Hacking Health: The Only Book You’ll Ever Need to Live Your Healthiest Life

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One summer's day in May 2007, I walked into an emergency room in San Mateo, California, at five in the morning. I hadn't slept in over forty-eight hours and had a throbbing headache as well as an inability to look directly into light. I had tried to shrug this all off as jet lag since I had been travelling back and forth between India and the US every month during the early days of Myntra. However, it soon became too painful to endure and I had no choice but to head to emergency. So, I walked in, zombie-like, and the moment the resident doctor saw me, she knew something was quite seriously wrong. On a hunch, she told me that she wanted to do a spinal tap, in which a syringe is inserted into the spinal cord, to extract fluid for testing. I, of course, had no idea what she was thinking then, and was just happy to be in the hospital and be attended to. After my spinal tap, the sample was shipped off to the lab and I was put on painkillers.

Another doctor woke me up that afternoon with a worried look. He said my sample had tested positive for meningitis, an infection of the brain and spine that can be quite deadly, depending on the strain. I would need to be completely quarantined for a few days until the doctors understood what type of meningitis they were dealing with. Confused and delirious, I started making frantic calls to close family and friends to let them know what was going on. 1 even called my Myntra co-founder in the middle of the night, blathering on about not knowing whether I would make it! Images and memories flashed through my mind in rapid succession most importantly-the face of my two-year-old daughter, who I had hardly seen over the previous six months as I had been spending most of that time in India, trying to bootstrap Myntra.

Within thirty minutes, I was strapped to a gurney and shipped off to the neurology ward of another hospital in an ambulance, its siren blaring as it glided surprisingly seamlessly through the otherwise notorious traffic of the Bay Area. I was put on an even stronger painkiller and antiviral medication, and I slept through the next two days as I waited for more reports. The access to my room was limited, and anyone coming in to deliver food or medicine had to be covered from head to toe-an image that continually reinforced the fear that I was carrying something catastrophic inside my brain. Finally, the lab confirmed that it was indeed meningitis, but of the viral variety, which is much easier to deal with than the more deadly bacterial strain. I continued my antiviral medication and was discharged from the hospital a few days later, fully cleared of the viral infection but extremely weak and fatigued. This horrendous ordeal, capping off a long run of falling sick nearly every month over the previous six months made me think very seriously about giving up entrepreneurship but I managed to stay in the game.