Four Arms and Three Legs

Mist is all I could see and there was a huge air sac stuck in my throat. 3 more hours to go.

I was seated in the waiting room, desperately waiting for my wife’s operation to end. The odds of her making through were very low, or so I thought. She had been battling Churg Strauss syndrome for the past two months. Only 90 people have been known to suffer from it over the past two years and she was one of them.

What in the world is this disease you wonder? Churg-Strauss syndrome is a rare disorder that was first reported in the 1950s. Persons afflicted by this syndrome have an accumulation of an abnormally large number of certain white blood cells, inflammation of blood vessels and inflammatory nodular lesions. The onset typically occurs between 15 to 70 years of. It can be severely debilitating, and even fatal if untreated.

And that’s what had happened with Susana. It went unnoticed till two months back when I found her fighting for breath and bleeding through the nose on the kitchen floor.

The doctors didn’t give her much chance. I didn’t.

A handicap’s chair came to a stop next to me. The attendant placed a toy on the lad’s lap and disappeared behind a door.

For someone with two stumps for hands and legs that couldn’t move he seemed pretty cheerful; staring at the toy and pleased like a bowl of spiked punch.

“What are you smiling about chap? You don’t even have a hand to hold on to the toy and play around with it!”

Susana always said tense situations made me extremely rude.

The kid took a while to shift his gaze towards me. “Just because you are blind doesn’t mean I am not playing.”

“What!? You are staring at a toy dumb boy.”

“Well I don’t have hands in the physical world, but I have four arms and three legs in the world that I imagine. I do more than what you could ever do in this world.”

‘What a freak of nature,’ I thought to myself.

“Why three legs and not four boy?” I had to ask it, if you had four arms it made sense to have four legs. Three was so odd.

“I always loved the way a camera stood on a tripod,” he replied swiftly.

He turned back to playing again.

“So why are you so cross?” He didn’t turn his eyes away from his toy.

“I am sorry lad. My wife’s being operated upon and she’s battling for life.”

“And??”

“And what!?”

“You don’t think she’s going to make it through?”

“Well her disease has reached a critical stage and doctors don’t think she can make it through.”

“How different is that from a couple of minutes ago when you thought I had no arms and a useless pair of legs.”

The sac of air just evaporated. I felt humbled, I felt a lot better.

“How do you do it kid?” I croaked.

“To be like the drop enjoying its momentary form, to be as elated as the dried leaf enjoying its final dance in the swirl of wind before it hits the ground. That’s how I do it sir.”

He continued playing with his toy.