My Pain Is My Wife

MY PAIN IS MY WIFE

A True Story of Survival, Suffering, and Unbreakable Power

by

Mohan Kumar Thadi

Submission Excerpt — Non-Fiction Book Award & True Story Award
Page Turner Awards 2026

“Because pain never leaves, it becomes the only one that stays.”
— Mohan Kumar Thadi

PROLOGUE: SOMETHING BEHIND MY LIFE

These words have lived in my heart for years. I return to them often — especially when life feels unbearably heavy.

But what happens when life suddenly throws you into a storm so violent, so unexpected, that your entire existence is torn apart? What happens to your dreams? To your ambitions? To everything you once thought was permanent?

Can a person truly live again after being so completely broken?

This question haunted me. It haunts many. But somehow, even in the midst of disaster, there is a quiet voice inside us that refuses to be silent. A voice that says:

Keep walking.
There is a reason behind this pain.

That is how ordinary people survive extraordinary pain. I was one of those ordinary people — a young engineering student with a simple, promising life. Until the day destiny rewrote my story.

It was August 12, 2003 — Raksha Bandhan, a day of celebration and love. But for me, it became the day I met death. A horrific accident almost ended everything. Everyone thought my story was over. But destiny had other plans.

No one around me could see it at the time, but that terrifying day did not destroy me — it transformed me. It did not bury me — it planted me. That accident became my rebirth.

Today, exactly nineteen years later, as I enter the twentieth year of survival, I feel compelled to share this story with you — not for sympathy, but for truth.

I have known starvation and suffocation. Physical agony and mental torment. Hopeless nights and paralysed days. Watching my parents break in silence. Sleepless years with nothing but pain for company.

I lost the use of my right arm. I lost sensation — but never the burning pain.
Even after all this time, the pain never left — but that is a story that deserves its own chapter.

I have wanted to die. More than once. But in those darkest hours, I heard something — not from the world outside, but from within. A voice. My own soul.

That voice became my anchor. It led me to one powerful truth:

We cannot change the past — but we absolutely can change the future.

The death that tried to take me that day failed. Because something greater still lives behind my life. And I am walking toward it — step by step, day by day.

That is what this book is about. A journey from devastation to purpose. From unbearable pain to unbreakable power.

— Mohan Kumar Thadi

CHAPTER ONE: THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED
12th August 2003 — The day I died, and the day I was reborn.

I still remember the wind that day. I was riding at 120 kilometres per hour on my bike — fast, free, and completely unaware that everything was about to change forever. The road stretched ahead of me like a promise. I was young. I was alive. I had places to be, things to become.

Then came a turn. A tractor. And a collision so violent it still echoes in my bones. The tractor was loaded with 300 cement packets and iron bars. The driver lost control. I lost control. And then, in a split second that lasted forever, we hit each other.

My body flew into the air — as high as a coconut tree.
I do not remember the exact moment I fell back down.
But when I hit the ground, I was not the same person anymore.

What I Was Before That Day
I want you to know who I was before the accident, because the contrast matters. I was a young engineering student — full of ambition, full of plans. I loved riding my motorcycle, feeling the freedom of the open road. I had friends who made me laugh. I had a future stretched out before me like an open field.

I was my parents’ son — their pride, their hope. My mother’s prayers in the morning were for my success. My father’s hard work was to give me opportunities he never had. I carried their dreams alongside my own.

My Right Limb Was Torn From Me
When I opened my eyes — briefly, weakly — I saw it. My right arm was hanging, torn from its place, barely connected to my body. The pain did not even register at first. Shock took over. The body shuts down when the damage is too great.

The tractor fell into a canal. The driver and workers ran away, leaving me bleeding and broken on the roadside. But someone — I still do not know who — took me to a hospital. An anonymous act of grace in the middle of a nightmare.

Coma for Six Months
The doctors said I had suffered a severe head injury. I slipped into a coma for six months. While I lay still, machines kept me alive. My collarbone had shattered and pierced my lungs, making independent breathing impossible.

Six months. One hundred and eighty days. Long enough for the world to carry on without me. My mother’s prayers became the soundtrack of those months I cannot remember.

Waking Up to a New Life
When I finally woke up, the world was not the same. My right arm was paralysed. Completely lifeless. The doctors explained: brachial plexus injury, multiple root avulsions from C4 to C7. The nerves had been torn from the spine itself. No chance of recovery.

The doctors said I would not feel anything. But they were wrong. The pain never left me — and it never would.

Two and a Half Years on the Bed
For the next two and a half years, I was confined to a bed. Galvanic stimulation. Faradic stimulation. Endless exercises. I was like a baby, learning to exist again. Every breath was a struggle. Every day was a war.

The most important days of your life may not look like gifts when they arrive.

CHAPTER TWO: THE HOSPITAL YEARS — BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH
When machines breathe for you, you learn what breathing truly means.

Hospitals have a smell that never leaves your memory. A mixture of antiseptic and something underneath it — something human and fragile that all the chemicals in the world cannot fully mask. I lived inside that smell for years. It became the smell of my new life.

What My Family Endured
While I lay unconscious for six months, my family lived in a kind of suspended agony. My mother camped at the hospital, sleeping in corridors. My father divided himself between work and the hospital bedside where his son lay connected to machines.

They held themselves together with the sheer force of love and prayer, and they showed up every day to a bedside where nothing changed, and they hoped with a ferocity that must have been exhausting.

The Moment I Opened My Eyes
My mother told me later that she had been praying at my bedside when my eyelids flickered. She froze. Then my eyes opened — unfocused at first, confused. I looked at her face and did not immediately understand what I saw there — the relief so enormous it looked almost like grief.

I tried to speak. Could not. The throat injury had stolen my voice temporarily. I tried to move. My right arm did not respond. And that is when the real journey began.

The Diagnosis That Changed Everything
The diagnosis confirmed what my body already knew — those nerves were never coming back. What the doctors had not fully prepared me for was what came next: the silence of a dead limb that somehow never stopped screaming. Medicine had a name for it. I simply called it my life.

The body can survive what the mind cannot yet comprehend. Give yourself time to catch up.

CHAPTER THREE: MY PAIN IS MY WIFE
Because pain never leaves, it becomes the only one that stays.

People have a way of disappearing. The friends who came to visit in the early weeks began, one by one, to drift. Life called them back. Their worlds kept turning.

But my pain? My pain never left. It was there in the morning. It was there at night. Day after day. Year after year. Twenty years.

At some point I stopped fighting it. Not from weakness, but from something deeper — a recognition that this pain and I were bound together in a way that no doctor could sever.

So I did something that might sound strange. I named it. I acknowledged it. I turned to face it. I married it.

My pain is my wife.

She does not leave me.
She does not sleep while I am awake.
She does not forget me.
She reminds me, every single day, that I am alive.

I talk to her. I have screamed at her in my darkest hours. And I have also, in the strangest moments, thanked her. Because she never pretended. She never lied. She never left when I turned away.

What It Means to Live With Constant Pain
People who have never experienced chronic pain often imagine it as simply a more intense version of everyday hurt. But chronic neuropathic pain is something entirely different. It is a different relationship with reality.

When pain is constant, it becomes the background of everything. Every decision is filtered through it. It shapes your sleep, your mood, your capacity for each day. There are nights when the burning is so intense that lying still is impossible.

And yet. I am here. I have had thousands of such nights. And I am still here, still writing, still choosing to speak. That is not nothing. That is everything.

The Medicine of Honesty
There is something profoundly liberating about telling the truth about your pain. My pain did not go away with time the way people promised it would. Twenty years in, it burns as fiercely as it did in those early days. But the moment I stopped pretending otherwise — the moment I said, ‘I see you, I acknowledge you, you are real and you are mine’ — something shifted. Not in the pain. In me.

You cannot heal what you refuse to feel. Acknowledgement is the first act of power.

— — —

[End of Submission Excerpt]

My Pain Is My Wife is a complete memoir of approximately 45,000 words.