Broken Symmetries: Age of Illuminati Read online

  The next day, Hast dialed Mark’s number to tell him what he had found, and after four beeps a voice answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi Mark, I think I know who Mr. Young Nimrod might be,” Hast claimed. “He is a famous faith-healer living in a small town near New Delhi, and his name is Padsha Mali.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Mark asked.

  “His physical features match exactly with the prophecies. We need to go there and make sure that he truly has these extraordinary healing powers,” Hast said. “If he is truly healing cancer, then I suspect he is the guy we are looking for!”

  Chapter 14

  Bakir was a 28 year old man who worked as an accountant for a small private company, and his life had changed one year ago when his 61 year old mother was diagnosed with stage four inflammatory breast cancer with wide spread metastasis to her lungs. The condition has made her breathing eventually more and more difficult, and it was as if she was gradually drowning, even a slight exertion made her suffer from breathlessness. She endured all her chemotherapy sessions, but unfortunately there was no response. Her cancer was out of control, but Bakir didn’t give up and took her to many doctors, but they all told him that her cancer was unfortunately among the most aggressive breast cancers and the survival rate was very low. At her stage of the disease, it was not curable and all they could do for her was to give her pain killers to alleviate her pain and suffering. She would also need to be admitted to the hospital to administer oxygen everytime when she had attacks of breathlessness. Bakir had to move to live with his old, diseased mother to take care of her; after all, he was her only son.

  This was now Bakir’s new life. He took his mother at least twice a week to the hospital because she was having sudden attacks of shortness of breath due to the accumulation of a fluid around her lungs (pleural effusion). The accumulated fluid in her chest made her feeling choked unless the fluid was drained out by a doctor, the process called thoracentesis, however, the relief only lasted for a few days and the problem returned.

  The frequency of her breathless attacks increased with time, and her son started to skip work because of her. As a result the company he was working for fired him because his numerous absences.

  Bakir’s mother realized that her son no longer went to work and she saw the distress on his face grow by the day.

  “Why are you not going to the work?” his mother said to Bakir.

  “Don’t worry mother. I’m on a paid leave for three months, and I can be with you now all the time,” he said smiling to her trying to hide the facts. He thought telling her the truth would only make her sad and worsen her condition.

  The mother felt she was a burden on her son and she wished to die, but because of her religious beliefs she couldn’t commit suicide. “I wish I could die soon so that you can enjoy the rest of your holidays,” she said.

  “Don’t say that, mother!” he said. “I can’t enjoy the holiday without you.”

  The next night at 3:00 a.m., Bakir’s mother had another acute attack of breathlessness, so he took her to the emergency ward again, but this time a young junior doctor seemed to be in charge. He looked like he had recently graduated from the college of medicine and appeared inexperienced. When the junior doctor examined Bakir’s mother, he was hesitant to act. He made some calls and consultations before he came back to Bakir and his breathless mother.

  “I’m sorry for this, but I haven’t done thoracentesis alone before, so to be safe, I have called a senior doctor to come and assist. He will be here shortly,” the junior doctor said.

  Moments passed, and Bakir felt his mother was deteriorating so he urged the junior doctor to do something. The junior doctor put on a pair of gloves and took some antiseptics with a large bore needle and a catheter and tried to empty the fluid in her lung alone. He demarcated the site of the needle insertion, before he advanced his hand began to shake. ‘I can do it. I have done everything correctly according to the textbook,’ he recited to himself to increase his confidence but then his courage left him.

  “I can’t do it alone!” the junior doctor said. “There is a risk I might induce a pneumothorax, which is dangerous and could take her life, so I think it’s better to wait until the senior doctor arrives,” he said.

  When Bakir’s mother heard the words ‘pneumothorax take life,’ she looked at her son’s face who looked very tired, pale, and lifeless at the same time! ‘My son needs to enjoy his holidays. I’m burden on everyone,’ she thought before looking at the other patients around her. ‘They deserve more attention than me. I’m of no use. I’m just a burden and pain to others. The pneumothorax could take my life and I would not remain a burden,’ she said to herself. She hinted at the junior doctor trying to tell him her thoughts, but her voice didn’t come out. ‘I need that pneumothorax. Please give it to me, as it’s the best cure, not only for me but for everyone.’ At that moment she thought of an idea. She could commit suicide without doing it by herself, and this way she was not violating the commands of the holy§cript! She began exacerbating her symptoms hoping the junior doctor would try and give her the cure she wanted. She started to pretend she was choking and gasping to death. The junior doctor realized the need to act immediately, so he collected all his courage and inserted the needle straight forward into the patient’s lung with the hope he had done it correctly. A moment later a sigh of relief came to him as he saw the watery fluid was coming through the needle to the catheter powering it into the collecting bladder. Her vital signs and the oxygen concentration started to come back to normal ranges again.

  “That is great. I have done it successfully,” the junior doctor said smiling.

  “Thanks a lot doctor,” Bakir said with relief as he watched his mother starting to breathe again at a normal pace.

  Bakir’s mother shed a tear of sorrow as she thought, ‘I haven’t got the cure I needed today.’

  ***

  A few weeks later, Bakir saw the news article on the BBC about a faith-healer called Padsha Mali who could cure cancer effortlessly and he was only 200 miles away from Bakir’s town. Without a second thought, he took his mother to the faith-healer in the next day. When Bakir arrived, he saw a huge crowd of people from all races queueing before the faith-healer’s house. Because his mother seemed so unwell, the guards who were registering people’s names and arranging the queue gave Bakir’s mother a quick pass; otherwise, Bakir could have waited days for his mother’s turn to come!

  During the meeting, the faith-healer told Bakir’s mother to lie down on the ground. He then put his hands into a bucket of water while reciting words from the holy§cript before scrubbing his wet hands on her face. Once finished he looked toward Bakir. “It is not me who is healing her, it’s ∞Illuhim∞, and you should be thankful to him not to me,” he said.

  A few days later, the miracle happened. Bakir’s mother walked up the stairs without feeling breathless, and she started to get better day-by-day. One month later, her x-ray results showed shrinking tumors in her chest. The doctor who was following her case was speechless after examining her medical tests. No chemotherapy he had used before could do such amazing work without hurting the patient! It became clear to Bakir that his normal life was now back, thanks to ∞Illuhim∞ and Padsha Mali’s blessed hands.

  ***

  The following week after the good news about his mother’s shrinking tumors, Bakir went to a fast food restaurant to have a quick sandwich during his lunch break. He heard two voices behind him talking about the rising faith-healer, Padsha Mali.

  “Did you hear about Padsha Mali?” one guy said.

  “Yes, I’ve heard about him, and what is wrong with the social media these days? I keep seeing posts and videos about him and many of the posts are sponsored!” the second guy wondered.

  “That is because he looks exactly like the Antichrist! He is blind in his left eye and has a reddish face and frowned eyebrows!” the first guy replied.

  “But he doesn’t claim to
be God,” the second guy said. “He himself is a devout preacher of Abrahamic faith.”

  “I guess he is trying to control our emotions through curing diseases and preaching for Abrahamic faith. I saw a viral post yesterday, and someone had taken a close shot of Padsha Mali’s face. The wrinkles on his forehead show the figure of triple 6s in Hebrew!”

  “Wow!” the second guy responded.

  Bakir bit his lips from rage while listening to them as he really wanted to punch them in the face as hard as he could.

  “I really pity those who follow this faith-healer,” the voice behind him continued. “They have to be very ignorant of Abrahamic faith to not know the signs of the Antichrist!”

  That was the straw which broke the camel’s back. Bakir stood up and turned to the two guys grabbing their table. He lifted it and turned it upside down so that everything was thrown on the floor. Angrily he shouted, “If you suffered from cancer you would understand the truth better.”

  Other people in the restaurant grabbed Bakir from behind and tried to calm him down.

  Chapter 15

  Sardar, Hast’s brother, who had recently started practicing medicine, didn’t believe that prayers had any effect. He believed that most faith-healers were either deceiving people or ignorant about what they were dealing with. Most of the patients identified as being ‘possessed’ by these faith-healers do not have a real physical disease. According to Sardar and many other doctors, these patients are usually suffering from psychological problems known as conversion and dissociative disorders. The afflicted patients usually had emotional problems which they usually do not want to declare or which reside in their subconscious. Their brains would then present the emotional problem in a form of a physical disability which could then be treated by controlling or coping with the original emotional problem residing in their subconscious.

  The problem is those patients are seeking emotional care by their relatives or close friends and this is how the supposed faith-healers take advantage. They label the patients as having a possessed spirit and this makes others pity the patient and not hold them responsible for their behaviors. This is exactly what a patient with a conversion disorder wants and finds it comforting. Sardar usually tried to explain this point to his brother to demonstrate for him why a conversion disorder is sometimes responsive to faith-healing giving a fake impression that there is something supernatural about faith-healing.

  Sardar remembered his first time in the Emergency ward when he was having his first night shift. On that evening, a 17 year old boy who was presumably unconscious and brought to the ER by his parents. Sardar immediately checked the boy’s pulse rate and all the other vital signs they were all normal, then he sent out for blood and sugar tests and they all returned normal. Sardar asked the mother whether the boy had experienced any emotional problems recently. The mother said that yesterday his son had a major argument with his father. To Sardar, this looked like a typical case of a conversion disorder. Here he had a young patient with a healthy medical history and normal medical tests which ruled out any physical disease.

  However, the boy’s father denied that his son’s problem was emotional and due to the argument they had, so he started to accuse Sardar of misdiagnosis. Sardar tried to explain to the father that he didn’t blame his son’s condition on him.

  “Your son has a conversion disorder. I can refer him to a psychiatrist so that he can be treated properly,” Sardar said to the father.

  “Are you saying my son is crazy?” the father asked in an angry voice.

  Sardar realized that he was talking to a very ignorant man so he gave up the case but warned the father that if didn’t take his son to a psychiatrist to receive proper treatment and advice, his son’s unconscious episodes would be repeated every time he encountered emotional distress.

  What made Sardar’s frustration even more was when he realized that the father had taken his son to a faith-healer instead of a psychiatrist. He figured this out a couple of weeks later when his brother, Hast, brought him a recorded video of a local faith-healer called Mam Jameel who was residing in a nearby town to Erbil. In the videos Mam Jameel was showcasing the treatment of some patients he claimed they were ‘possessed’, and to Sardar’s surprise, one of the patients was the same the 17 year old boy. Again, the boy seemed to lie unconscious in front of the faith-healer. In the video, the faith-healer was reciting some words with smoke all around him and the boy’s body began to shake. After a few minutes, he woke up, fully conscious again. His father profusely thanked the faith-healer for saving his son from the bad spirit.

  Sardar heard the father saying in the video that he had taken his son to so many doctors and none of them were able to diagnose what was wrong with his son. “I believe this was a bad spirit who possessed my son’s body and now God has shown us this miracle through your blessed hands,” the father said in the video.

  Sardar facepalmed himself while watching the video thinking ‘if conversion disorder still has such a big impact on re-enforcing superstition in the twenty first century, then how big was its effect in the ancient times?’ Nevertheless, Sardar himself was baffled by how responsive patients with conversion disorder were to the suggestions of a faith-healer. In the video, there was another young girl who was mute but started to talk immediately after the faith-healer recited his magic words over her, and there was another man claiming recent deafness but who started to hear again after the faith-healing. For Sardar, conversion disorder looked like a functional brain disorder which was hard wired specifically to be cured by faith-healing!

  He thought that in the ancient times humans lived in small communities and societies; their size could have ranged from hundreds to thousands. If there was a conflict or a war among them, then bigger communities with larger sizes had better chances of winning and survival. However, larger communities would not have been possible if they hadn’t had a strong leader. A strong leader would not have been possible if people hadn’t seen their leaders as gods. People would not have seen their leaders as gods if they hadn’t possessed faith-healing powers, and hence, conversion disorders helped to create the illusion of some having supernatural or godly powers!

  So in short, the genes that produced this weird disorder re-enforced superstition among people and the latter had a greater survival value at least in the ancient times; this was Sardar’s thoughts about this psychological disorder which was commonly depicted as exorcism. So for Sardar, the whole situation was like a conspiracy imposed upon them by Mother Nature.

  On the contrary, Hast thought conversion disorder was a sign that Mother Nature herself wanted us to adopt religion and believe in God! “There are countless ways for Mother Nature to evolve something that promoted unity among humans, so why would she choose superstition to do that?” he asked.

  “Maybe, that was the easiest,” Sardar answered.

  “No, I think Nature wants us to believe in something higher than ourselves, and superstition was the first step for us to realize that there was something supernatural about the universe. This is how ∞Illuhim∞ has revealed himself to us,” Hast said.

  ***

  Sardar hated conversion disorder a lot, not only because it was the main tool in the hands of faith-healers, but he also thought that the disorder was no longer useful for human survival. He remembered one of his night shifts alone in the emergency ward. It was on a night he was exhausted after treating more than ten serious cases. His last case was a young 19 year old girl. She was brought to the ER by her friend, and she was unconscious. Sardar checked her vital signs and they were all normal. There was no serious neurological signs like pupil dilatation or an increase in her reflexes. Her friend said that the young girl had caught her boyfriend cheating on her today and she felt upset. She arrived at the friend’s house in tears and moments later fell unconscious. To Sardar, this was a typical case of conversion disorder again, an emotional problem presenting itself as a functional neurological problem. He thought about sending her
for an MRI scan to be extra sure and exclude any possibility of a real neurological problem, but after hearing the story from her friend, he became certain that this case was just another conversion disorder and sending for an MRI was not necessary, but he decided to keep her under observation for a while. After all, a doctor’s job was to filter out serious diseases from non-serious ones and send only the needy patients for further expensive medical investigations; otherwise, the MRI queue would pile up unnecessarily.

  To his horror, one hour later, the young unconscious girl started vomiting and showing signs of a serious underlying neurological problem. When Sardar finally sent her for a brain scan, it turned out that she had a ruptured brain aneurysm, a life threatening condition. Unfortunately, she didn’t survive the resuscitation. The hospital’s administration didn’t blame Sardar for mismanagement because the disease was known to be hard to diagnose and manage and its mortality rate was high, but Sardar’s feeling of guilt was immense for not taking her case seriously from the beginning. ‘If there were no conversion disorders, I would have taken the girl’s unconsciousness more seriously from the start,’ he thought. It became clear to him that conversion disorder was now doing more harm than good. ‘Stupid, blind Nature has invented a disorder without realizing its harmful long term consequences.’ From that moment on, he hated both conversion disorders and faith-healing holding them responsible for spreading superstition and deception.

  ***

  Like everyone else, Sardar recently came across the news about the rising faith-healer in New Delhi who could heal patients with end stage cancer within a short period of time without any complications just by reciting the holy§cript and using some sort of a holy water. Sardar couldn’t believe that initially, but as he looked online further it became clear to him that many of the patients the celebrated faith-healer had treated were verified cancer cases. ‘How could this be possible!’ he thought to himself, ‘There must be something tricky going on.’