Grandparents

Grandparents have been on my mind recently...I can wager a couple of guesses as to why.

I never got to spend much time with my own grandparents. All of them lived in India so my time was limited to summer vacations and crackly international phone calls. My dad's father passed away before he even got married and his mother died after an acute TIA when I was 12. I was closer to my mom's parents, mainly because I spent the first two and a half years of my life in their house. I have some hazy memories of my grandpa carting me around to the park on his shoulders and picking mangoes off of the tree in our backyard. He passed away suddenly also of a hemorrhagic stroke when I was 4 years old or so. At that time, I was still too young to realize what was going on. In fact I still remember genuinely thinking he was sleeping. After he passed away, my grandma was basically left alone in the house that my grandpa had built for them. She had a horrible case of osteoarthritis and was basically homebound but didn't let that stop her from being otherwise incredibly independent and stubborn. She refused to come to the U.S. to live with us and didn't want anyone to live with her because she didn't want to "be a burden" to anyone. I spent nearly every summer in elementary school with her. She was a brilliant, spunky lady and always entertained my wild imagination, complaints about my mother, and myriad of questions with a big grin on her face. The summer after the third grade, when my mom and I were in India, my grandma was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer. As gruesome as it sounds, the image of this ulcerating mass that bled through the white of her sari blouses is still imprinted in my head. I left at the end of that summer because I had to go back to school but my mom stayed back to take care of her. Things seemed to be looking up for awhile, but as is the case with most metastatic cancers, she passed away from an assortment of complications the following spring when I was 10 years old.

I refused to go back to India after that. At first I just wanted to desperately hang onto all the wonderful memories I had of the place and did not want to confront the very large, gaping hole that my grandma left behind. And as I got older, there was always just something that occupied my summers. I was taking SAT prep courses or beefing up my college apps with extracurriculars and volunteer work. In college, I was too busy studying for the MCATs or working at hospitals and clinics in order to get into medical school. Once I got to med school, the notion of a "summer break" was a fleeting memory. Then there were Boards to take and clinical rotations to complete. This September, it'll actually be 17 years since I've been to India. Crazy right? But for the very first time in a long time, I really don't have excuses. Application and interview season is coming up and that will hopefully keep me occupied, along with trying to find something to do until Intern year begins. But there's actually not a whole lot stopping me from taking a trip out once the Match is done next year. We'll see. The notion of having to sit on a plane that long (18-20 hours?) is mildly anxiety-inducing. Which one of my new Intern friends wants to write me a scrip for some Valium???

Kidding. Kind of anyway.

So I guess what spurred me to write this entry was that today (yesterday) I went to the hospital today with my mom to visit a family friend of ours. In my eyes, she has always been the quintessential, sweet, doting grandmother, and growing up, I was and still am so blessed to have her in my life as a second grandmother. It's hard to do her justice in trying to describe her but anyone who has been around her for even a little bit can see the strength of character and the resiliency she possesses. Seriously amazing. Thankfully, she appears to be doing relatively okay, or at least better than she previously was according to her. And in my completely amateur opinion, I think that with a few days good ol' IVFs and being able to control the causative factors, that she should be very much be on the road to recovery.

Anyway, what was the point of this entry? Grandparents are awesome and a treasure trove of advice, wisdom. They're also probably some of your biggest fans. If you're lucky enough to still have your grandparents around, call them up or go spend some time with them and tell them you love them. And if they're no longer with us, well talk to them anyway and tell them you love them. They'll appreciate the reminder.

Unrelated but somewhat related tangent: I have had no shortage of people in my life tell me I'm overly sentimental and/or sensitive, that I'm corny, that I care too much, give too much of myself in certain situations and that I wear my heart on my sleeve. But you know what? I don't care. I LIKE that part of myself. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's one of the parts of me that I would not change. You're not going to win any medals for going through life trying to keep everything bottled up and walking around with a poker face trying to be all unemotional and detached. Letting people into your life is one of the best things you can do for yourself. Yes, sometimes we undoubtedly get burned (been there, done that)- but when you think about all the amazing things that can come out of it, the risk is worth it. Emotions are messy but they were given to you for a reason. If the last few months have taught us anything, it is that life is too damn short to not let the people we care about know just how much they mean to us. JUST DO IT.