Ignorance is bliss

Ignorance is bliss

Vijay Gopichandran


A few months ago, an elderly lady walked into our clinic. The only feature about her that indicated her age was her grey hair. She was petite, with taut skin and had a skip in her step as she walked into the clinic. She had wide innocent eyes, which looked like those of an innocent scared child. The innocence on her face was adorable and to match it she had a high-pitched voice with a child-like quality to it. She also spoke in a sing-a-song manner. She was wearing a yellow saree and had several strings of holy beads around her neck. She had holy ashes smeared on her forehead and all over her hands and a bright red vermillion dot on her forehead. Her petite form, high pitched sing-a-song voice, innocent look all indicated a young soul inside an old body. She looked endearing and lovable instantly. She had come to see me with complaints of a profuse white discharge from her private parts. As I elicited her history and reviewed her old records, I came to understand that she was diagnosed to have cancer of her cervix (the opening part of the womb) about 2 years ago. She was asked to undergo radiotherapy. But after just 2 sittings of radiation treatment, she stopped going to the hospital as she was scared of the machines, gadgets and the people in the hospital. She had been taking some native treatment near her house. Now she was having profuse whitish discharge that was severely disturbing her daily life and so she had come to us.


I told her that there was very little we could for her at our hospital. We were just a primary care center and did not have the facilities to treat cancers. But she refused to listen to my reason and kept insisting that I treat her in the clinic. I took her to the examination room and wanted to visualize her cervix. What I saw was not encouraging. Her cervix was hard in consistency (because of cancer) and cancer had spread around the cervix area. In addition, a foul-smelling, whitish, bloody discharge was oozing out of the cervix. It looked like there was an active infection inside the uterus with pus collection. I started the elderly lady on antibiotics for controlling the infection. I emphasized that she must go to the cancer treatment center and get herself checked. I told her that the condition is quite serious, and it cannot be treated with just medicines. She may need some procedure to drain the pus that is collected in her uterus. I didn’t know if the lady understood the gravity of the situation. She had the wide-eyed look of innocence, which seemed as though I was explaining someone else’s condition to her. But she kept nodding her head as though she had perfectly understood what I was saying.


When we came back to the consultation room, she started talking to me about her life. She started explaining her personal situation. I can still vividly remember her sing-a-song narration with a high-pitched childlike voice. She is a mother of two sons and two daughters. But she was now living alone because they had all gone out of the village in search of livelihood. Her sons and daughters had initially visited her and helped her when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. But after some time, they could not continue to help and support her as they had their respective families to take care of. So, they stopped visiting her and stopped taking her to her radiotherapy sessions. That had been a major reason for her to stop her treatment. When she told them that she had stopped her treatment they hadn’t bothered.


Over the past 1 month, her sons had started pressurizing her to leave her home and go live in a destitute old age home. They had found such a home and told the social worker there that she was a destitute elderly in their native village. They had hidden the fact that she was their mother and had arranged for them to come to the village and pick her up the previous day. She came to know about this and had escaped overnight and run away from the village. She had taken a bus and gone to a distant village temple. She had found that the temple was having a festival and that explained her yellow saree, holy strings of beads and holy ashes. She told me that after taking the tablets from me she was not going back home but is going to again run away to some other place. She was scared that her sons would be waiting and would put her in the old age home. Her plan was to roam around various villages and visit various temples and then return home after 10 days. That way she would escape being shipped off to the old age home. She said, her sons wanted her gone because they wanted to sell her home and take the money. But the home was the only asset she had, and she hated having to go and live in an old age home.


I felt very sad to hear her story. The woman was temporarily running away from her home to avoid having to permanently leave it. The irony of it all seemed too harsh. I wanted to comfort her, hold her hand and tell her everything would be alright. But she did not seem to need all that. She had a sadness in her eyes, but the sadness was mixed with a strange look of excitement and anticipation. I think the excitement was because she was running, hiding and having an adventure of her own and she was ultimately looking forward to deceiving her sons and getting back home. Like a woman on a mission, she picked up her medicines and walked out with the same skip in her step.


She now visits regularly. The pus in her uterus flares up now and then and it resolves after taking the tablets. Every time she comes, she would walk in with a lot of worry and concern and leave with hope and gratitude. She knows her diagnosis and gravity of her condition, but she seems to have come to terms with all her health problems. I don’t know if her poor understanding and engagement with her diagnosis is a boon or a bane for her. In certain ways, it is a bane, because she is not taking care of her symptoms and her condition is worsening day by day. In certain ways, it is a boon because though the cancer is eating her away physically, her ignorance is keeping her in a state where she is not suffering the mental agony of a terminal prognosis.