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'I almost gave up hope'
Subhash K Jha |
July 28, 2003 13:31 IST
"No, I have not started walking on crutches yet," says Vivek Oberoi. The actor, who had an accident on the sets of his latest film in Kolkata on July 16, is recovering in Mumbai's Hinduja hospital.
"It is like to going to hell and coming back," he continues. "I cannot begin to describe what I have been through. I broke both my bones in my [left] leg that day. The pain was incredible. Here's what happened. I was to give a shot where Abhishek [Bachchan] was chasing me. A stuntman was to skid [on his motorbike] towards me from the opposite direction. But when he did, he flew at lightening speed straight at me. I managed to get one leg out of the way. Otherwise, I'd have broken both! The motorbike's chrome-plate guard snapped my leg and threw me 10 feet high into the air. My back, shoulders and hips were hurt when I hit the ground and went rolling down the road.
"I'm thankful to God for being alive. The leg was not a major problem. It was operated on and that's it. It was the complications in my lungs that scared the hell out of me. No one knows what exactly happened. They call it war trauma. While being moved from the accident site, some bone marrow got aggravated and strained my lungs until they couldn't cope with my respiration. It was scary. I was spitting blood. I couldn't breathe without an oxygen mask. I couldn't eat anything. Every time I uttered a word, I felt an acute pain in my chest. There was a time when I had actually started to sink. I was on the operation table and since they couldn't numb me entirely for the fear of losing me, I felt the excruciating pain. The worst part was to be put with critically ill patients in the ICU. To watch people dying in front of your eyes caused me such psychological trauma...
"I believe there was a report in the media that I was being kept in the ICU so I would not be bothered by the press and fans. Am I mad to voluntarily stay in a place where you are repeatedly reminded of death with an oxygen mask on my face, watching people screaming with pain wanting to die because they can't take the pain anymore? Now, I'm out of the ICU. Hopefully, I'll be out of the hospital in a couple of days. The leg will take three months to heal. But I plan to start physiotherapy soon. I'll be on crutches shortly. Maybe, by the first week of September, I will be able to walk without a crutch. All my schedules are in a mess. But that cannot be helped. I'm thankful to be alive.
"My family was my life support system during these critical weeks when I could have slipped into a coma and died. My lungs could have collapsed. That scared the hell out of my family. Every time I would wake up in the ICU, I would see my dad [Suresh Oberoi] sitting on chair in a corner. At one point, I broke down and almost gave up hope. The chest pain was unbearable. Everyday the doctors assured me I'd be better tomorrow. But tomorrow never seemed to come. Then suddenly, overnight I improved. I am so grateful to the people who prayed for me. In 24 hours I had recovered by 40 per cent.
"Now I just want to take stock of the situation. Mani Ratnam, Indra Kumar and John Mathew Mathan's films are affected. Not so much Samir Karnik's Kyun Ho Gaya Na because in any case, I was to shoot for him at the end of this year. I don't want any filmmaker to be inconvenienced. Luckily, my shooting schedules are pretty much linear, so there will be no overlapping."