THE CHEEK OF THE MATTER #WRITEAPAGEADAY #BLOGCHATTER
Despicable Me Agnes - Pinterest
I was born cheeky!
That is not say that I began to sass my parents the
minute I was born. It just meant that I had more flesh on my face than anywhere
else. The exercise having my cheeks pinched started when I was a toddler and
continued till I grew old enough to pinch people back. Just joking!
The journey from adolescence to teenage was peppered with
pinches from friends, neighbours, uncles and aunts, sometimes even pure
strangers. Luckily, they were all good-natured ones, never meant to harm me in
anyway. Maybe life was not a perilous as it has turned today.
I had often been amazed at the priceless heirlooms passed
down from grandmother to mother to daughter… gold necklaces, ruby earrings,
rings studded with gems… the works, in short.
I inherited a healthy set of fibroids from the matriarchs
of my family, most of whom having bade farewell to their uteruses well before
they should have, passed on the tradition with ease. So, in my mid-thirties, I
had doctors proclaiming me a walking miracle when my haemoglobin nose-dived to
5.8.
“You will need a hysterectomy as soon as possible!” was
the verdict.
So there I was, having blood pumped into me, and not one
person believed me when I informed them that I was anaemic.
“No way! You have such round cheeks!” Same old story!
Hysterics over, hysterectomy done and dusted, I was a new
person. Lighter inside, with only my ovaries left behind fortunately, because of
which I missed hot flushes, putting on weight, and the worst of all, developing
masculine tendencies like growing a moustache, tendencies which were thrust
upon me by people who had never seen a stethoscope in their lives.
They would begin with, “Oh, so sad! You have a daughter?
No son?” Before I could assure them that neither my better half nor I had a
problem with that, they would peer at me with expressions taken straight from a
coroner’s office and continue. “My sister-in-law bloated like a balloon after
she had her uterus removed. Worse still, her voice became hoarse, and she looked
much older than her age.”
The next naysayer made it even more graphic.
“Oh yes, and she started growing a moustache and had to
go to the parlour twice a month to get rid of her facial hair. Plus, she was
advised to see a cardiologist, just in case!”
Those months were quite a nightmare, and I stood on the scales
regularly to fathom the extra weight that was looming over like a Damocles
sword, waiting to land on my hapless head. That was when my mother, a much
experienced surgery expert (having had three deliveries and three extra
surgeries, almost like ‘ek ke saath ek free’) sat me down and gave me a stern
talking-to.
“Will you stop being a worry wart and get back to your
sunny self? Look at me. I have survived all my surgeries without adding a kilo.
You have my genes. Stop listening to all and sundry and perk up! That’s an
order.”
Maybe that was all I needed at that moment. To have one
sane voice tell me to stop listening to those who loved embroidering tales and turning
them into horror stories! It got me thinking.
Why do some folks enjoy being voices of doom, telling
graphic stories of surgeries that went wrong, of mishaps that may or may not
have taken place and of generally behaving like harbingers of misfortune? Their
eyes sparkle as they relate gory tales, adding nuggets of
information/misinformation to further embellish their narratives.
“Oh, my late uncle had a knee surgery which was supposed
to be a simple affair. He died on the operating table!”
“A distant relative had a hysterectomy. She was then wheeled
back to her room where she had a cardiac arrest.”
Is it a lack of empathy that brings out these gloomy
tales or is it their shock value? Either way, they do nothing to calm down
patients who are, in any case, not looking forward to any kind of procedures,
but are forced to do them at different stages of their lives.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, once I had taken in
Mom’s well-timed advice, I decided to cool off. I knew that my cheeks would be
my companions for life and that I might as well appreciate them. My daughter
had inherited them in a lesser measure, but decades later, they reappeared when
my adorable granddaughter was born. History, they say, repeats itself!
I have now developed a magical sense of hearing which
shuts off drivel or nonsense the moment I feel that I do not need to listen
anymore. My friends and I laugh and joke about our weight or lack of it, our
health issues which are thankfully trivial at the moment, and the need to walk/sing/dance/maybe
even exercise on occasion. There are no hard and fast rules, the one major one
being the old adage which works even today – “Live and let live!”
My cheeks continue to thrive, but I no longer disown
them!
Nice, cheeky writing.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much! :)
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