Life of Doctors – Patients, Medicine and Beyond…

Dr Suresh Venkita, our Group Medical Director, a senior cardiologist and an avid writer, has yet again shared this lovely story from his desk.

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K2

Men do not readily admit this. But I find it liberating.

I didn’t think I would ever fall in love again. I know that everyone says that after a heartbreak, but the difference is that I’m not heartbroken. I’m not cynical, or pessimistic, or sad. I’m just someone who once felt something bigger than anything else I’d ever felt and when I lost it, I honestly believed I would never have that again. But… I was 22 then and life is long. And I’m feeling things right now that I haven’t in a long, long time.

It was the summer of 2008. July was a warm and bright month. The terrible heat of April-May-June was at last over and my spirit had begun to lift, somewhat relieved from the oppressive heat of Chennai. My heart and mind longed for a delightfully cool breeze to blow into my life and that was when I thought of mountains.

But I was no mountaineer, nor was a physical fitness enthusiast. In fact, I was afraid of heights and learnt my fear has a name- Acrophobia. Being a writer I looked up the Oxford English Dictionary which defined acrophobia as an extreme or irrational fear of heights. I also learnt that, dating back to the late 19th century, doctors merged the Greek for summit and fear to create the term.

That was when I bit the bullet and decided to work hard towards reaching a summit and get over that paralysing fear.

When you think of summits, Everest always comes to the mind, being the highest. But, for some inexplicable reason K2 popped into to my brain. Perhaps it was because Mathematics was my hobby and a number embellishing a letter naturally appealed to me.

K 2 is the second highest after Everest. It stands over 3,000 metres (9,840 ft.) tall, a steep pyramid, dropping quickly in almost all directions. It is at the highest point of the Karakoram range straddling both Pakistan and Xinjiang, China. It is known as the Savage Mountain due to the extreme difficulty of ascent.

For a novice like me, attempting to climb it was a scary thought. I had resolved to be content with making it alive to the basecamp. It has the second-highest fatality rate (Annapurna has the highest fatality-to-summit rate). With around 300 successful summits and 77 fatalities, about one person dies on the mountain for every four who summit.

The Italian climber Foskor Maraini had graphically described the dark legend around K2. He concluded that it was ‘’just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars. It has the nakedness of the world before the first man – or of the cindered planet after the last’’.

Little did I suspect that I would find love so early in my life at that rarefied height, in the company of rock, ice and storm, amidst atoms and stars, and also later lose my love in the abyss.

At 22, I did not quite know what love was. I certainly had given no thought to it. I barely knew women, coming from a family teeming with boys. I was south Indian, from a vegetarian Tamil Brahmin home, and weaned on rice, yoghurt and pickle. I was studious, shy and stuttered when was nervous which I invariably was during my occasional encounter with girls.

I had prepared hard for the orientation session that briefs novices and others on the protocols of a hazardous mountain climb. I had worked out at the gym for 6 months, lifted weights, did chin, push and sit ups and squats, swam lengths and ran half-marathons. I had fortified my carbohydrate diet with eggs. I was in fairly good physical shape when I reported but I knew that mental resolve and resilience were even more crucial. But I did not expect that my heart would soon go into a spin and flip into a spiral dive like a biplane in an aerobatics show!

I saw her as soon as I entered the briefing room. She was on the dais, twirling the remote control on her hand and all set to launch her power point presentation. The sight of her, and the energy and enthusiasm that emanated from her, hit me like a thunderbolt.

She was confidence and composure personified. She was professional and precise. A slender but very fit 5 ‘8’’, brown, bright and flashing eyes, pearly white and perfect teeth, with an engaging smile that occasionally broke in to a sparkling laughter when she tried to lighten the tense and taut mood of the audience. She was endowed with waves of luxurious black hair, stylishly coiffured, that danced in sync with the movements of her head. She was clearly a year or two older than me, and evidently more mature and accomplished.

This was an Indian girl holding the centre stage, speaking in Pakistan, to an audience which perhaps had no other Indians except me. I was immensely proud of her.

Perhaps that admiration showed. I did not stand out of the crowd in any way, there was nothing distinguishing about me, I could as well have been invisible but she paused, turned and looked directly at me and our eyes locked. From that distance I looked into her eyes. I was mesmerised; I felt a transcendent exhilaration and exuberance. I felt instantly that I cannot live the rest of my life without basking constantly in that effervescent energy and enthusiasm, with an incredible zest for life. I was certain that she would make me feel grateful to be alive and cherish every moment of it.

If that wasn’t love, I was sure I will never recognize any other feeling as such.

That was the most sublime moment in my short life of 22 years. Those two weeks we were together on the mountain were the happiest in my life; it was a mid-summer night’s dream come true.

She accepted me as her trainee and hand held me through the process of familiarization and acclimatization. I learned the ropes of mountain climbing under her expert tutoring, swiftly acquiring confidence and competence. Though engrossed in the related technicalities, sweating even in that frigid air from the exertion, and breathless from the excitement, I was light-headed and insanely inebriated from inhaling, from such close proximity, the delicate fragrance of the perfume that came wafting from her.

All I wanted was to keep looking at her, without making her conscious of my devotion. Her words were music to my ears. Her proximity was intensely invigorating. Our hands rarely touched and when they did briefly during training sessions, I instantly felt the warmth even through the thickly gloved hands and I melted even with that mellow transmission of life’s energy. I was sure her hands, if I ever get fortunate enough to hold, would never be cold. If I ever get to hug her, I was certain I would instantly evaporate with the heat of the energy released by fusion of every atom in my body from sublime happiness.

Drenched from this total immersion in happiness it never struck me to wonder whether she reciprocated my intense feeling towards her. I was so completely satisfied with my experience of love that the object of my love became a deity to me and I assumed that, like all benevolent deities, she understood and accepted my love unconditionally.

Deities never tell you that. But I was fortunate and unfortunate at the same time. I received that reciprocation a week later but that moment also shattered my life into trillion pieces which lay in the bottom of the abyss.

That defining point came on the Abruzzi Spur.

I had learnt that the standard route of ascent, used by 75% of all climbers, was the Abruzzi Spur, the southeast ridge of the peak. The spur began at an altitude of 5,400 metres (17,700 ft.), where Advanced Base Camp was located.

From there the route would encounter some very challenging climbing on two infamous features, “House’s Chimney” and the “Black Pyramid”.

The last major obstacle on the final path to the summit was a steep, narrow gully on the mountainside known as the “Bottleneck”, which placed climbers dangerously close to an ice cliff to the east of the summit. Avalanches happened often on that cliff, instantly burying climbers.

Thanks to superb training and mentoring by her who was my load star, inspiration and ideal, and my secret love, my fellow-trainee and I made it along with her to the advanced base camp, much to our surprise, pride and delight.

That evening, sipping tea and relishing the last few moments of twilight before darkness set in, she quietly asked “Like to give me company up to the Chimney or even till the Pyramid?’’

We did not hesitate. In unison we said ‘’Yes!”.

01 August 2008 dawned dark and cold, but dry and windless. Noon was a safe time to climb the steep rock face. She led the climb, heavily laden with stuff in her backpack as the summit was her destination. We packed light as our intention was to return to base camp. We were tethered to each other with ropes.

With enormous effort, we made it past the Chimney. She paused, looked up at the Black Pyramid, turned to look at us, put her thumbs up, turned and climbed. That was our signal to turn back.

Then, in a heart-stopping moment, she slipped and fell.

She passed my colleague who clung to the rock face stunned, and as she flashed past me, I, who was perched on a ridge, grabbed her hand.

She hung on my right hand and dangled.

Her eyes were very close to me, I looked deep into them, they were brown, bottomless and beautiful. For a moment I saw infinity and eternity there.

I saw no fear, and I finally saw love, great and deep love, and concern for me.

I realized instantly that she knew that I will not be able to hold her, burdened by her heavy backpack, for more than a few seconds and that I and my fellow-trainee above me would lose our hold on the rock face in the very next second.

In the flash of a second she pulled her knife out with the free hand, slashed the rope and looked at me. I saw deep in the recesses of her eyes my north star melting into liquid gold in that fraction of a second. The rope broke; that flame of love instantly extinguished as she left my hand, descended into the abyss and was lost to me for ever.

The pain was deeply personal, profound and paralysing.

I knew that she had wanted to be the first Indian, the first Indian woman, to summit on K2.

The first woman to summit K2 was Pole Wanda Rutkiewicz on 23 June 1986. Liliane and Maurice Barrard who had summited later that day, fell and died during the descent.

Julie Tullis and Alison Hargreaves, two British women who summited K2 in later years, had also lost their lives on descent On that fateful day, 01 August 2008, 11 climbers from several expeditions died during a series of accidents at the level of the Bottleneck.

That dark, sad, day came to be known as K2 Disaster of 2008.

The darkness that descended at noon that day hovered silently and suffocatingly over my life over the years that followed.

I could not bear the thought that its tenth anniversary would soon be upon me as 2018 dawned. So, on the 27th of August 2017, which would have been her birthday I decided to be back on the mountain to make peace with my past.

Absentmindedly, and like a zombie, I drifted into the briefing room and stood transfixed as an acute sense of ‘‘déjà vu’’ struck me. Everything seemed to have got stuck in a time warp, the scene looked exactly, and uncannily like what it looked like way back in the summer of 2008. There was an Indian girl giving the briefing. There was one striking difference though, she wasn’t even remotely similar to her, my lode star.

But she too, turned and looked straight at me and looked into me, and I felt as though her gaze, transmitted through tinted spectacles, travelled right through me, to the core of my heart and planted something there, like a flag you hoist at the summit.

I had changed, since the I last looked up at the summit. I had also looked into the abyss that day and that receding pair of bright, brown eyes had kept me sleepless for all these years. I had become older, more mature, academically more accomplished, physically stronger but still emotionally wounded and possibly scarred. I still carried in my mind the memory of the glow and glare of my lode star but the luminance had inexorably dimmed with time.

Yes, she was different, in height, colour, demeanour, accent and attitude. I looked, and looked, for something in common with the lode star I carried in my mind. Occasionally I caught a whiff, or a fleeting glimpse of something but I could not quite put a finger on that.

She was taller and fairer. She was soft spoken, with an accent that carried the imprint of foreign climes. She invariably sported dark glasses while on the ground.

She also had an infectious laughter. It was impossible to be gloomy in her presence. She, with quiet determination, dragged you out of your introspection.

Dragging me out of the abyss I had been to could not have been easy for her but she had a quiet determination to have things her way.

Over the next two weeks, she gradually made me surface from the dark and cold depths to which I had sunk to. I learned to laugh again, to listen and respond and to feel and reciprocate.

I was feeling things that I had not in a long, long time. I was learning to love this warm-hearted, spontaneous and intuitive young lady.

But I was also getting afraid what the mountain will have to say about us.

I decided to find out. Much lighter that what we would be ordinarily be carrying on our back we set forth on our rendezvous with the Black Diamond and what lay beyond.

As we began the climb up the Abruzzi Spur I looked up at the summit and down into the abyss, my ears sharp to receive a message, my eyes sharply looking for a sign.

But the cold mountain, inscrutable as ever, stood silent.

As we passed the Chimney, I moved ahead, to lead on our climb to the Black Diamond.

An alternating series of rock ribs, snow/ice fields lay ahead of me which had slopes that looked dangerously exposed and difficult to navigate.

On the slope, I took my next step onto what I thought was snow, but it was ice, smooth and seamless. I slipped, fell and began to slide at swiftly accelerating speed down the steep slope, swishing past the climber in the middle with a ‘swoosh’.

I instantly knew I was heading towards the abyss, past her.

She reached out and held my hand, so firmly and with such a will and determination that it arrested my slide.

I looked up from the floor, straight into her eyes.

I looked deep into them; they were brown, bottomless and beautiful. I saw no fear, I saw only love, great and deep love, and concern for me.

Those were the very eyes that once looked up one last time from the abyss, and then receded for ever from me. The eyes in which I once saw infinity and eternity.

‘’ I am her sister’’ She said softly ‘‘I came looking for you’’