She Tolerated The Polio... But When I Got Cancer, My Wife Abandoned Me!

My name is Sabavat Ramesh. I was only a year old when polio took away almost all use of my left leg, forcing me to grow up different in a world that never let me forget it. I learnt to balance on a bamboo stick, learned to work with pain as a companion, learned to smile even when the world pointed and whispered. Now, at thirty-six, I live in a cramped home with my sixty-year-old mother and my three children. My body has survived so much, yet it is cancer, this invisible thing growing inside me, that now threatens everything I love.

My wife was a few years younger than me, and for a long time, we made things work as a family. Even when money was tight and my body refused to cooperate, I did what I could to provide. Then, last year, when the blood started coming up from my throat, everything changed. The hospital visits, the medicine, the pain… she could not take it. She started coming home later and later, her excuses growing thinner, her eyes dull with resentment. One morning, about thirteen months ago, she was simply gone. No warning, no farewell. My children cried for their mother. I called my mother-in-law, desperate to bring her home, only to hear that my wife had run away with another man. That news was a wound deeper than any I had known.

I was mocked as a child for my limp, my broken body, but nothing could prepare me for the cruelty of adult gossip. Now, neighbours and relatives look at me with pity or say things behind my back that reach my ears anyway. They say that a crippled man could never make his wife happy, that no woman would stay with someone who is both handicapped and dying. I no longer go to family functions. I do not want my children to hear what people say about me. My eldest daughter, at thirteen, understands more than she should. She wipes my wounds, changes my dressings, and looks at me with eyes that carry more worry than any child’s should. My younger daughter and my son still think their mother is away at her grandmother’s house, waiting to come home after a quarrel.

My mother is in her sixties now, and works as a househelp, earning about six thousand rupees a month. When my father died of liver failure, it was my mother who kept us alive. Now, she does it again, standing by me when everyone else has left. My government pension barely covers anything. I dropped out of school at seventeen, took up jobs wherever I could, like working at an e-seva, running an auto rickshaw, or night shifts at a call centre. 

Blood vomiting started about two months before I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in November 2022. Chemotherapy became my new routine: first once a week, now twice, each session draining the strength out of me. A year ago, kidney stones meant surgery and fresh bills that swallowed what little savings we had left. The cancer is relentless… the tumour has pressed so hard against my old stitches that it tears them open. There are days I cannot lie down without pain. Nights when we skip dinner so we can afford my medicine. 

I am afraid. The charitable trust that once helped with my chemo cannot support us anymore. The cost of surgery is out of reach. I have spent my whole life fighting: first against a crippled leg, then against hunger, and now against cancer and humiliation. I have never begged for help before. I want to live for my children and for my mother. I want to see my daughters settled, see my son grow up. I am asking for help not just for myself, but so that my family does not lose the only person they have left. Please help me fight one last time. I cannot do this alone.