lives. He made it sound like she was about to die. We were both in shock that evening as we drove to Dr Nag's home on Boat Club Road. She was more reassuring. She insisted that it wasn't so bad, and took us straight to Ruby Hall Clinic to meet a cancer surgeon she worked with, Dr Sujai Hegde, who also helped to calm us down.

Eventually, though, as the months and years passed, I started to realise that it was that bad. I watched my mother undergo endless cycles of chemotherapy until her veins no longer tolerated it. She underwent two rounds of surgery and was in so much pain after the second one that I wondered why we were doing all of this. What was the point of making someone suffer so much if they were going to die anyway?

My mum spent the first year of having cancer in a state of conviction that she was going to beat it. We made multiple trips to Bombay to see a Tibetan doctor. I was in touch with a doctor in the US who had developed a supplement to fight cancer, and I fed my mum copious amounts of the supplement every day. She spoke to a nutritionist in America who taught her about the Rainbow Diet. Before the first surgery, she convinced the surgeon to only speak positively about her health while conducting the surgery. Once it was completed, we were told she was now cancer- free, and we were so sure that she had beat it - we had outsmarted the cancer with our natural healing methods.