Let not Karthi's Condition Come to any one
“When I think about this, I am terrified; trembling seizes my body – Job 21:6 (NIV)”
Even now if I recall the hopeless, precarious condition of Karthi when I brought him home on 29 May 2001, my whole body shivers. His head would sometimes collapse to one side. He would be starring at a particular place and blink. Since his spinal card, abdomen and hip muscles had become very weak, he won’t be able to sit steadily in the wheel chair. If I don’t tie him up with a belt with the wheel chair, he might either fall to the front or on the side. He was not able to even hold a pen or a spoon in his fingers as they had become very stiff and bent. During the night I used to straighten his fingers of both the hands and tie them up with a splinter. As he was totally paralyzed below the hip and as he had no strength in his upper body, two people had to lift him up from bed to make him sit in the wheel chair. His leg would stretch out and stand out like a log due to spasm. I had to massage his muscles and slowly bend it to place them on the foot rest of the wheel chair. His memory was impaired to a very large extent. Hours together I used to sit by his side and narrate many incidents
happened earlier in his/our life to enable him to recapture his memory. In his food pipe in the neck, a hole had been made to insert a pipe to his lungs (Tracheostomy) to remove the plums. Due to this, his tongue had been pulled inside resulting in the loss of his speech. When I asked him any thing, he would try to speak but it would only be an indelible sound. To a person who is an Engineering Graduate and worked in Singapore and USA, I had to give him speech therapy patiently to speak out words like A for Apple, B for Boy, Papa, Mamma, Aunt etc. Sometimes he would try to tell me something but I won’t be able to make out what he was trying to tell me. He would further try hard to explain but having failed to communicate or make us understand, his eyes would moisten and he would become silent looking helplessly at us. Such situations would simply break our heart and cause intolerable pain. If any food was fed in his mouth, he would not be able to chew them and would just hold it in his mouth. When I tell him to chew and swallow it, he would try many a times but would not be able to move his tongue to chew the food. Finally I would take out the food from his mouth. To swallow one sip of water, he would take a few minutes. He had absolutely no control over his bladder and bowel movements. All the medicines and tablets were powdered and injected through a tube which had been fixed permanently in his abdomen. Sometimes liquid food was also given through this tube. When many known friends and neighbours visited us to see Karthi, he was not able to recognize them. He was just a living vegetable. We had to take care of him like a premature baby.