Being on top of the world could mean different things to different people. For a surgical oncologist, it could be redeeming a patient’s life through a difficult procedure, or may be receiving an international award for lifetime achievements.
For Murad Lala, a head and neck cancer surgeon, however, the phrase means what it reads. The oncologist from Mumbai is perhaps the only Indian doctor who has summited the Mt Everest ever, and he has summited the Mt Everest alone.
Recalling his touch-and-go romance with the peak at the valedictory session of the national level conference on the laryngeal cancer organised at Apollo Hospitals here, Dr.Lala, now 52, could source the daredevilry to nothing more than “boyish urge”.
The boyish urge, however, had humbled him so much that he refused to be acknowledged as the one who “conquered” Mt Everest, even as a metaphor.
“It is a very humbling experience to see how insignificant we are in front of the Himalayas,” was how he had responded, to a question from the audience.
Treading between life and death is what he has spent his career assisting the patients do, but it has assumed a whole new meaning for him after traversing the narrow ridge between the South Summit and the Everest Peak at the fag end of his expedition in the summer of 2013.
“The ridge has Nepal on one side and China on the other. Once on the ridge, I shouted to my Sherpa behind, asking whether to fall to the right or to the left, in case I had to fall. He shouted back repeating ‘fall to right, fall to right’. It was 8,000 feet on the left and 12,000 feet on the right, and his reason was that I would live longer if I fell to right,” Mr.Lala explained with the smug humour of having survived the situation.
Death stared in their face at every moment during the adventure; when they had come across the monuments for climbers who never returned; or stumbled upon the climbers themselves, their bodies eternalised in the frozen mountain tracts; or found that their tents shifted by the daybreak from the place where they had hitched them in the night; or when they were caught in the blizzard at Camp-I and could not come out of the tents, nor could communicate with one another for two days—to name a few.
Though his five-member team summited the Everest on May 19, after two months of sweat and toil, celebrations began only after they touched the base camp, for, life was certain only then.
“Every night during the expedition, I thought of coming back. But then at daybreak, after seeing the Sun, I would resolve to make it one more day,” Dr.Lala reminisced.
Would he do it again? The thought was scary immediately after, seemed possible later, and certain now, he says. For those wishing to emulate, it cost him Rs.30 lakh and a whole year’s preparation.
