Failure to Thrive \"Is There

¶ … Failure to Thrive

"Is there any way to make him more comfortable?" Anand looked at his father, lying on the cold, narrow, hospital bed.

"I'm sorry, sir," said the nurse. "I'm just here to take his blood -- the labs need to do some more tests. If you want more pillows for him or to elevate him, you'll have to call an orderly."

"Make sure they send those damn samples to the lab that is covered by my insurance," groaned Anand's father. Anand looked up at the ceiling, trying not to cry. It was just like his father to be concerned about things like this. He had no doubt that his father had spent more time on the phone fighting with his health insurance provider than researching his illness. Weak as he was, when Anand had come to the hospital several months ago, to see his father for the first time in a year, he had found his father shouting on a cell phone that the insurance company would be cursed. "I hope you have a miserable old age and may cancer eat you and your savings alive," his father bellowed to the employee who had the misfortune to direct Mr. Singh's call.

"Hello, Mr. Singh." A young, slender South Asian man in the white coat shook his patient's, then Anand's hand.

"I am his son," said Anand.

"I am the oncologist now assigned to Mr. Singh's case."

"Yes, they said you would be coming by today," said Mr. Singh, brightening for the first time, as if thrown a lifeline. Anand looked at this man, who seemed to embody the dream life his father had wanted his son to lead. Probably graduated Harvard Medical School, married a girl from a carefully arranged marriage from India.

But how could Anand have become a doctor? He had always hated hospitals, at least, ever since what the family had always called 'the accident' -- the car crash that had occurred when he was in his final year of college, barely twenty. He had been coming home from the gym after a fun game of football with his friends. Always athletic, a top college tennis player, he even entertained the idea of pursuing a professional career. But all of that had come to an end that day when he was crossing the street. A careening Ford pickup ran a red light and the next thing he knew he was hurling through the air. There was a sickening snap which took Anand a minute to realize was his own body against the pavement. He could hear the car as it heaved away. He wondered if they had even seen him, but then he heard the ugly words: "dot head" screamed from the window. A tin beer can clanked to the pavement beside him.

It always seemed to Anand that in those few seconds everything had gone wrong. So long as he had tennis and his physical health, his family had respected him. But after he lost tennis, he lost everything. The police found the men and Anand and his family won a small settlement from them that was enough to pay for the rest of his college, now that he no longer qualified for an athletic scholarship. But the money could not buy back his loss of confidence. He would walk with a slight limp for years afterwards.

Unlike the other, mostly white boys at the university, he lacked social ease. He could not relax talking to girls. The other jocks could get Bs without studying and laugh -- Anand would study, but would become so wound up with anxiety upon taking every test his hands would shake and his mouth would turn to cotton, so although he worked twice as hard, his grades were no better than his friends' averages. Eventually, he switched from pre-med to economics, much to the displeasure of his father. When he could play tennis at a competitive level, his parents allowed him a certain degree of liberty given that he excelled in something they knew they could not understand. When he stopped playing, the pressures to get a good job and to marry a nice Indian girl increased. It was like a double bondage. Why should he have to suffer for the careless actions of those men in the truck?

Worse, he could never move himself to either be wholly bad or wholly good -- he didn't have Western girlfriends in college like his friends, he felt too guilty, as if he was betraying his parents. But he couldn't obey his parents either. When his parents tried to pressure him to marry a young woman, the daughter of a family friend, he would not even meet her.

His mother died soon afterwards -- suddenly, a stroke. Her doctors had been lecturing her for years about the need to lose weight, to regulate her diabetes. But a woman whose main pride was her cooking would not listen. Yet Anand did not attribute her death to over-indulgence, rather he blamed himself for leaving his father a widower. He was sure his failure to marry had broken his mother's heart.

The body is cruel, thought Anand, looking at his father.

"I need to speak with you privately," said the doctor.

Unable to force himself to marry, and encumbered with only a mildly useless degree from a mediocre university, Anand drifted after graduation, unsettled. He had resolved that to make a great deal of money was the only way to prove his worth to his father. With money, he rationalized, it would not matter who he married, and money, unlike talent at athletics, was lasting and endured.

But Anand did not have the temperament to wait patiently and work himself up slowly from the bottom, nor did he have the naturally energetic and extroverted personality that makes a talented financial rainmaker. Long, dark years followed -- currency speculation, failed start-ups, unethical business partners, failed joint ventures and failed attempts to raise capital. However, Anand finally met with some success -- doing what he loved. He created a sports information website that became extremely successful. Then, shortly afterwards, his father became ill. It seemed like the supreme irony -- just when he felt that he had redeemed himself, and avenged his old injury, life took another sad turn.