Is it the beginning of the END??

Yatish was about 2 years now and our search for answers continued. We met numerous doctors and specialists, some of whom were useful but most of them left us more confused. But then we also met quacks, astrologers and the sundry, which were not even remotely connected to this. We were trying everything and anything anybody told us, when I think back I feel like a complete nut case who had thrown all rationality out of the window. What was I thinking? Somebody suggested that we take Yatish to a quack lady, who gave some kind of herbal concoction mixed with milk early in the morning. Thanks to Yatish’s reflux, he promptly threw it out before we reached home. Thank God he had more sense. There is no miracle cure.


The state you are in, you start believing that there is a miracle cure, and imagine that one morning you wake up and your child is walking, talking like any other child. You begin to trust everything blindly. We continued the physiotherapy, but were completely clueless about where it was leading to. There was no great improvement in his condition physically but cognitively he was improving which was a great sign. We also ended up doing more CT scans; endoscopy etc. and nothing conclusive came out of it all. What should we do now? There was nobody who could tell us definitively what we should be doing and what kind of future awaited Yatish. I was reading a book called “Stumbling upon Happiness”, which says that when the frontal lobe of your brain is damaged for some reason, you lose the concept of future. You only have the concept of present and now. For once I really wished frontal lobe of my brain was damaged because thinking about future was scary and dark. My frontal lobe is intact and hence the future seemed bleak.

The frustration was really building up and since Yatish being the first child in our family, there was no legacy to fall back on and all of us were first time mom and dad, grandparents, uncles, aunts etc. Every time we got a phone call, the first question anybody asked me and my hubby was if there was any improvement in Yatish. We really did not know what to say. While we wanted answers now, the doctors knew nothing much could be done, so they just wanted us to take it easy. This kind of conflict created a volatile situation. In one such situation the Paediatric head at a leading hospital in Bangalore, suggested that if we had the resources we could take him to US or UK. Then we started thinking about it. Maybe this was what we should be doing we thought. During the course of this we also happened to meet an Oncologist who is close to our family and looking at the state we were in he suggested that it would be a good idea to take Yatish to US and we may get some answers there. He said we should check if we could get to Stanford Medical Centre.

This seemed like an answer to our question !!!