The Unconscious Brahman

You get older; stuff breaks.  I've got lots of stuff breaking lately.  As a consequence, I spend much time talking to doctors.  Most are pretty awful; few are good.  Occasionally, you run into a real one.

About a year ago, in preparation for another medical procedure, I had a consultation with a new anesthesiologist. The doctor was an elderly East Indian woman; she had a small pair of rooms off a corridor in the county pest house.  She was about seventy, I'd guess. In the Indian fashion of the aged, she wore no makeup or jewelry and kept her long, ice-blue hair in a braid.  She wore hospital greens with a colorful cloth belt tied at the waist and a lab coat over it all.  Her office had a Steel Case desk and two chairs and was unadorned, excepting for a small statuette of the elephant god on the credenza behind her desk.

The doctor smiled at me through a set of old-but-sturdy teeth. 

"Tell me all about yourself" she said--an odd request from a specialist at a county hospital, certainly.

So we spent about an hour discussing my education, her education, why Catholics drink more than Anglicans, eastern-versus-western faiths, illness-as-metaphor, the ways New York winters can shorten your life, why Osteopaths make better diagnosticians than MD's and how hospital food is invariably shit.

We finally arrived at the subject of my various illnesses.  The old woman read my chart to me.  In a brief year, I'd gone from a life of excellent health to renal disease, ulcerative colitis, asthma, uncontrollable hypertension and an enlarged heart.  Not only that, but I'd presented these symptoms of auto-immune disease a full decade later than most cases ever do.  "You are either a very backward young man or a very precocious old one..." she said.

"You're not in love, are you?" she asked.

"No."

"And you have no children?"

"None that I'm aware of."

"So..." she said, "What is your explanation for this seemingly spontaneous appearance of such life-threatening illness?"  Shit--she really expected me to answer her.

"Well, " I began, "I think it has to do with aging--or the fact that I don't seem to--on the outside at least.  I have few responsibilities, other than to myself...  If I had to, I suppose I'd say I was given this to humble me--as sort of a reminder of my own mortality".

The old lady nodded.  "You would make a good Hindu" she said quietly.

"Well," I said, "You'd know better than me that one cannot become a Hindu, one must be born to it."

"Ah yes," she sighed, "But a smart fellow like you would know that every Hindu hopes to become a Brahman...Yes?"  I agreed.

She continued:  "And you certainly don't have to be Hindu to become a Brahman, do you?  Who can tell?  Perhaps you're already a Brahman and don't know it..."

What could I say?

"Well," I replied, "Perhaps you're already a Brahman and do."

The old doctor laughed like a girl. "Oh--you are such a devil!" she smirked, "How you flatter an old woman!"

It was an enjoyable conversation.  In surgery the next day, the old Brahman doped the hell out of me.  It was great--I was never in my life so unconscious.  I'm still grateful.