Turning the Decade

To my older brother, on his 31st birthday - Happy Birthday! May this next year be one filled with friends old and new, discovering new experiences and finding a deep joy in life!

Random Memories: Eight Years Old

My brother and I used to sleep in the master bedroom by ourselves when we were younger. I am not sure how we got away with that, but I suspect that my Dad's inability to climb the stairs easily and both my parent's generosity had something to do with it.

The master bedroom holds a lot of memories for me as a child. I remember the pillows that adorned the bed - interspersed among the proper sleeping pillows were our bantal busuks (literally 'smelly pillows' in Malay, equivalent to a security blanket.) I had this yellow Doraemon pillow which I must have drooled on incessantly until it changed colour. (Ewww...)

The master bedroom was also the scene of the death of our childhood dreams - I remember how as little children we used to have these wonderful T-shirts with capes at the back of them - it was the height of the Superman (Christopher Reeve, not Brandon Routh) craze then. We were pasar malam heroes in our T-shirts - I was the Malaysian Hero with my red flowing cape while my brother had his blue Batman one.


My wonderfully artistic younger sister's recreation of what I looked like in that caped shirt as a child. I wish I knew where the original photo is.

We were a handful, both of us boys, tearing through the house like chimpanzees on steroids, our capes flowing behind us. We would scream the house down, and I think that one day we were jumping around and making a little too much noise when Mum decided that she had had enough, so she grabbed the sewing scissors and then proceeded to cut the capes off our T-shirts, much to our juvenile horror.

We didn't fly around so well after that. Our tiny imaginations couldn't bring us beyond the jagged edges of cloth that hung limply from our superhero uniforms where our brave capes once flowed.

I remember as well the nights before our sleep when my brother would tell me stories sometimes or we would talk about everything and nothing before falling asleep. There was a period in his ten-year-old life when his only aim was to make me laugh until I begged him to stop.

The magic words that would cause me to laugh uncontrollably would somehow always involve a bodily excrement or function and some bad words (read: shitting, pissing and farting) and I would be so tickled that I would still laugh about it the next day.

Twenty one years on, and my taste in toilet humour has not weaned off one bit. Just ask Karen.

Happy birthday, Jo.

Wong Fu Productions: Up In Da Club

Wong Fu Productions is the inspired trio of Philip Wang, Ted Fu and Wesley Chan - three Americans of Asian heritage who started off in their budding directing and production skills in college.

They struck Youtube gold (or should I say yellow) when they uploaded their first clip - Yellow Fever several years ago and since then, the trio have never looked back, coming up with their own production company, becoming more adept at both their directing and acting skills, and indeed have created a nice little niche market for themselves.

Indeed, their brand of militant niceness and astute humour have struck a chord with many people, Asians or not, and they continue to serve as an inspiration to many aspiring talents.

Watch all 4 parts to the end - I laughed my ass off - and I know that you will too! (I know that some connection speeds are slower than others, but it is worth the wait!)

Chew On This

Almost true representation of events.

(With apologies to my friends who are dentists, who I am sure are kind to small animals and little children. Occasionally.)

The top 3 things that humans fear most:
1. Public speaking
2. Death
3. A visit to the dentist

I have not seen a dentist in 20 years. I am not particularly fond of them, they don't get Christmas cards from me.

My teeth are, surprisingly, in perfectly good condition, thank you very much, apart from this unbearably horrible toothache that I get when I eat. And when I don't eat. In fact, it hurts all the time.

[The chances of Heng Khuen seeing a dentist is found in the equation

P = Pt x ft > Fd

where P is the probablility of Heng Khuen visiting a dentist, Pt is the pain from the toothache, multiplied by ft which is the frequency of the toothache and Fd is the F@^&ing dentist, er I mean, Fear of dentist.)

I finally dragged myself to the dentist and he tells me that I have multiple cavities, which are holes in my teeth. He says that I have enough holes in my teeth for him to play a whole round of golf.

I am not laughing.

I also have this set of impacted teeth, which means my mouth was too small (contrary to popular opinion) to fit in all my teeth, so two of my molars were squeezed in to sit under my tongue, which I often show to little kids to scare them into obedience.

But my dentist says that my impacted teeth have to come out, or else more cavities will form when food gets stuck there. I think of the piece of apple that I had last night now stuck between my teeth. It now has a face. And a beard. And a pickaxe. And it is furiously chipping away at the rock of my teeth, laughing gleefully like a maniac, as it digs harder and harder to find the nerve that will give me Unbearable Pain which is its Revenge for me eating it.

I walk into the dentist's room. There is a chair in the dentist's room. It is not like an electric chair. It is an Ergonomic Reclining Chair with soft cushion padding, which fits your body snugly so that you can lie in it comfortably. It is like a La-Z-Boy couch which you lie on to watch the game on your big screen TV.

Except that it is not a La-Z-Boy. And there is no soccer match in front of you.

They slap on a pair of sunglasses and then suddenly a light descends upon you from above. The light stand is angled like a curious dinosaur bending it's head down to get a closer look at you. Except that it has the Sun for its face.

It is like you are in an interrogation. A comfortable chair, and a not-so-comfortable interrogation.

There is a tray. There is a tray with many instruments which look like they belong to a villain in a Bond movie. There are instruments with hooked pointy little ends which look like they could cause a lot of pain. And then there are the clamps. Which could fit on your little finger, squeezing it tighter and tighter. There is a needle, which looks like it could have truth serum in it. There is a pair of pliers. For ripping out teeth. And fingernails.

Suddenly your breath stops as your eyes land on the most horriblest instrument of all. The drill. The tiny little sharp rotating drill which sounds like a hundred little tiny fingernails scratching on the blackboards of your mind.

The dentist comes in, and he is all smiles. You expect a Villain Monologue during which time you will shoot out the lights with your gun, kick him in the balls and then make your escape.

You have to keep your mouth open the whole time while he does unkind things to you. Not unlike another profession that I know of. (With apologies to my friends who are in that other profession, who I am sure, too, are kind to small animals and little children.)

He reaches for the drill. The dentist tests it first. It gives a satisfying buzzing whirr in his gloved hand, vibrating the air around it. And then he reaches it into you. Hundreds of tiny fingernails scratch slowly but eagerly along the blackboards. The high pitch whirring resonates in your head, threatening to detonate it from inside.

Your body arches upwards. Your face scrunches in pain. Your fists grab the comfortable La-Z-Boy beneath you and threaten to rip it to pieces. You want to scream but there is no sound.

He has to inject you with an anaesthetic, he says. It will feel like a pinch. Or a mosquito bite, he promises. But it is not like a pinch. It is like a mosquito bite except that the mosquito is from a place called Hell, and it has eaten a mouthful of red-hot cili padi and volcanic magma before stinging you.

Your mouth gradually goes numb as if Muhammad Ali threw a few punches at you, but only managed to hit the left side of your face.

The dentist reaches for the pliers. You feel the steel rubbing on your tongue and clunking against your teeth as he clumsily rips your tooth (fingernails/eyes/nipples) out. The tooth is curved like a scimitar and red from the stab wound into your gums. Your mouth pools with blood. You taste it on your tongue.

He gives you a cotton swab to chew on. He smiles and expects a thank-you nod for his hard work torturing you today.

He leads you out of his room and you think that you are finally safe. Thank God that is over.

The worse is yet to come. Your half-numb mouth hangs open at the amount that you have to hand over for the forty five minutes of torture that you had just walked out of. A thread of saliva steals out from your open mouth like an art thief's rope at the Louvre, and it dangles over the three digit number on the bill before you.

Like a masochist, you swallow your blood-stained saliva and dig deep into your wallet to pay for the pleasure of the pain today.

The receptionist flashes you a perfect smile and takes your cash. You pray that somewhere in the back of her mouth, the tiniest little piece of a Mars Bar is patiently chipping away at the those pearly white teeth.

Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night

So I walked into the ED one Sunday night and it was chaos. It looked like a bomb had struck the place after a hurricane and a tsunami had hit it. The crap did not only hit the industrial strength fan, it also hit the full-blast air-conditioning and the heating in the ventilation.

But enough bad analogies.

Just before I had walked in, there were three simultaneous codes - a 91 year old man who had a large aneurysm of his aorta (swelling of the main blood vessel in the tummy area), another seventy something year old gentleman was having seizures from the newly diagnosed brain tumour in his head, and there was a 30-something year old mother who had overdosed on a whole heap of medications who no one could wake.

And she was vomiting out blood as well for good measure.

And so the whole department was abuzz with doctors and nurses flying from one end to the other, trying to put out as many fires as they could.

Every bed was taken in the Emergency Department that night, as evidenced by the full waiting room outside, as we had neither the time nor the place to see anyone.

My boss went out and told the waiting patients in no uncertain terms that tonight the ED was really busy, and unless they were willing to wait for a long time or thought that their ailment needed attention this very night, they would be better off coming back tomorrow. Or never.

Please, thank you, come again.

The surgeons were in the room seeing the gentleman with the 10 centimetre aorta that was about to rupture, trying to convince him that he needed an operation urgently. His wife and daughter were there by his side keeping vigil.

His wife stood there by his side telling him that he should probably have the operation. For the longest time the man kept silent while she talked on and on about how he should have it. She was trying to cope with the sudden bad news and her mind was grasping at straws at this stage. She was about to lose him and she wasn't ready yet. So, yes, yes to the operation. Yes to hope.

20 metres away in another room, a young mother was trying her best to die on us. Her family had checked in on her at six pm that day and thought that she was sleeping so they had left her alone. It was only when she didn't rouse that night when they called her to dinner that they feared the worst.

They rushed into her room, the pack of empty pills by her side and she would not respond to their frantic calls trying to coax her back from Death's edge. Her brother had tried to sit her up, and she had vomited out blood in his arms, and the family were beside themselves as the call for help went out.

Many women have tried to take their own lives, but more often than not, it is actually a cry for help and most survive. I have never seen someone come so near to death on overdosing on pills before.

And so we were trying to put the tube down her throat to help her breathe, and all this time the blood gushing out of her stomach made it very difficult. Then we had to get lines into her to give her the medications that would keep her blood pressure up.

We had to keep reaching for some shots of adrenaline to bring the blood pressure to a level where it would perfuse the vital organs in the body.

The man with the brain tumour had finally settled from his convulsions with the medications that he was given. His family sat next to him, distraught at what they had just witnessed. Just this morning he was fine - he was their father, their husband - having breakfast with them, laughing about things and now eight hours later his body no longer belonged to him.

It was weak on one side and would not respond no matter how hard he willed it, and when he fitted, he jerked around as if he were being drawn on the strings by an invisible puppeteer.

We had to attend to the man with the enlarged aorta because he had suddenly lost consciousness. As we stepped in, the surgical registrar dramatically waved us away, his arms cutting open in a fashion like No Deal!

No! he exclaimed. Don't do anything!

The surgical registrar recounted to us what had happened, his eyes wide open in surprise. It was the most amazing thing! he exclaimed. So we were just telling him about the operation when this man suddenly turned to his wife and daughter and said, angrily -

"I've had enough! I don't want anything done for me anymore! See you! Goodbye!"

And with that he just... went.

The surgical registrar's voice trailed off, amazed that the man could dictate his own death.

[Mr A leaves the play, never to return. Exit Stage Left]

My boss went out to talk to the family to confirm the man's last wishes, and he returned to the room, his single nod confirming that this man should be kept comfortable only.

Back in the room with the young mother, we battled on and had to throw a heap of medication at her in order to keep her blood pressure up, in order to stop her from the death she wanted so much. She was finally flown away to another hospital that night, her family still coming to terms with their grief and now needing to find their way to her tonight.

There is time to breathe, and reflect. Here was one man who had lived a good long life, and had seen many things in his time, and who was just sick of it all. He somehow wielded the power over the timing of his death -nature had finally taken its course, and he wanted no more of our withcraft to try and stop it.

On the other hand, here was a young mother, who at a very young age decided that she had seen enough in her time and was just sick of it all as well. And in some strange way, she wielded the power over the timing of her death as well, but the love of her family, and the same modern medicine that brought her to the brink of death was trying its best to pull her back to life.