A Glimpse of Eternal Snows by Jane Wilson-Howarth
Synopsis
This is the autobiographical
story of a British doctor who, a month after the birth of her second
child, returns to Nepal. The book describes what drives her to leave –
what drives her to ignore the admonitions of doctors and their gloomy
prognostications about her son. Quitting Cambridge means abandoning
access to good medical care. She doesn’t know what to expect but fears
the worst, yet she hopes it will allow the child to live in dignity and
happiness; it certainly allows him to escape daily blood tests, feeding
tubes, hospitals and institutions. Family life returns to normal as he
defies his doctors’ predictions. Back in Nepal, life is no longer
dominated by hospitals and the parents learn from the tolerant accepting
attitudes of the locals they live and work with. The mother struggles
with guilt, often thinking that she has made the wrong decision, but
guilt is mitigated by seeing a joyous carefree child develop.
A group of giggling young Nepali
mothers gathered around to see my five-week-old: to compare babies. They
took him from me and pressed in to see. ‘How beautiful,’ ‘Such soft
white skin,’ ‘These little holes in his ears are a gift from heaven.’
This was the first time strangers had admired my new baby, and at that
moment I knew that it had been right to flee England. There he’d been
still as a rag doll; he twitched at any noise and vomited after each
tube-feed. He was suffering. Panic often showed in his eyes. We didn’t
know what to expect of the future. All we knew was that it would be
better than submitting to what the Cambridge doctors had planned for our
quiet beautiful baby.
We had been living in urban Nepal, but would be
moving to remote Rajapur Island in the middle of the largest tributary
of the Ganges. We were up-beat about going but Nepalis warned of the
heat, bandits and disease in the Plains. On Rajapur though we entered an
accepting, straightforward community where David was special – touched
by god – not abnormal. Our neighbours saw beyond his handicap. He
stopped twitching at the slightest sound and he rallied physically too.
Soon there was a sparkle in his eyes and slowly, he started to respond
to us, even tease us. We were right to take him away to Nepal. And
David’s older brother, Alexander, was spared spending his early years in
dank England, hanging about in hospital waiting rooms. We settled into a
contented, sleepy life on our island where we lived close to tiger,
rhino and wild elephant, and village boys taught Alexander to climb
mango trees, make catapults, catch skinks and fly kites.
The one sympathetic hospital doctor in Cambridge had
advised us to treat David normally and we took this as a licence to
take him on his first trek; at the age of four months, we packed up
David’s heart medicines and tubes and headed up over precipitous drops
and wobbly rope bridges to explore drippy forests and mediaeval
hill-forts. The mountains were spectacular and healing. Strangely
David’s heart disease protected him from the affects of high altitude.
Our arrival in each mountain village was heralded by choruses of,
‘Children have come!’ We’d be surrounded and David taken from his
carrying basket to be handed around for all to cuddle. He glowed in all
this attention. He smiled and burbled appreciatively at all his
admirers. Nepalis helped us see David’s qualities and talent for
laughter.
I took up a little part-time health work, taking
David with me to village meetings as part of my credentials for talking
with the women. Our Nepali neighbours had their own problems yet they
took life as it came and dealt with their hardships cheerily. Their
spirituality and fatalism seemed to allow them to snatch some joy out of
life too, and they helped us see our situation in proportion and live
contentedly with our – at times – uneasy child. We did not dwell on
David’s problems but, having absorbed the positive aspects of both
cultures, could enjoy his happy personality and increasingly mischievous
sense of humour.
This book describes the emotions of facing up to
having a special child. It also shows that throughout all this we did
not allow David’s problems to swamp us. We could still laugh, be
optimistic. The book looks at some difficult issues surrounding
disability and the ethics of who should be treated – or not. It
contrasts our unhealthy, unhelpful Western views of imperfection and
death with a more tolerant, fatalistic view in Nepal. There it was
easier to take life day by day.
No comments:
Post a Comment