Smell The Cheese!

Karen and I have been spending some wonderful evenings with H and V, a married couple from Karen's church who have been good friends and great mentors to us, guiding us in this period of our relationship. These nights are precious to Karen and myself - we are invited over for cozy home-cooked dinners, and then spend the whole evening talking and chatting like old friends until the wee hours of the morning.

It has been eerie how well H and V and Karen and myself have hit it off - I have known them for under a year now, and Karen maybe double that, but it feels like we have been lifelong friends. Karen always says that H is like an older version of myself, and I tend to agree, while I can see in V what Karen will be like later in life. It's like God giving you a glimpse of your future, and how wonderful married life can be!

One of the many joys that we have spending time at H and V's is the chance to play with their three kids - the very well adjusted twins Jus and Josh, and little Nikki, who is about the cheekiest four year old I have ever seen.

Her eyes twinkle with mischief, and her chubby cheeks flank an impish grin as she thinks about the next best way to grab your attention, as kids her age do.

She is the apple of her father's eye, and I must say that I am really proud of her brothers, who have become more protective of her over the years, allowing her to join in and even helping her win at our favourite card game - Snorta! - which involves us making animal noises while turning over cards.

I know, I know, I should know better at my age than to be making animal noises. In my defense, I will say this - "Oink, oink!" "Rrrbiit!Rrrbitt!" "Tweet!Tweet!" "Cock-A-Doodle-Do!"

The defence rests its case, your Honour.

In many ways, the three siblings, Jus and Josh, and little Nikki remind me a little of my own family - the two brothers who feign annoyance at the antics of their little sister, but who secretly love her to bits.

********************************

Anyway, last night, while the four of us were chatting away, little Nikki comes up to us and grabs on to the dining table chair, swinging her right leg vacantly, her mind ticking over at how to grab our grown-up attention.

She recalls, with a sudden light of inspiration, something that had tickled her father pink over the week.

"Hey Dad!" her little Australian-accented voice calls out. "SMELL THE CHEESE!" she says, beaming a smile.

H bursts out laughing and V is all smiles as we look on, bemused.

H turns to us, and then explains that little Nikki had learnt this new trick at school. He was about to explain it to us, but then turns to her, instead, and asks Little Nikki to kindly show Uncle (sobsob) hK how to

Smell The Cheese!

1. First, open up the palm of your left hand.
2. Place your closed fist of your right hand onto the left hand, forming what looks like a cheese on a plate.
3. Invite the clueless Uncle hK to "Smell... The... Cheese!".
4. As he brings his silly nose near to smell your 'Cheese!' punch his nose with your all your cheesy right hand might and then run away, laughing.

I stare in disbelief initially, but then burst out laughing at the cheeky little Nikki, and tried to pull off a trick of my own on her.

"Hey Nikki," I say. " Do you know," I begin earnestly, "they say that if your right hand is bigger than your face, then you are really smart, you know?"

hK's evil plan:

< /formulating ingenius plan >

1. Little Nikki  puts her right hand over her face, seeing if indeed she is Really Smart.
2. I smack her hand quickly, effectively causing her to slap herself on her own face.
3. Cruel laughter ensues.
4. Victory is mine.

< /end ingenius plan >

But instead this is how it turned out:

Little Nikki looks at me for a moment, her bright eyes piercing mine, and her little lower lip curled up in deep thought as she considers my proposition.

"SMELL THE CHEESE!" she says, her right hand missing my nose by inches, and the whole house erupts into laughter as they watched me being given the four-year-old equivalent of the middle finger.

And so it stands - Little Nikki 1 Uncle hK 0.

The Opposite of A Birthday

When You Least Suspect It

The doctor is sitting at his desk, in the area designated to quickly review the less urgent patients.

It has been a relatively quiet day, being a public holiday. He glances at the computer screen and marvels at how decent the patient numbers actually look. Nothing like a public holiday to put into perspective which pains and aches truly could wait.

*BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!*

An alarm shatters the relative silence of the department. He looks towards the alarm and rises from his seat.

Someone had triggered the Emergency Alarm button, calling for help. It was either a doctor, or a patient, and usually a host of doctors and nurses would rush with the resuscitation trolley to wherever the emergency was.

Often times it was a false alarm - a patient would have accidentally triggered it in the toilet or in their cubicles. Often, a nurse would step in and cancel the false alarm.

This one kept alarming.

The doctor keeps walking and looks up at the alarm monitor display. The number 1 flashed in red.

1 spelt trouble. 1 was the resuscitation cubicle.

How To (Desperately Try To) Save A Life

He rushes to the cubicle, and the first thing he sees is A, a fellow colleague who was pumping away on the chest of a patient. Another doctor, J, is feverishly trying to put in a needle in order to give the patient fluids and medications.

There were just the two doctors there as the other doctors were all in handover.

The doctor joins the other two doctors, and the two nurses - one is trying to get a second needle into the other arm, the other one is assisting the patient's breathing with a bag and mask.

The doctor walks up to the head of the bed. His pupils dilate and his pulse quickens. The patient looked young, and fit.

The defibrillation pads are on, and it showed that the patient's heart was beating in an erratic and ineffective manner. A is doing CPR like a man possessed, massaging the patient's heart artificially so that his vital organs remain perfused.

There are shouts in the flurry of chaos for adrenaline, and for fluids to be put up, The nurse are scuttling to and from the drug cupboards, getting the medications. Another nurse is standing in the corner, whose sole purpose is to document everything that is going on.

The doctor takes over from the nurse and helps to ventilate the patient with the bag and mask.

Someone rushes to alert the other doctors who are in handover, and soon, more senior doctors pour in, and take over. Within minutes, the patient is relaxed, and has a tube put down his throat to help us ventilate him easier.

In between the shots of adrenaline and other emergency medications that are called out, we defibrillate the patient, delivering an electric jolt into his body to try and force the heart back into its correct rhythm.

"Charging!" shouts the nurse manning the defibrillator. "Stand clear!" comes the shout once the charging is done. There is a surreal moment of inactivity and silence as we all drop what we are doing and stand away from the patient.  

His body jumps of the bed as 150 Joules of electricity course through him.

We looks at the monitors. His heart is still displaying a poor rhythm.

Doctor after doctor, and nurses have taken turns to pump away at the young man's chest. We have used up a whole array of life-saving medications in our arsenal to try and will this young man back to life.

The senior consultant walks in, and she takes the ultrasound machine to the patient's heart to quickly see if there is a collection of fluid around his heart to explain a lack of response to all our efforts.

There isn't any.

The History

A walks out to the family quickly to try and get a story, and comes back to report that this man was actually here visiting his sister and cousins from F, and he had been here for a month.

He was playing soccer this evening when he had collapsed on the field, and had what looked like a seizure on the field. He was then brought to our department where he was initially conscious and talking before he suddenly lost consciousness.

We give our best efforts in trying to save this man, especially because he was so young. We continued CPR, but a host of medications and multiple shocks to his heart did nothing to bring him back.

The Most Difficult Thing In The World

It was about the hour mark when we called in the family, three male cousins who had just been playing soccer with him that evening.

Loud exclamations of prayers leave their lips as they walked into the cubicle. They struggled to understand the sight before them - their cousin, who was laughing and kicking goals all evening was now lying limp in the bed, dying - lines and tubes coming out from him everywhere.

We continue CPR for another fifteen minutes in their presence, and the senior consultant reaches for the ultrasound and checks his heart again.

She looks up. "I am sorry," she says. "We have tried everything that we could - we have given him multiple shocks and a whole heap of medications and called the specialists about him. We have done everything that we can for him, and he is not responding to our efforts."

"What do you mean?!" one of them protests, a little too loudly. "You can't stop now!!"

"People whose hearts stop beating for a long period of time will suffer brain damage, and even if we do bring him back now, we will not make a meaningful recovery."

The other two cousins look on, unsure how to react.

"Oi,_____!" they call out his name, and shake his left leg. "(Wake up, ______! Can you hear me, woi?! Stop fooling around, man! It's time to wake up! Wake up _____!)" they shout in their native tongue.

It was an act of disbelief and desperation as their minds struggled with this new reality.

"He is no longer alive," the senior consultant says gently. "I am really sorry for your loss."

""You can't give up now! You CAN'T give up now!"

The younger doctors and nurses step away from the patient, their heads bowed.

There is an uneasy silence in Resus Cubicle 1. It is almost a sacred silence.

"He's still breathing, but," they say as they watch their cousin draw in deep dying breaths.

"Yes, dying people do that sometimes," says the consultant again, gently.

The doctors and nurses trickle out of the cubicle as the consultant explains to the family what needs to happen from this point on.

The three cousins then push past the curtains, and begin the eternal journey back to the interview room full of other waiting family members to tell them the bad news.

********************************************

What Happens After

The doctor walks past the interview room back to his working area, and his steps are interrupted as a primal cry of grief escapes the doors as the news is broken.

He gulps.

He sits down, shaken. This young man's parents, who were several continents away, were about to receive a life-changing call that night.

There is a different atmosphere in the Emergency Department - a mournful, respectful air - as the department quietly grieves for one who had died so young.

The family in turn visit Resus 1 to say their final reluctant farewells to him, and the grief is most palpable in the plaintive sobs of his sister.

******************************

The doctor goes out to the front desk again. A is standing behind him.

He and A goes back several years now, and A is a top-notch doctor, fully committed to his job, and had brought many patients back from the brink of death.

Not this one, however.

The doctor turns around and sees the vacant stare in A's eyes as he considers what else we could have done to save this young man's life. He can see A's eyes glisten with moisture, and he cannot be sure if it is tears of grief, anger at the helplessness of the situation or resignation.

J is nearby, and sees A, too.

You want to go for a drink after this? asks J.

Hey, A, you want to go for a drink after this? asks J again, as A does not reply.

A snaps out of his meandering ruminations, and manages an Okay. There is little time for what-ifs right now, as A has to tie up the loose ends with all his other patients before leaving work tonight. 

The patient was twenty nine.

*************************************

I think about my thirtieth birthday, a week ago to the day. And I am at a loss as to why some of us are allowed to live on, and others don't. 

I think about medicine, and I think about the doctors, nurses, and paramedics who have to deal with death at work, and then grapple with living once more when they get home.  

Who knows when our name will be called home again. May we brave and honest enough to look at our lives, and be completely happy with how we are living it today. 

Flipping Your First Digit Part 3

3) The Dinner

If there is one thing that I pride myself in, it is this - although I may not be the smartest man in the world, I am pretty good at sensing out surprises, and reading people.

After deep thought and careful consideration, with a crack team of specialists and consultants to dissect what went wrong with hK's iNtuition 2.0, here was why I didn't see it coming:

1) My brother was away in Brisbane. There was no way that he would have made it for my party, I thought.

2) I thought I knew Karen really well, and she was a fairly private person, fond of small parties, and one-on-one catch ups.

3) There was no clue or indication from any of my friends that this was going to happen. No sms went astray, no e-mail accidentally got sent my way.

This was done by professionals.

4) Karen kept telling me that we were going away to a special place for dinner, and whenever I pressed her throughout the whole day she would stonewall and say "I'm not telling" or "Stop guessing already!". She would subtly drop hints that it was a candlelit dinner for two at a fancy restaurant. Cheeky.

5) I didn't think I deserved any of this.

Which explains this:









My name is HK, and I am here today to audition for the role of The Deer in Headlights. Take 1. 


It was a glorious surprise birthday party, and one that I completely did not expect.

It was only in that split second, at the top of the stairs in Animal Orchestra as I approached the room when I saw the darkened room did my tiny brain finally compute - Wait there's something wrong here... The lights are off because...  

By which time it was too late, of course.

My brother had come all the way from Brisbane for my 30th, and friends from different times and parts of my life showed up as well.

I was really touched. In fact, thinking about it, I still am really touched, and a little unbelieving that so many friends had taken the time to come and celebrate my 30th birthday.

Five minutes later, when they had finally resuscitated me after I had collapsed from overwhelming joy, there were hugs all around, and a good deal of catching up over the great spread that Animal Orchestra had prepared for us.

I got toasted and roasted that night - some people said some very nice, sweet things about me, and reminded me of certain random acts of kindness, but a majority took turns to bag me, telling me I was a bad doctor, a sleepover parasite, a terrible guitarist, a pantry raider (it's pantry, Mum, not panty)  and an all around grown-up child.

Thanks, you guys. :)

But the pinnacle of the presentations was one that my brother had painstakingly prepared for weeks in Brisbane, which contained some very revealing childhood pictures courtesy of my Mum and sis.

Now, thanks to them, all my friends have seen the photos of baby hK's tiny kukucheau [err... the Cantonese equivalent of s*h*o*g or p*e*n*i*s (oops, I have to fire my censorship editor)].

Unfortunately, I can't show it to you here on the blog because it's a Powerpoint presentation.

In fact I don't think I want to show it to you here on the blog even if I could, in case your kids are reading this (and laughing at my small kuk... Never mind.)

But even that couldn't stop me from having a good time, to be really thankful for friends who cared, and who showered me with gifts.

Me birthday bounty... arr!(talk like a pirate fail)


Then came the cake - oh the pretty pretty cupcakes! They had thought of everything!

The cupcakes actually say "HUNK" but they didn't have enough space. Haha!


The cupcakes were an elegant masterstroke by Karen - they had the letters 'HK' and '30' on them, and were almost too pretty to eat. But eat them we did, and the sugar high led to a glut of photos being taken as the night dwindled to a close.

I was still buzzing as I left Animal Orchestra that night. Karen laughed as she recounted the amount of lying and sneaking around she had to do in order to get my friend's contacts, and to plan the party. I laughed and I chided her mockingly, but I couldn't have loved her any more than I did right then.

She breathed a sigh of relief that it was finally over, as well, because the preparations had taken its toll on everyone involved in the planning, including my brother, who wanted to make sure that the party was perfect.

Thank you all, for taking the time to share today with me; for a love so richly undeserved, and for friendships and relationships that bring me so much joy just thinking about it.

For someone who thrives on words, none will do justice to how happy you have made me feel as I turned the decade.

And if I haven't said it enough already, I love you all. Truly, I do.

Flipping Your First Digit Part 2

2) Lunch and A Very Surprising Gift

After the spa, K joined me again, and we were both beaming - me, radiating with my post-spa glow, and K, glad to join me again after two hours.

We walked along the beach and then made our way to Donovan's where we had a really yummy lunch.

We decided that seafood was the theme of the day, so we had oysters, crab bisque (an atas way of saying soup), prawns and barramundi fillets (an atas way of saying Filet-O'-Fish).

We then went home to get some rest, and this was where Karen surprised me with this:

Surprise! Mum, if you're reading this, congratulations!


Okay, okay - as you can see, thirty years body does not equal a thirty years brain.

Eat your heart out, JK Rowling.


Karen actually took excerpts from my blog and she's making it into a book! How cool is that, eh? Soon you will be able to see my book on all the bookshelves and there will be book signings, of course, and it will be made into a huge motion picture starring my major movie-lookalike:

The resemblance is uncanny.  

But in all seriousness, I really appreciate the time and effort that Karen has taken to make something really meaningful for me, making a lifelong wish come true. This is how thoughtful and special Karen is, and I love her for that.

All this, and still, nothing prepared me for the night.

Flipping Your First Digit Part 1

Since I had the absolute pleasure of working fifteen hours on my birthday, K decided that we would bring forward the celebrations to the Friday before.

Here's how the day unfolded:

1) This is Spa-rta!

So where are we going? I ask Karen in the morning.

I don't want to tell you, she said, a much repeated phrase throughout the day.

We made a wonderful roundabout trip to end up in St Kilda Baths, where I was treated to this:

Yes, that's right folks, K hired me my very own topless woman.

No, no, I was treated to a (very manly) spa treatment session, which was an absolute luxury for me. This was my first time ever in a spa, and so I walked really uncomfortably in the provided cotton bathrobe and slippers, feeling very much in my birthday (haha!) suit.

I spent the next half an hour in a jacuzzi, by myself, thinking about life while jets of hot salted water made its way to every nook and cranny of my body. (My apologies to my readers who like to visualise as they read).

There was a soft knock on the door half an hour later, an indication from my massage therapist Irene that she was ready whenever I was.

And so I dried myself, and opened the door to the awaiting Irene, who brought me to this other room where I was told to make myself comfortable on the table, face down.

I have never been so comfortable face down on a table before.

She started off with the Back Polishing, where she literally sprinkled sea salt over my back, and then started spreading the salt with her hands and kneading it into me, marinating me as if I were a huge piece of thirty-year old meat about to be cooked for some giant's dinner.

Fe Fi Fo Fum,
I smell the blood of a Chinese bum. 

(Once again, apologies to my readers who take everything literally and like to visualise as they read.)

After half an hour of scrubbing, she then proceeded to my hour long massage, where she began to work firmly on every part of my body. And by every part of my body I mean...

...excluding my private areas.

(My apologies to all my rea... never mind.)

It was a really good massage, although I think I will need it every week for the rest of my life, but I don't think I can ever afford the luxury. And luxury it was indeed, as I was spoilt that morning in a way that I haven't been spoilt until...

Well, until... that night.