Good Things, Bad Things

And the discovery of a lifetime.

It can be confusing for the sexual dynamic of a marriage when one partner has to put a syringe up their butt and empty a foamy dose of steroids into their rectum just after turning off the lights. And again as soon as they wake up. In addition to the enemas, I was popping nine pills a day - not one of which got me high. Can you imagine?

I’m told this is how auto-immune conditions work. Your immune system attacks healthy tissue (nobody knows why), there’s inflammation somewhere in the body, and then Western medicine throws everything at it in the hope that something will stick. Enemas are just one of the many creative solutions the doctors offer for the increasingly common problem of inflammation.¹^⁠

My doctor - who would be a top casting choice whenever they make an Indian adaptation of Santa Claus - insists that inflammatory bowel disease (or, IBD) has nothing to do with your diet and everything to do with inflammation, which in turn, has everything to do with stress. It’s hard to believe that what you put into your GI tract barely impacts your GI tract, but I did not disagree with ‘if you kill the stress you fix the rest’, as he laughed through his beard.

I took the advice to heart and turned it into a customised, usable framework. I called it Good Things, Bad Things. Anything that would improve the state of my mind or body was a Good Thing. Anything that made it worse was a Bad Thing.

Bad Things inevitably include items you cannot escape unless you take a break from regular life for a while, which I did when things got hard to manage. Traffic, the news, work, court, senior lawyers, slimy junior lawyers, clients, corporate clients, entitled clients, condescending clients, negotiations with entitled corporate clients about deadlines or deliverables, or money. Conversations with nearly anyone about money.

The list of Good Things was broader. Meditation, sleep, journaling, music, podcasts, stretching, long walks, mid-day naps with Rani, water, things to watch, lying on the floor, books. Plus, Santa said fresh haldi helps so I grated lots of it onto all my food, including omelettes and Maggi.

But I only got worse. After weeks of medication and follow-ups, we had one particularly bleak appointment. Usually an optimist, on this day my doctor reviewed the latest reports, shut the file, and escorted me out of his office with the words, ‘May god bless you.’ Thanks Doc, way to shift responsibility.

The one silver lining in all of this was that the steroids had spared me their worst side-effect: weight gain. Instead, in the two months since I had relapsed, I lost fourteen kilos. I was finally at my ideal weight, and contrary to all the sham advice on the internet, I had achieved this through a sedentary lifestyle. Oh, the joy of finally being thin, and the annoyance of being too weak to flaunt it. Tara was horrified when I asked her if I looked sexy, my knees trembling as I pulled my shirt up over ribs poking out from under my skin. Our abstinence would go on a little longer.

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Manjula was visiting right in the middle of all this. A quick stopover in Delhi on her way to some Korea or Russia or Turkey-type destination, wherever she thought she might find herself next.

“But how’re you reaalllly doing?” She was concerned.

I tried to focus through the prednisone induced brain-fog and irritability.

“I think I must be very depressed… Do you think maybe this book is making me more depressed?”

I told her the plot. The man who had been uprooted from his land in a war, losing his leg and watching the stump grow gangrenous, freezing in a boat with nothing to cover him, in a constant haze from his heroin addiction while his brother rowed down the river and kept the gun loaded and tried to keep the maggots off hi-

“Stop reading this shit!”

She took the book from my hands and shut it. “I’m prescribing two things, and I want you to follow them religiously. Whenever you can, watch The Office. Watch it all day. And when you get bored and feel like reading, read this.” She handed me a slightly bruised copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day from her bag. I read the cover and thought, David Sedaris… some new idiot she wants me to read.

I found The Office quite enjoyable, and the new idiot soon became a favourite. I had tried so hard to turn the volume up on the Good Things and down on the Bad Things, that I had taken no breaks from all of the trying. Who knew that the sustained effort to rest can feel less than restful.

As I improved over the next few months I found the energy to write again. I noticed I was still starting the same way: by doing bad impressions of Joan Didion on the page. But midway through my failed attempts, they were turning into bad impressions of David Sedaris instead.

It’s nice to be able to pinpoint when your recovery began. Even nicer to discover a writer who can always make you laugh.

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This is a longer, edited version of a piece that was originally written at the

Ochre Sky Stories

Writing Circle facilitated by the incredible

Natasha Badhwar

and

Raju Tai

. They have recently announced new workshops.

1. There have been reports of an alarming increase in auto-immune conditions, with the increase being estimated at about 3-12% annually. https://nationalhealthcouncil.org/blog/a-major-health-crisis-the-alarming-rise-of-autoimmune-disease/

What I find even more alarming, personally, is that of the 11 people at our Christmas lunch last year, 4 (including me) had auto-immune conditions. The conversation slowly centred around each one’s symptoms and the party assumed the air of a support group meeting. I almost changed the playlist.