Bold Concerns: A Story About Abha Dubeydi, By Anushka Dubeydi

I’m a teenager having hundreds of icons and inspiring figures in my life, but when it comes to one woman who inspires me the most would be my mother. A lady who suffered from Avascular Necrosis for seven years of her life without a single glitch and effortless grace, she is strangely firm yet poised.

Back in 2005, on one strange night, I heard my mother crying out of pain, telling me how much pain she was. For me, things seemed pretty perplexing at the age of four to see my comforting mother in distress. My father was out of the station, totally unaware of a huge complication that was haunting our family at that time. My brother was a mere little life on earth welcomed just a few months ago at that time. We got help from people the next morning, we took her to the hospital, and what the doctor said was something I couldn’t recapitulate now, it gives me cold shivers every time. The doctor implied how miserably unlucky she was. Her disease only came to one out of a million people, and this time it was my mother.

I remember how she used to ask my father for those brutal pain killer injections, so she could just walk up to the kitchen and cook something for her family. She knew this disease was going to ruin her and her household. She then decided to go against the odds and work for her family, doctors told her she was soon going to lose her ability to walk, and one day she won’t be able to stand on her feet. But she knew that my annual functions, sports days were essentials she couldn’t miss. Painful sleepless nights and days were spent working for her family, the excessive pain killers made her left leg numb, and it helped her to walk with just one leg, dragging the other one.

She accepted the reality, and what was in her fate, she learned how to live with her voids and incapable flaws. Over time as the years went by, many folks came by giving fake hopes and fancy settlements, but no one stayed with her exception of her husband. It was easy for my father to leave us anyway, but he never did. He stood by my mother till her lows. I remember sitting in front of the television for long hours for my parents to return from the hospital, standing next to my window counting till a hundred with my eyes closed so that they could pop out of nowhere and tell me that everything is fine now.

People use to call my mother “Apaahij,” meaning disabled, use to tell my family that she is bewitched by some black powers, and it was best for us to leave her behind. She never really entertained such comments and never let it come to her face, for not even once. She never let her family realize that there was a deadly disease holding her back. She did everything, let it be teaching me how to dance, or making yum dinner for father’s colleagues or making a tree costume for my brother’s stupid fancy dress competition, she did everything to fit in just like normal people. She did things that a perfectly fit person would dread to do. She decided to retake her studies and get a B.Ed, dragging one foot and running with the other in a year she completed her studies, managing her two kids along.

I knew she was suffering all along. There were days when she was not able to get up from the bed, there were days when she was not able to walk even two steps to open the door, there were days when she used to cry at night. It wasn’t easy for her, but the way she carried herself, people would never believe that such a young lady with immensely high spirits is living with an awful illness.

Things got out of hand in December of 2011 as her condition became worse. She wasn’t able to even stand up from the bed now. Her leg was starting to shrink, and operation was the only thing that was going to help her now. And somehow we came to know that now there are implants which can help her out. Her surgery took eight straight. Three days after her operation, she came out of the hospital on her both feet walking more like jumping with the happiest gleam on her face.

My mother has a metal ball and socket joint in her left leg attached with a four-inch screw in her leg, but you can never tell. It just took her a week to recover from her surgery. Since then she has been unstoppable, she went on a trip to Sikkim with a walking stick doing the most adventurous activities throughout, she started her career as a teacher, she started dancing. Well, she did everything she aspired to do. You can never really tell now that she is the one who suffered for seven years to walk correctly. One thing that I learned from my mother is your flaws and inabilities never define you, your brave heart and soul does. I have been living with her for the last eighteen years, and she inspires me every day with her persona.

She is neither an actress nor a politician, she is just a homemaker but with great powers.