The breath of life

Between 19th May 2008 and 3rd June 2008.

There was an oxygen cylinder. I am almost certain there was. I remember because on S's birthday on the 2nd, Appa said he felt better after an hour of oxygen.

But these last few days, I haven't been sure because, if he was already on oxygen in late-May/early-June, why did the doctor not discharge him the second time until we had the oxygen sorted out at home? I've looked through medical records but I can't find the receipts from the oxygen supplier. I realise that while I've made and kept copies of discharge summaries and prescriptions, I haven't kept copies of any receipts. The first time I realised I ought to have was after I sent off the insurance claims and saw someone else at the xerox shop making assiduous copies of every bill and scribble.

I can't know for certain but I know for sure - to borrow Paromita's phrase - that there was oxygen. There was also, and about this I am certain, the antibiotic respules he had to take. Two years ago Dr. S had said that was the last resort. If I knew last year, as he prescribed it, that we had arrived at the last resort before the final long-haul of the desert, I had pushed the knowledge back behind hope.

Appa's cupboard tells me what he did those last two weeks but not how much time it took to do it:

An hour of oxygen in the morning and an hour in the evening and as required.
Two puffs of two inhalers twice a day (one of these three times a day).
Nebuliser twice a day. Each nebulisation for 15 minutes
followed by the antibiotic through the nebuliser for half and hour each time twice a day.

For the last time in those weeks, Appa went upstairs. He cleared out his cupboard, rearranged his papers (tore bitter letters and kept one photograph of his parents) and came down for the last time. Did he look a farewell out the window by his side of the bed? At the photographs, the terrace, my room and the view outside it that they wanted me to have when they built the house? Did he, in fact, know it was the last time?

Frankly, I don't think he cared. Not about these things.

The photograph on S's birthday has us sitting on the front door steps, Appa on the right of frame, Amma on the right and S and I in the middle. Appa has deep circles under his eyes. There are two white spots pinching at the side his nose as if he wore wireframed spectacles in the heat (but he didn't; this must have been something else). His smile is the kind some people have ready for photographs that other people take: a tentative stretch of the lips unmatched by the wathfulness of the eyes. As has become usual, one shoulder is higher than the other. This is the last photograph.

I am not and never was a diagnostician. But now, even I can see things that were there.