Thank you for your good wishes and prayers. I am writing from my hospital bed recovering from a fall of 15 feet.  Thanks to modern technology it is possible to stay in touch with a mobile phone. Well all of you are wondering how it happened. We have a guava tree in our compound which this year has given a particularly bountiful harvest of fruits. The branches overhang our first floor balcony. So in the morning at 8 am I had returned from my workout in the gym (these days I have become health conscious) I got ‘tempted by a (forbidden?) fruit’. There is a water tank on the balcony and I stood on it. While plucking the fruit I got a premonition that I may fall and had a momentary wave of giddiness. I slumped to one side and I was airborne without wings. The moments after that seemed like in slow motion. There was a rain shade which broke my fall. I slid off it and landed 15ft to the ground on the right side of my back, then my thoughts shifted back to real time from slomo. The pain was excruciating and for some time I could not inhale. There was a servant girl washing clothes and she starting shouting ‘Papa has fallen’. My 81 years old mother came out and became hysterical. I somehow managed to shout in a normal voice ‘Mama dont worry I am alright’. I was relieved that my toes and lower limbs were moving. Then my wife came down and I told her to call a known doctor and tell him to send an ambulance (unlike you lucky ones who live in the ‘first world’ merely have to dial 911, we have to depend on contacts). I did not move from the spot and even if I wanted I could not. I asked the servants to get of an icepack and asked them to apply it on my back and also asked them to get a bed cover and roll me on it. Meanwhile the ambulance came and I told them to transfer me with the sheet onto the stretcher. My wife also came on the ambulance and I told to instruct the drivers to take me straight to the CT Scan centre (we have standalone diagnostic centres in our town) I knew no point in getting admitted and then be shifted for a scan. On that journey on an ambulance with poor suspensions and me with an injured back and the pot holed roads, I realized what my patients must have to go through (I could call it an epiphany moment). I also realised that even the ramps leading to the centre are not without bumps and each one causes excruciating pain. Then in the scan centre I have to be shifted to the gurney of the centre and then transferred to the gantry of the scan. The CT report showed fracture of the transverse processes of all lumbar vertebrae on the right side with bilateral fracture on L1 and fracture of 6, 7 & 8th ribs with pneumothorax and lung contusion. By then all my juniors were with me and conveyed the report to the neurosurgeon. He wanted a MRI to rule out cord edema or compression. I had to be shifted to another centre which has the facility of MRI. So you can imagine that involved another round of transfers jumps and bumps. The MRI experience was like entering a  large water pipe followed by whole lot of whirring, clanging & banging. I can understand why people get claustrophobic in MRI. However the good news was my cord was intact. Then ‘piece de resistance’ was that before getting into my hospital bed I had to get a chest x-ray for which I had to sit up. I felt like passing out but somehow retained consciousness. Now I am on a firm air bed in an hospital ICU (though I really dont need ICU care) and as the old cliched saying goes ‘it only hurts when I laugh’ or when I move. In retrospect I got away cheaply from this fall. Definitely someone above is watching over me. My fall was broken by the rain shade and I landed on my back which distributed my weight over the length of my body. Because I kept my neck flexed it did not strike the ground with force, therefore avoiding a head injury. The neurosurgeon treating me said that I was lucky most who fall from that height have compression fractures of the vertebrae with paraplegia. So as the saying goes “every cloud has a silver lining”.