It still seems like it all happened yesterday. Of course, for those of you who know me well, you will know that i have been bitten by dogs. Yes, plural. Thrice. Is there something so out-of-the-ordinary about it? No. Am I gonna be talking about those incidents here? Nope. Not now 🙂
So what do i want to share with you today? Most of the other bites that i have gotten in my life come either from my little cousins or my nephews or nieces. And then there was one. The real deal this time. It all happened in my third year of college. .
It was after twilight and i was walking back from my early dinner. The road back to my hostel was dark and so was my mind. But little did i know that it was only going to get darker and hazier. The one thing i distinctly remember from that night is the split second when i knew that i had stepped on something in the middle of the road. I had looked down and seen (yes, seen) the snake recoil and strike. Once. Twice. And then I had stepped over it, literally jumping out of my skin and onto safe ground.
It took me all of three seconds to realize that not only that I had very little time to figure things out, but also that there was nobody around who could help me. Not a single one had a car that could take me all the way to the hospital 20 kilometers away. I was all alone. Except for my phone, of course. The journey itself would take forty minutes and who knows what could happen in those two score?!
The first thing i did was to call up my dad (who is a doctor) and tell him what happened. He told me he will take care of the things at the hospital, and all I had to do was rush to the hospital. FAST. Man, as if that was the easy part of getting bitten!
Well, suffice to say, i somehow found a guy who could drive me to the hospital in ten minutes or so and about three quarters of an hour from the time it happened, i was lying on the hospital bed with a string tied around my leg (someone had told me that was gonna save me even if God could not!). The next twenty four hours saw me drifting in and out of sleep/consciousness whenever some nurse came to take my blood (oh no! not again!!). I recall fifteen instances when blood was taken from me in those 24 hours. Man, i never knew I could do that! The doctor there told me that I had been bitten by one of those snakes which strike multiple times to push venom in, and that thankfully, even thought it had bitten me THRICE (I saw only two of them, but yea, there was one before that apparently!), there was very little rist in my PTT blood levels. Aw well, so I am not gonna die after all.. Phew! 😀
The one thing I realized during the whole ordeal was that no matter how rich or righteous you are (in my case, read those as ‘poor or evil’), at a point of time, you realize that no one can save you except yourself. Helplessness is not a feeling. It is a condition, a state that we all live through. And that one night took me to a level of helplessness and despair that i knew not existed. Fear is not a thought that floods your mind in such circumstances.
The feeling is dread. Pure, uncontaminated, sparkling dread!