Sharon Eappen

Note to the Reader: The 'you' here refers to no specific person. It's a mixture of too many people I've met and too many people I'm bidding farewell to. It also refers to the memories, the "first times" and the city I'm part of since I was a few days old. The 'you' is everything this city has given me and everything I'm taking along to another city. Lastly, the 'you' could also be you if we have had any memory/ a couple of memories/ a truckload of memories particularly pertaining to this city, to Hyderabad.

             Ashlyn Blocker, a kindergarten girl (back in 2012), is one of the very few people known to be diagnosed with CIPA or congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (that is, the inability to sweat normally, which means your body can't cool itself which leads to overheating of the body and a lot of other complications) - a disease caused by genetic mutation that makes it impossible for her to feel pain, heat or cold.       While that might seem like a convenient disease to have, Ashlyn's parents feel that their child has been "cursed" with the disease of not being able to feel pain at all. One of the many things they stated about how harmful her disease could be was, "When her baby teeth arrived she would chew her lips bloody in her sleep, bite through her tongue while eating and once even stuck a finger in her mouth and stripped flesh from it."       But  that was confu...