When you start to live for yourself........

Life has changed a lot for me in last six months, when I realized, I need to look at myself, live for myself to take care of others in my family.

All my life, I have been busy taking care of everyone in family, be it immediate or distance family. From earning the bread and butter for the family as well as taking care of all little stuffs, that makes our family life run smooth. And this had been going for long, till I started facing health issues in last few months.

It started with some pain below the right chest , or above right abdomen. And I did all kind of tests to no negative signs. Consults many doctors, but none of them were able to figure out the problem. One of the doctor told me that it may be some kind of nerve related issues, and advised some medicines, but I was not convinced. I told him, please don't experiment on me as a subject, if you can't figure out. I really don't know, why these doctors never admit the fact that they are unable to diagnose / treat in some case, probably their ego hurts ?

So I was frustrated with these and started doing exercise, and believe me the pain started reducing. Every day, I started giving half an hour for myself, doing walking, slow running and some other stretching. And the result was impressive, after 2-3 months the pain was gone and I started feeling better and better.

But the story did not end there, even with the exercise as a part of my daily life. All of a sudden, I faced sever constipation, gastritis and it hit me hard. My company offers a yearly full body check up for free, and I never did it earlier and this time I decided to give it a go. And what came in the result definitely needed attention.

I had simple cyst in the liver, and that is what is the problem. All my other reports were fine, but this was giving me the pain and all other health issues. I was advised to consult a Liver specialist, and with quick time, I was able to find out one of the best liver doctor in India : Dr Subrat kumar Acharya. He advised few other tests like TNF Alpha and Fibroscan.

And as usual, as we do it all, I started googling for the implication of these results and it was concerning before I went to show him the reports. And what I found out in Google was concerning, the reports of TNF-α was way outside of range, and I could not get any convincing information and most likely it was a killer symptom.

For the first time in life, I started thinking its all over and I should count my days. Meeting the doctor was not possible immediate so all I was relying on was console from family members. That is when I realized to think about myself, take care of myself, because I could see, how it would affect everything to me as well as family. All your plans for life goes into a toss at a sudden. I was eagerly waiting to meet the doctor to advise next steps.

And finally after 13 days, I heard from the hospital that the doctor is coming ( He comes for few days to my place as he is a native of my place but most of the time is at New Delhi ). Those 13 days went like 13 years for me. Every day I used to keep thinking about life crossing the borders between life and death. You keep asking yourself, keep answering to yourself. You listen to the inner self.

After seeing the reports, the doctor advised not to worry and advised me to never do a google search for any implications, because they are all related, and you probably could imagine my situation at that time.

I was feeling like Life has given me a second chance, and I should never ignore taking care of myself first.

As usually, I asked all kind of questions to the Doctor, and what he told is that, simply reduce your weight by 10%, that is your treatment. You don't need medicine. And that was a big big relief to me.

Since then I have increased my daily exercise to a hour, and have been able to reduce my weights by 3-4 kgs. Planning to do it more rigorous along with following some diet restrictions, that would help me to achieve my goals of reducing my weight.

I don't know what is there for me in coming days, but I have started to live for myself in the first place.