In early 2024, my mother was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. By December 2024, dialysis had become part of our weekly vocabulary. In January 2026, she underwent a transplant.
When I compress it into three sentences like that, it sounds orderly. As if illness follows a neat progression. As if survival is a timeline you can track and complete.
It is not.
It is slower. Heavier. More consuming than language allows.
Chronic illness does not announce itself loudly. It seeps in. Hospital corridors become familiar. Lab reports begin to dictate the emotional temperature of your week. Words like creatinine, potassium, fluid restriction, immunosuppressants stop sounding technical and start sounding like instructions for living.
Dialysis is not just a procedure. It is a restructuring of time. Hours tethered to a machine because the body can no longer do what it once did quietly on its own. It is exhaustion that sleep does not solve. Nausea that lingers. Weakness that humbles. Dependency that rearranges pride.
My mother carried that in her body. I will never pretend our tiredness equalled hers.
But illness does not remain contained within the person diagnosed. It expands. It alters the emotional architecture of a home. The patient is not the only one who suffers. She is simply the only one whose suffering is medically documented.
There is, of course, the financial cost. Lakhs dissolve into consultations, tests, emergency admissions, dialysis sessions, surgery, lifelong post transplant medication. Survival in this country is not only a medical battle. It is an economic one.
Money, however overwhelming, can be calculated.
The other costs cannot.
No one prepares you for the constant low grade alertness. You begin living like an emergency responder. You listen differently. You notice swelling. You memorize lab ranges. You check reports before you check your own messages. You learn to read numbers the way others read horoscopes. Searching for reassurance. Bracing for impact.
You Google more than you sleep.
You become strong because there is no alternative.
And strength, sustained too long, becomes its own exhaustion.
When someone in the family falls ill, life does not pause. It splits into the life you are living and the life you were meant to be living.
I was meant to take a work from office job. I did not.
After her diagnosis, and even more once dialysis began, geography stopped being flexible. You cannot casually relocate when hospital schedules anchor your week. You cannot stay late when emergencies are unpredictable. You cannot afford to be unreachable.
So I stayed. I worked from home. I chose what was practical.
Practical decisions rarely look impressive on paper. They do not translate into promotions or bold announcements. From the outside, it may resemble stagnation. Inside, it is risk management for someone else’s survival.
In families like ours, spontaneity fades quietly. Every plan carries logistics beneath it. If we step out, who stays home. If there is a function, who remains the stable variable. Even small outings require contingency thinking. We rotate responsibility without formal discussion. We cancel without drama. We adapt without applause.
We are not less ambitious.
We are running parallel operations no one sees.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I decided to prepare for CAT. I assumed the syllabus would be the hardest part. Quant formulas. Data interpretation sets. Vocabulary lists. Mock tests.
It was not.
The material was manageable. What was not manageable was carving out uninterrupted mental space in a house where illness hums constantly in the background. It is difficult to calculate percentages while also calculating medication timings. It is hard to analyse reading passages after nights fractured by worry.
The challenge was never intelligence.
It was bandwidth.
Ambition requires quiet.
Chronic illness steals quiet first.
The most disorienting part is comparison. Watching peers move forward in clean upward lines. Promotions. Offer letters. Dream college conversions. Celebration posts that suggest momentum is linear.
And knowing that when I walk into an interview room or an exam hall, no one will account for context. No interviewer will say we understand you were caregiving. No employer will adjust expectations because your family was in survival mode. No exam lowers its cutoff because you were dividing your attention between mock tests and medical reports.
The world rewards outcomes.
It does not measure context.
There is also a peculiar guilt in being the healthy one. Guilt for feeling tired. Guilt for wanting more. Guilt for imagining a different version of your life. Caregivers are not given permission to collapse because there is always someone whose suffering is more visible.
So you swallow the fear. The anger. The resentment that is not directed at the person, but at the circumstance that shrank your world without asking.
When January 2026 arrived and the transplant finally happened, relief felt physical. As though we had been holding our breath for two years.
But relief is complicated.
A transplant is not an ending. It is another beginning. Precautions. Medications. Follow ups. The quiet fear of rejection. Gratitude and trauma coexist. You are thankful. You are also tired in ways sleep cannot repair.
Sometimes I imagine alternate timelines. If I had moved cities. If I had taken that job. If I had studied in a quieter house. If ambition had not needed to negotiate with hospital schedules.
But when I look at my mother, at what her body endured and the resilience it demanded, I know I would choose the same path again.
That is the complicated truth about love.
You do not regret the sacrifice.
You grieve the version of your life that unfolded more slowly and more privately than it might have.
Illness is often narrated as a singular battle. One patient. One body. One survivor.
In reality, survival is communal. It is financed collectively. Endured collectively. Rebuilt collectively. The patient carries the physical pain. The family carries the invisible weight. Postponed plans. Muted ambition. Hypervigilance. Quiet recalculations.
We are all altered.
The world may never cut us slack. No application form will include a column for caregiving during crisis. No interview will pause to ask what it cost you to show up.
But there is something profoundly human about showing up anyway.
Showing up tired.
Showing up distracted.
Showing up afraid.
Showing up determined.
The patient is not the only one in the story.
But neither are we victims of it.
We are witnesses to how fragile stability is.
And to how stubborn love can be.
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