Just a week shy of turning 25, Dahisar resident Kunal Thakkar tells us he has been given a second shot at life. The photographer-turned-bookstgrammer spent a better part of the last two years indoors after a wrong diagnosis turned life on its head. Since 2018, Thakkar was under treatment for asthma, taking medicines twice a day, only stopping them briefly during the pandemic. “At the fag end of 2020, I started feeling breathless in the night, and while my doctor continued my asthma medication, my father noticed that I was also losing weight drastically. We thought it was because of my loss of appetite. But, when it dropped from 70 kg in December 2020 to 60 the following month, dad was alarmed.”

Around this time, Thakkar also developed a fever, and despite negative Rapid Antigen and RT-PCR tests, was advised to isolate at a COVID isolation centre by his doctor. “While I was there, the health staff ran a few tests to figure out why my fever wasn’t breaking. In one of those tests, I was diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB).”