At the moment, I’m hard pressed for time doing anything else other than writing my book, re-reading the previous books of the series, editing for the umpteenth time, and thinking about the final book, but I had to squeeze in this blog post, hoping it’ll reach people. The trigger for it is an eighteen year old girl who has her kidneys almost failed.
The kidneys that have been affected due to ignorance of her needs.
This young girl damaged a perfectly good physiological system deliberately by herself.
Most people, especially young adults, take their health and the body and the organs they’re blessed with for granted.
They use it to look into the screen of a smart phone all day.
They use it to store junk from fast food.
And in the case of this eighteen year old, they subject it to starvation to accomplish a material task.
Though I’ve stated this loads of times in previous blog posts already, I’m saying it again.
YOUR BODY AND THE ORGANS INSIDE IT ARE PRICELESS.
Priceless.
And yet, teens and young adults brutally ignore this fact.
This eighteen year old girl was so into studying for her year twelve board exams that she deliberately put off her meals to cram in an extra chapter into her mind. I laud the girl for her dedication to score high marks but it is overshadowed by how she pushed away the demands of her stomach. And when she couldn’t ignore the wails any longer, she obviously ate snacks or noodles, whatever was quick or ready to eat. Anytime she ingested a proper meal, it was untimed. For example, eating breakfast at noon and having dinner in lieu of lunch.
This couldn’t be the only time she did this.
Because a damage to your body doesn’t happen overnight.
Year twelve is full of demands and commitment to the text-books. The pressure happens either self-inflicted or by teachers and parents. The girl took on the former and coupled it with her fiery ambition, I suspect ever since the summer special classes started. The only thing I can be a little happy about is that she wrote all the exams before the problem to her kidneys took over.
Abandoning meals must have also included abandoning water too, leading to external as well as internal dehydration, one of the direct hits to the kidneys. She has no immunity to fight for herself – which proves she’d only eaten junk food and snacks to satiate her hunger – and now is in the condition where extra blood has to be transferred to her body, which also has to be accepted, since a large number of white blood cells are required to revive her. But damage to the kidneys is a permanent damage, as it is with any other organ. You can never get back the original function of an organ after it’s harmed, since it’s either helped with medication or has to replaced with an artificial replica of it.
No eighteen year old or young adult or any one for that matter should go through this. Your life changes horrifyingly and nothing is ever the same again.
God blessed us with this beautiful and amazing body for us. Why can’t we care for it and not work it like a mule, thinking it’ll withstand any kind of crap you subject it to?
It’s not just this eighteen year old. Countless other teenagers and young adults ignore the worth of health and prefer to gamble it away, ending up in similar conditions. Most of them are revived but what next? They have a long journey waiting for them yet. Life is just starting. Family, career, desires, all of these are a part of it and with their body having undergone physiological problems due to stupid reasons like an ignorant poor diet, how in the world are they going to take care of their future and family?
Bear babies?
Give birth?
Raise them?
And will those children grow up healthy?
Not likely, by the looks of almost everyone’s lethargic attitude.
Thinking about this makes me shudder.
And angry.
It’s true the world is filled with means to ruin people’s lives and health but there are so many ways to take proper care of yourself as well. Eating properly and at right times alone will solve so many problems. How long is that really going to take, huh?
Young adults find it a hobby and trend to eat out with friends, avoiding home cooked meals most of the time. What they like eating is filled with arrows to either poison or weaken their body systems. I’ve seen so much of this live back in my college. It’s an all women’s college and we have two batches, regular courses from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and the self finance courses from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. I was part of the morning batch, where we have a break from 10 a.m. to 10:20 a.m. and that’s usually when so many girls have their breakfast. You can’t blame them, since some of them come from long distances and don’t have time to eat in the morning, but yet, they don’t bring home made meals. They like eating fried snacks or those parottas the canteen stocks on a humungous level. Had the canteen stocked up on fruits and vegetable rice instead, I think the damage would have been lessened. But no. Anyway, no use in blaming the canteen, the girls should have thought for themselves. It’s not like the noxious trait of fried foods and parottas are a secret.
But in this aspect, I think the girls are not solely to blame. Some mothers at home don’t spare the time to prepare food that early in the morning. It’s predictable they would have gone, ‘Eat in the canteen.’ Their laziness has a hard impact too. How long would it take or cost for them to mix the simple milk rice that is a soothing balm? It’s enriched with calcium and gives adequate energy for the rest of the time in college.
On the other hand – this infuriates me – girls find it embarrassing to bring packed lunches. They like shouldering that handbag or backpack that contains their possessions, having no room for a lunch box, and including a lunch bag apparently taints their pride. We sometimes have extra classes or other work in the afternoon, requiring us to bring lunch, and I was the only girl to carry a lunch bag in the class (I carry it on normal days too, for the food or fruits I take for break as well as my water bottle). The rest of them either ate in the canteen or stuffed a small box of food to fit into their bags. The small box of food that doesn’t fill even half their stomachs.
Another way girls gamble their health away is by eating less so they can be slim. Just two spoons of rice, or just one or two dosas or idlis or chappathis. They don’t have the rational mind of eating a healthy amount and working out to lose extra calories. Everything should happen so easily.
And in the end, what happens?
Immunity is reduced, as well as destroyed, leaving them vulnerable to terrible circumstances like the one of this eighteen year old.
We have a future.
We have to take care of a family.
We have to raise children.
Remember that.
~~~~~
Discover Deepika 
This made me realize that I have been using too much of my phone and I think it has started to affect my eyes. I agree the organs are priceless , I think I won’t be using the phone all the time now.
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Glad to see the post resonated with you, Ananya 🙂 It’s crucial to realise how much time we spend with the modern devices and take good care of ourselves so that we can use them in the long run 🙂
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