The Man Who Came for the Bag, Not for His Body
The evening sky over Rourkela was painted with the golden dust of immersion processions. Drums beat for Goddess Laxmi’s farewell, and the air shimmered with smoke and sound. Amid that chaos, Dr. Biswajit hurried through traffic, heart pulled not by devotion, but by duty.
He was thirty minutes behind his usual 6 p.m. counselling hour at No Prescription Point. Two surgeries, a ward round, and a farewell for his DNB students had already consumed his day. Yet in his heart, a quiet anticipation lived: a cancer patient was coming, not for medicine, but to learn about his body, about healing, about himself. That thought always gave him hope.
The appointment had been fixed by one of his close relatives, a man deeply connected to the patient and himself a beneficiary of the CelluReva program. Having once experienced healing through awareness, lifestyle change, and self-understanding, the relative had developed a compassionate concern for his friend, who was now battling cancer.
It was his heartfelt belief that if anyone could help his friend rediscover the forgotten dialogue between body and mind, it would be through the Art of Self-Healthcare at No Prescription Point. And so, moved by empathy, he brought the ailing man to meet Dr. Biswajit, not just for consultation, but in the hope of transformation.
When he finally entered the softly lit chamber of NPP, he saw them: a frail man in his sixties with paper-thin skin, and beside him a young, well-dressed man, perhaps his son, eyes fixed on his phone.
The elder spoke first, voice trembling. “Sir, I’m an RCC patient… kidney cancer. I’ve had five immunotherapy doses already. Spent thirty lakhs. Nothing’s working.”
Then, without warning, he lifted his shirt. A transparent colostomy bag hung from his abdomen, half-filled.
Dr. Biswajit froze for a moment.
Colostomy? For renal cell carcinoma? It made no clinical sense. He asked for papers, reports, discharge summaries, anything that could connect the dots. The son opened his briefcase. It was empty except for one sheet listing drug names. Then, almost casually, the son mentioned that the colostomy had been done at one of the premier institutes of India, in an emergency condition.
Perplexed, Dr. Biswajit asked if there had been any history of intestinal obstruction. The patient replied that he had been passing stool and flatus till that very day. “And now?” the doctor asked gently. The old man hesitated, then said, “I still pass stool through the normal passage, sir.” For a moment, Dr. Biswajit just stared—speechless.
A colostomy was done without obstruction, yet the main operation was still not planned, and the patient was still defecating normally. No communication from doctor to patient, and none from patient to doctor. Only confusion, fear, and blind faith.
He felt a deep ache—not just for the wound on the man’s abdomen, but for the deeper wound of a system where the right hand no longer knows what the body feels.
The surgeon-educator within him sighed. The doctor in him wanted to shout.
“Then tell me, what do you want from me today?” he asked gently.
The boy answered, “Sir… the bag is leaking. We wanted to know if you can fix it.”
That was all. Not curiosity about the body. Not the cause. Not the life within still pleading to be understood.
For a moment, the air grew heavy. The Goddess outside was being immersed, and here stood a man already half-immersed in ignorance—mind still chasing fixes, never understanding the flow of cause.
Dr. Biswajit spent nearly an hour trying to explain, speaking not as a doctor, but as a fellow human who had seen what ignorance can cost. Yet there were no papers, no curiosity, no effort to understand the body or the science of how cancer could be slowed, even reversed.
Their faces showed no hunger for knowledge, only the impatience of people seeking one more free opinion. The doctor could see it clearly: the body was crying for awareness, but the mind had already shut its doors. And he wondered, where is this mindset taking our society—when even in the face of death, we refuse to learn about life?
As they left, he reminded them, “Come tomorrow morning. Let me evaluate properly. We’ll start from the beginning.” They promised.
Next day, silence. No call. No visit. Only a WhatsApp message from his relative: They’ve decided not to come.
He stared at the screen for a long time. Not in anger, but in sadness. Not for the wasted hour, but for the wasted possibility.
He thought, A man can spend thirty lakhs on drugs, but not thirty minutes to learn about himself.
That night, he wrote in his journal:
“We have become a civilization that trusts machines more than meaning. We worship scans, not silence. We seek cure, not consciousness. And so we keep dying—educated, insured, and utterly ignorant.”
Outside, the chants of immersion had ended. The night was still. He looked up at the moon, remembering the frail man’s hollow eyes.
If only he knew, thought the doctor, that the same cells that built his disease could rebuild his life, if only he gave them knowledge, rest, rhythm, and reverence.
That night, he prayed, not for the man’s recovery, but for the world’s awakening.
Because healing, he knew, would never come from another injection. It would come when people finally learned the forgotten art of self-healthcare, When they would meet their own biology with awareness, not fear. When they would choose CelluReva: the revival of life at the cellular level, not by shortcuts, but by understanding.
And in that quiet realization, amidst exhaustion and hope, he whispered to himself:
“Ignorance is the real cancer. And awareness… the only cure.”
