When it comes to healing, copy the trees

On a weekday, a sharp pain in my tummy told me I should head not to work, but for an ultrasound. Winter was on its way out, and the softness of spring would arrive soon. My body was on a different journey though—on a winding path of pain and discomfort.

- Neha Sinha

Lying in a pool of sterilized light on an ultrasound table, I felt the impossible dichotomy each patient feels. The doctor looks you over in a cool, detached way, even as the blood pounds passionately in your ears. You may be in thousands of photos, but a strange shyness engulfs you when the camera moves inwards towards your organs. We don’t want to be splayed on medical beds with fake bravado as someone gazes at what is inside: Something that is intimately ours, but still unfamiliar to us.

I realized then that the body is like an ecosystem. Our veins and arteries, like rivers, need to flow naturally. A dam or a blockage creates problems, and sometimes, in the way that dams break, debris can get lodged downstream, in organs and places they have no business to be in. Our body has connections in the way a healthy ecosystem does—what affects one part affects the whole thing.

As I reluctantly turned myself over to hospital, the air grew warmer, and flowers threatened to take over the world as they do only once a year in spring. I noted that my favorite tree, the semal, had buds. In the parks of Delhi, the colorful import of tulips was poking out its first leaves. But the outside world had to wait, as I was wheeled into the intense interiority of the surgery. A painful but relatively minor procedure followed. At the same time, my father was fitted with a pacemaker. I had something removed from my body, and he had something put in. Henceforth, the complex business of living life would be accomplished with these plusses and minuses.

“I had a novice’s hunger for history, but a novice’s inability to envision it,” writes Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, on tackling disease and its history in his fine book,