It began so quietly that it felt almost impolite to notice. Just a tickle in the throat; not a pain, not even what most people would call an illness. Only a faint irritation, like a loose thread on a cuff, something you keep brushing away because the day is already too full to stop for it.

I ignored it. There were rounds to finish, echocardiograms to review, and a long cath list at display. The morning had already opened into its usual urgency: charts, images, numbers, worried faces, familiar diseases arriving in different bodies. In a hospital, the day does not pause to ask how you are feeling; it moves, and you move with it.

By afternoon, the thread had become something heavier. A low-grade fever settled in; not high enough to alarm anyone, not dramatic enough to justify stepping away. It was Ramzan, and I kept fasting until evening when  I returned home after a long day. I swallowed two paracetamol tablets with lukewarm water and told myself what doctors tell themselves every day: it is nothing, keep going.

That is how many of us have been trained to live inside our work. We do not exactly deny the body; we negotiate with it. We lower its importance. We fold discomfort into the day and carry on as though endurance were a professional virtue, as though paying less attention to suffering somehow made us stronger.

The fever did not leave— it stayed, rose steadily, and grew stubborn. Then came the body aches, not sharp enough to be theatrical, only slow and consuming. My muscles felt as though they had turned against me from within. My joints stiffened; movements that should have been acquired automatically encountered a strange resistance, as if the body were no longer an ally but an opponent.

The next morning, I stood in the hallway, trying to tie my shoelaces, but I could not finish the knot. It is a small thing, tying a shoe, until the day it is not. My fingers felt thick and unfaithful. One shoe was tied, the other undone, and I stood there longer than I should have, held in place by the humiliation of a task so ordinary it had never before required........

© Greater Kashmir