Last night@Fortis Hospital

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Asleep at 12 in the night, I got a call last night from my dad and all he said was that he had fallen off a bus and I needed to come to him quickly with enough cash on me. The call came at 11:58 and at 12:03, we were at his side, to pick him up. But this blog is not about him….thankfully he was alright. He slipped off the bus (Dont even try asking why he was on a bus at 12 in the night in the first place) while getting off and dislocated his finger. Painful as it looked, it could have been much worse and by god’s grace, he was fine.

We reached Fortis hospital around 12:30 and went straight to the emergency ward. Dad with his impatience with incompetent doctors, was content when he saw that the doctors on duty were very efficient and knew their stuff. Of course the ridiculous system of making payments and filling forms before the doctor will even help was there, but besides that, they were extremely helpful. The x-ray they took of his hand was nothing less than a horror film; the finger was completely dislocated from his hand and stood at an awkward angle. 2 injections and a quick procedure later, it was all fixed and looked as good as new. We had to then wait for them to do a 2nd X-Ray to confirm. The clock was striking 1 at this time.

The next three hours seemed right out of a movie. As we waited, we were robbed of the right to demand attention as we saw cases come in that were much more serious than ours was. A biker who had been through a really bad accident rolled in. His X-Rays itself took an hour before he was rolled into the CT-scan room. Dad kept trying to raise the guy’s spirits by telling him that he was a very lucky man and it could have been much worse. As the night progressed, it got even more surreal. The recent spate of violence in the name of carjacking in Noida seemed scary but it took the magnitude of horrifying when the police rolled in this guy around 2:30-3 in the morning. He was also a victim of the same gang. He was a driver and had just dropped his employer home and was returning to his house in Nithari. The bikers chased him all the way to Indirapuram and finally forced him to come out. They left with the car but not before stabbing him multiple times all over his body. And this was the state in which we witnessed him!

Reaching home around 4-4:30 in the morning, I felt nothing but humbled….and sleepy of course. Life is so uncertain, you don’t know what will happen in the next few hours, what you will have to face, what you may have to endure….its so fragile that it can be taken away within a micro-second….and everything can change from what you had ‘planned’ it to be. Whenever people said, ‘Life is short, enjoy it’ or as Rohan’s favorite quote goes ‘May you live every day of your life’, I never really understood it to what it meant. It was like denial – nothing can happen to me. This crazy night left me a little shook up and cleared my head. There is no time, if you need to say something…say it now…if you want to go somewhere…go now….don’t just exist today with the hope that you are securing your tomorrow….go….live….