رہیے اب ایسی جگہ چلکر جہاں کوئی نہ ہو
ہم سُخن کوئی نہ ہو اور ہم زُبان کوئی نہ ہو
(It is time to now go somewhere no one lives and there rest,
Where conversation will remain quiet, where tongues will be at rest.)
Diagnosed with a severe headache at around 12 in the noon, I was rushed to the hospital nearby. I was throbbing my head with my hands and was taken to the OPD.
Within an hour, after I was treated, my headache got better than what it was and now was nearly causing me no pain and the doctor told me that I was going fine. With that said, I thought I was going to be okay and we took a leave and went back to home.
After having my meals, I found myself in an incredibly unexplainable condition, I felt breathless (of course not because of covid, I was tested negative a day back). In a moment it because so bad that I fainted down due to lack of oxygen. Black and white colours began appeared right into my ways as I was completely dumbstruck. I, with all the energy left in me held a curtain of my room so I could at least step up and call someone. Finally getting up to the lobby I was walking down and my mom appeared. She was as dumbstruck as I was because she also couldn’t address my problem as I was unable to speak. She shouted and cried as if she was holding me dead and all of a sudden all of my family members took me to the hospital nearby.
On the way to the hospital believed that I was going to die, yes — that I had few minutes or hours left of me and I shall soon be transported into the afterlife because I at that moment found myself like in an infinite space and time.
I felt with every breath I loss I was losing a part of my life. My eyes turned to a 360-degree peripheral vision and I could see everyone around me.
Soon some tests were carried, doctor checking on my pulse, my saturation level, I went through an X-RAY and an ECG.
The tests shocked all of the doctors as they were normal and even more good and healthy than a normal patient has. But I was still breathless, nothing helped. I begged for an oxygen support but the doctors believed more in the report and seldom did they listened to me. It was only after a dearest friend, Javid Rather who worked in the same hospital, told the doctor to at least try oxygen for once. Fortunately, the doctors listened to him and I was shifted to a ward and was on an oxygen support now. The oxygen was not helping though as the doctors told it won’t, but it was just I wanted it mentally to work.
Now I began to cite an incredible clarity where everything started to make sense. The tests were normal but I was dying due to breathless. It was a clean symptom of an uninvited death, I assumed.
But I felt I didn’t want to go, because it was so painful. It was just miserable, because, for the first time, all the pain from breathless was unexplainable. All the discomfort was within. The fear surrounding the room, was just unexpected. I didn’t want to die like that. All of my family was rapping me and comforting me with their words, their love – unconditional love.
“I held the hand of my mom, telling her, “Mama, is it as simple to go to the heavens as they say? Doing good unconditionally and getting to heavens, a reward? What about my sins? I admit that I always, always try to do good and never harm anyone but what of the sins I’ve been doing? I am a really big sinner. I’ve sinned with my heart and mind, with my eyes and ears and what not. What would I get of those sins? I don’t want to die unless I make to that I earn heaven for me, mama. But I also don’t want to be in this much pain.” Crying louder, my mom told me that she would never give up on me neither would let me go and that who’ll take care of them when they grow old? That bought tears in my eyes and holding me with her chest, we wept together.
To make the situation calm down, I was injected with something that made me fall asleep. But before I slept the joy – the joy of knowing that whatsoever happens the family was with me and that we are all one. Everyone of us is me, all of them are with me. It’s one! My whole family, they’re a part of me like they have always be and whatever befalls, we shall tackle it together.
Waking up the next morning, I was good than before, wondering how much my family loved me and how on earth do I forget that sometimes.