Holi in the year 2004 was a highlight of the year, as usual. In many places of India Holi is only celebrated on one day but in Vrindavan it is always one week long. As we had grown up in Vrindavan, Holi meant a week of fun for my brothers and me. As always, we went to the town where the festival starts earliest, Barsana. First we celebrated there and in the following days in Vrindavan. It was lots and lots of colourful fun!
Some days after the celebrations, on a very normal day, I was about to go into my cave. I don’t know what happened, where exactly I set my feet but I fell. I did not only fall to the floor, no, I fell down the stairs. It is remarkable how the human’s reflex system works to protect the body and its most endangered part – the head. First your brain tries to place your feet somewhere where they can take your weight and balance your body again. If this does not work, your arms and hands are next to do the same thing, at the same time protecting the head from colliding with walls or floor. Once I arrived on the floor, I immediately felt a sharp pain starting in my left knee, circulating up and down my leg. Somewhere on the way down, in the struggle to place my feet, my leg had made a terribly wrong twist.
I was in horrible pain. I knew however that I had to get up and get up those stairs again. My family knew that when I was in the cave, I usually did not want to be disturbed because I was meditating. So they would not come and look for me. I had to get out. With my very bad pain I somehow made it up the stairs and out of the door.
My brothers were shocked to see me like this and pretty much carried me straight to the car to go to the closest doctor. I told that I had fallen down the stairs and that my leg was hurting. Without any further ado the doctor declared my leg broken and ordered the nurses to put my leg in plaster. They did and released me with a stripe of painkillers in the hand and the whole leg, from upper thigh to toe in plaster.
I think I don’t have to tell you that my situation was more than terrible. I could not walk a step without help – due to the plaster I could not bend my knee and I anyway could not put weight on my leg because it kept on hurting like crazy, even after the painkillers. Needless to say that my brothers had to help me with everything.
When this did not get better at all after two days, we decided to show my leg to another doctor. Back into the car – also a challenge with your leg fully straight – and off to Mathura to another doctor. When I told him about my fall, he straight away had me lie down for an X-ray, with the plaster on the stretcher made for this. When he saw the report a short time later he showed it to me. There were my bones, all straight lines, no damage, no broken pieces, no splintering and no breaks. ‘I think we can take this plaster off, your bones are not broken!’ I was happy to get this hot and big thing off my leg!
The doctor assured me I would be fine. I should just lay down and rest a lot, let my leg recover from the fall and don’t exercise. Obviously I should not do any of the yoga that I had been doing regularly but instead just relax. Then it should be painless within some days again.
I was very relieved. So everything would be fine on its own! Imagine I had walked around with my leg in plaster for several weeks with no bone broken! I thanked God that we had gone to this doctor who had made a proper examination and found that I was fully fine!
But this doctor, too, should be mistaken.
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