I got used to medication. I am somehow oscillating between commitment and uncommitment towards a kidney disease group. I would like to participate, but hey, I am not sick enough yet to be part of the club. Anyway, instead of boring everyone with repetitive tales of which symptoms I am showing I will let you into the wicked circus of my life.

I was born in a disease stricken, damp, hot and stinky Calcutta in the year 1974 during monsoon rains. I was born in a private hospital with rusty cots and a pre-historic respirator as recalled by my mother. My mother, who had studied law and then married my dad, a Chemistry and Plastics engineer and moved to Switzerland. My mothers family had always had money. My great grandpa is said to have had a golden Rolls Royce and I can confirm that my grandparents had a staff of seven people including a cook, maids and other "people", as they were simply referred to. My grandmother was cat crazy and ran a "cat shelter" of fourty cats. While refugees from Bangladesh were dying outside and Mother Teresa's halls were full of lepers and the dying, we would tend to the fight wounds of tomcats, neuter them and raise kittens by the bottle. Still sometimes a party of three, my grandmother, my aunt and my mother would go to Mother Teresa to donate items, money or medicine. I was never allowed to go along.

My mother grew up in quite luxury, with the best of education and more freedoms than most of her country kinswomen. All that changed when her beautiful, charming and talented sister declined to marry a prince and eloped with my mothers guitar teacher instead. That happened a few years before my birth and by the time I was born, she and her mother were on talking terms again, but the relationship between my grandmother and my aunts husband always was a little awkward.

When I was in Kolkata once, as a child, I remember seeing a dead beggar lying on a garbage pile being eaten by stray dogs. I pointed it out to my mother and threw up in the taxi in which we were driving, but my mother pretended that I must have been mistaken. That image still haunts me today. I wonder who had disposed of the dead body on a garbage pile and how hungry the dogs must have been to eat a human being.

Lyrics to Mad World (by Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears)

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
And their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
'Cos I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very, very
Mad World
Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me

Back on Track!

So what. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease which causes my kidneys to turn into Swiss cheese. During the last checkup at the city hospital I was informed that things look sort of bad and that I need to increase the medication that was prescribed to me. A medication that turns me into a brain craving Zombie or at least into a meat craving Zombie, complete with the intellect of an amoeba.

Half an hour after taking my pills I get tired, my brainwaves get slower and I feel warm and cozy in a sad and confusing cottonball world. I somehow enjoy the free trips to fantasyland, but so far I had my easter vacations and from tomorrow on I will be back in the office, pretending to not have vertigo when I wear heels and not to be any different than usual.

Thankfully I have quite some experience with the types of drugs that grow organically, so that I am used to function well while being under (much of my highschool time was either on booze or weed) and my grades still did not suck. So let's see if I can trick everyone to believe that I am perfectly alright and that the business decisions that I take are sound.

This blog is also a trip through my medication experience. Stay tuned to find out if I get fired or if I get promoted as a zombie. Considering the usual career paths I am now CEO material!