HOW I BRAVED MY ADDICTION!
Starting with what addiction is, it’s been defined as a disorder for the matter. A disorder, where a person has a compulsive need to take in substance, knowing that it would have serious repercussions.
Most people get this disorder towards drugs or alcohol or similar harmful substances. Nowadays, the term ‘addiction’ in common practice has been casually used for several activities or things. People say they are addicted to music on their online profiles; some are addicted to video games while others say they are addicted to social media. When they realize that it’s gotten out of hand, some people succumb to it and some try to get out of it by a certain ‘detox’ routine. Now I’m not a professional to write about a working protocol for detox. This article is about how I had an addiction, which is very peculiar and how I’ve come far away from it.
Several years ago, while I was at home preparing for class 11 exams, I was bored with studying so I went to the kitchen to chat with my mom. She was preparing idly batter. While talking, she scooped a little bit of soaked rice and gave it to me. I chewed on it and kept talking to my mom. Then she gave me coffee and I resumed studying. This was the routine; during exam times I was mostly at home and the littlest of activities that didn’t involve my textbooks excited me a lot. The next time I knew my mom was making idly batter I went into the kitchen again to make little talk. Like the time before, she offered me a little of the soaked rice again. If you had tasted soaked uncooked rice ever, you would know how heavenly it tastes. It isn’t sweet or spicy but has just the taste and texture to bring euphoria in a mouth that had lacked the taste of junk food because it was exam time and anything and everything that looked beautiful or tasted rebellious were banned in my home.
Soaked rice became my thing in the days to come. Whenever my mom made idly batter, I used to scoop spoonsful of rice and put in a tiny bowl and have it as a snack. Days went by and I even stopped asking my mother for it, I helped myself! This habit of mine went out of hand when I started craving for rice and on the days when my mother hadn’t soaked it, I wouldn’t have the patience to soak it so I would simply eat the raw rice. Only during those times, I came to know the common rice and idly rice are different; idly rice is easy to chew while eating the common variety is a curse on the mandible. Days went by and at this point, my parents didn’t have the faintest idea that I was sneaking in the kitchen and going back to my room with my fist full of rice.
To pursue under-graduation I left home and moved to a new place. Very soon my friends came to know about this peculiar liking of mine for rice. At first, they thought I was just being casual. Whenever we went out for grocery shopping, I used to just stuff my mouth with the rice that I scoop from the huge metallic containers that they keep in the grains aisle. Sometimes I would ask my friends to man the area so that nobody would catch me stealing handsful of rice and shoving it in my mouth. My friends were embarrassed at first but were more concerned about me getting caught for petty theft. Days later whenever we went shopping there was always a hush-hush drama going on because I would ask my friend if I could take some rice and she would strongly deny that and hold my hands so that I wouldn’t be tempted to take it. Shopping activities started bumming me out from then on. For a few weeks, I managed without eating raw rice because I stopped thinking about it. The thing about withdrawal symptoms is that the craving will ambush you. You wouldn’t know why or from where these sudden thoughts have come to haunt you. It happened to me as well and I took this drastic step of going to the store and purchasing half a kilo of rice and bringing it back to my room. Now my friends got worried about how stubborn I was and how all of this was going to affect my health. Some people who were new to me colluded with me to pick rice from the stores. Those were adrenaline moments, at least for me. This went on for the whole of four years that I spent away from home.
I went back home and stayed there until I got admission into another college for post-graduation. This time my mother came to know that I still haven’t gotten rid of my rice eating habit. One day she screamed at me and said that this will only cause anaemia and I will have to suffer so much. I never gave in to all the emotional drama that she did. Only within a couple of days, she caught me red-handed. I stuffed the rice into the insides of my cheek and answered her saying that I was not eating rice. She got infuriated and forced me to spit it all out into the dustbin and did the one thing all mothers do, made me promise on her that I would never eat raw rice again in my life.
For the second time, I moved out of my house to a new place for studies. This time instead of stealing rice, abiding by rules I started purchasing rice and stocking it up in my room. I maintained a low profile about my odd habit and I think none of my new friends knew about it.
Regarding my health condition, yes it deteriorated with time. Even if I had eaten full lunch, I would be unable to stand during lab hours. Several times I have blacked out and caused trouble for my teammates. None of them had suspected that my health was going downhill because of my toxic habit. Meanwhile, during my post-graduation time, when I had completed one year, I saw it coming. Health-wise, I was doing worse. Every alternating month I had food poisoning. My GI tract was susceptible to infection and anything I ate out of routine, gave me a tough time. One particular June I fell seriously ill and the fever never left. They had me tested for typhoid and I didn’t have it. Day by day I got weaker and one particular day my fever got very intense, I had my parents come and pick me. They took me directly to the hospital and the doctor advised me to get admitted so that they could administer saline trips. In my entire life, that was the first time I ever got admitted to a hospital. I remember, they had me pushed on a wheelchair from building to building for various investigations, my mother running behind me. I immediately regretted enjoying being pushed around instead of walking when people started giving me the glares.
For four full days, I was in the hospital. I had the common fever but also got diagnosed for Hypochromic Microcytic anaemia. My Hb was only six-point something just like my CGPA. [ Really!]. They had to administer iron supplements but my mom [who is a doctor] knows that my body can’t take iron so she recommended for RBC transfusion. So the first day apart from saline trips I had a unit of RBC transfused. I had a difficult time having the need to go to the loo every hour, having to stop the trips every single time. One particular staff nurse had poked the IV needle and prodded it inside my hand and when I gritted my teeth in pain, made insensitive comments about how adults should know no pain.
The antibiotics, the needles, the inability to move around, being tethered to the trips stand, all in one gave me so much frustration. I cried every single time they injected antibiotics in my hand. The only good thing that happened to me was, I got to spend four whole days with my mother beside me. She’d been busy her whole life and we had very few quality times together until then. She didn’t leave my side. She took care of the whole trips-needles situation because I was whining like a baby. She fed me food and made me tell her all the stories from my college. I spoke to her non-stop about all the people I loathed and she held my hand until I dozed off. We used to sit in the main lobby and watch the fish tank in the evenings. By the third day, I got restless and wanted to get out of there. I convinced my mom and the doctor that I am okay and need to go home. After the fourth day, I left for home. After a week I had gone for a review and still, my Hb was too low so they wanted to administer iron drugs through IV. My sister was with me when this happened. For the first two minutes, everything was normal and then my skin started to develop red spots. I told my sister that it is nothing but the other allergy that I have. But soon the spots became redder and started to swell. She ran out to call my mother. The duty doctor was an intern and she didn’t do much. My mother then administered anti-allergen drugs. In the meantime, my whole body was swollen and burnt like hell and I started screaming, unable to bear it. It took a while for my body to retract to normal and forever for me to recover from the trauma.
It’s been years now since the whole hospital episode happened. Finally, I’ve overcome the toxic habit. Not because I’m a better person now, the trauma related to it still hasn’t left my mind. By now I would’ve eaten like a hundred boxes of dates to boost my haemoglobin. I’m always low on energy and get fatigued more often. Rarely do I get nightmares about eating rice. Nowadays I help my mom around in the kitchen. I help her in making the idly rice batter. I have an odd satisfaction, watching the rice being ground into fluffy flour. Not once I’ve felt like scooping some and putting it in my mouth again. I’ve stopped eating raw rice now!
