6 Years Without Hospitalisation

Health Is Number One Priority

What happens when you know your body requirements? You adopt healthy habits and stay disease-free. I am extra-conscious about my health right now on a personal level. But this kind of contingency plan comes in effect whenever I sense such threats.

Whenever I feel there is a change in my body behaviour, I become proactive with my activity in the initial days without seeing a doctor and health restores in a few days. The “initial days” is essential because the sooner we take conscious steps, the earlier we recover. This plan is working for the last six years, and I am happy to manage health on my own.

Maintaining Since A Long Time

The last time I got a severe health problem ( in 2013 ) was the first time I moved to Kota to prepare for engineering exams. All students from Kota (mainly who moved from other cities) know that water doesn’t suit some people in initial days or food also feels terrible for some time. I have seen some of my friends leave Kota permanently because of health issues.

But I had to stay. Damn it, and I wanted to stay. If I am staying away from home to focus on my career, then I have to make sure my family is living tension-free. I have to learn to handle issues on my own and take responsibility whenever something goes wrong, independent of what kind of problem it is: career, health or social.

Learned The Hard Way

For a dedicated student in Kota, the exam pressure has modified our brains in such a way that we compromised everything to get good rank in tests. Even compromising health to a minimal extent will work, but you can only make it so far without caring about it.

Since I am lactose intolerant and milk is the source of many nutrients, I didn’t have much knowledge to experiment with non-dairy healthy foods. Instead, I compensated with non-veg options. Now I am shifting to the vegan side, but at that time, I had no idea what “vegan” was, and on the other hand, I preferred easy access to non-veg food.

It surely was expensive, and I talked to my dad also regarding this. I was scared to death when explaining why I was spending so much on food. I tried to cover it up with lies like spending on books, class commute, uniforms, etc. It turns out I have only one colour. I can’t lie to my close people. It hurts me more than it convinces them. But his response was so cool, “Any resource spent on health and career is worth it. Even if its money, make sure you are using it for the right purpose. Never worry about the amount. Please focus on the quality it offers.”

He floored me. Since then, not only have I started spending frugally, I am also terrible at it. I have tried so much to refrain online shopping, but I had to learn it the hard way. When my bank balance once reached a single digit, then my ass exploded, and I analysed my past few months credit card activity to focus only on the necessary expense.

Since I started my first full-time job, I have done so much online shopping, so many EMIs, that it hurts till now. It is disturbing with my financial security too. But as time passes, this pressure is lifting, and when I am free from the mistake I did with non-stop online shopping, I will share that story too because it will be long and deserves a separate article as a lesson to my future self.

This blog belongs to a series of posts I am publishing in this 100-days streak. Navigate to the end of article 22 for the references from day 23 onwards. If you would like to read the ones before day 22, here is the first one that started it all.

~ Sanjeev