Thoughts On Turning Thirty-Two.

Today I turn thirty-two.

I look at my life and I see how richly blessed I am - a loving wife and best friend, surrounded by family and friends who I love and who love me, and I am happy at work.

It is strange then, that today, I think about dying.

Don't get me wrong. I am not contemplating suicide, or have received bad news and I'm certainly not depressed.

I have seen three deaths in the past three weeks in my ED. Two of them were young and unexpectedly sudden, and no amount of miracle of modern medicine could bring them back.

A lot of us fear death. We try and fight it off with health supplements and exercising regularly. Others build monuments unto themselves - we get a wing of a hospital building named after us, we build statues or get our names written in history books, we write blogs that will last forever in cyberspace. (erhem)

We try and grasp at immortality, hoping that one day someone will remember us, whisper our name, and knew that we somehow mattered. But buildings are torn down, statues will crumble, and blogs can easily be deleted.

All my life, there have been moments when I have simply thought that I would rather be dead. Most of the time, it is right before something stressful is about to happen, with all the anxious anticipation leading up to it. I cannot count the number of times that I have prayed for God to take me right before some major exam (He never obliged) or when I had to address a huge crowd, or (when I was a little more junior) some night shifts at work where I had to be in charge of the Emergency Department.

The other times I have thought about dying is when I look back at a life well lived, and then having that passing thought of 'You know what, I could die right now, and it would be fine.'

I do not fear death. Suffering, perhaps, but not death.

The main reason for that, I think, is a quiet confidence in my God. I do not claim to be a model Christian, I am not sure if I have even won one soul to His Kingdom and I lead a life that some would raise their eyebrows at.

But I have a quiet assurance in who my God is. I have heard Him roaring in the hurricanes during the storms of my life, I have heard His whispers when I am surrounded by nature. I catch up with Him from time to time, praying in my car on the long drives to Bendigo and the Northern, understanding His heart in church on Sundays, wrestling with Him when I see injustices in a broken world. I see His fingerprints all over the story of my life and I rejoice when I recognise it in the stories my friends tell me.

I find His penmanship in my Bible but also in movies like The Dark Knight and Matrix and Avatar and the myriad of other stories that deal with sin and salvation. 

And I know this - that I can trust Him. That I have journeyed with Him through my father's disability, through my own surgery and through times of great rejoicing as well, and I know that His heart is good. And hopefully one day, when I do cross over into the other side, He will look up at me and say 'Hey, I know you.'

The Bucks Stops Here (Final Part)

Activity Three: Dinner and That's Super, Man!

We drove for an hour and a half back to the city after our adventures in Torquay, and headed to our next destination - Squire's Loft in the city for our Man Meal.

Smile for the camera,
unsuspecting victim!

And so we sat over ribs, and steaks and mounds of chips, each of us tired and hungry from the day's exertions. By this time Alex had joined us for dinner, and we recounted the day's events to him as we wolfed down our meals.

Then came the session of questioning by my brother and everyone else present. They had asked Karen a few personal questions about our relationship and I had to get every one correct, otherwise I was punished.

It was at this moment, when I thought that this was as bad as it got, when my brother suddenly pulled out this costume he had kept hidden in a plastic bag. It was a Superman costume.

My heart sank immediately. I was going to say my stomach was filled with butterflies but by this time,  the butterflies were competing with steak, fries, ribs and drinks. My brother led me up to the bathroom upstairs and I changed into the outfit. I was terrified about what they were going to ask me to do next.

I walked down the stairs and was greeted by cheers, both from the bucks and the other patrons gathered there.

Oh, dear Lord.

I look like I'm in boxers.
And nothing else.

My brother pulled out my tasksheet for the night - I had to ask random women in Melbourne for their names, phone numbers, to rate my hotness, and to see if they would give me a kiss and a hug.

Each women held a promise of a maximum of 18 points, which meant that I had to ask a minimum of 6 women that night for their details. The questions were marked accordingly - 2 points for a real phone number, 1 point for a fake one. 4 points if they kissed me on the lips, 3 points if they kissed me on the cheek, and 2 points if they kissed the paper I was holding.

Reluctantly, the Man of Steel-A-Little-Nervous-About-This went out into the Melbourne night with its hordes of drunken revellers. I was sure I would die or at the very least, get beaten up tonight.

I was trying to remember if we left a Super tip that night.

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

The first women we approached were thankfully a little drunk and very obliging. I got two women outside a pub on a quiet street to answer my questions in quick succession, and soon I was flying (hurhur) - 24 points! This was going to be a breeze!

Some wonderfully sporting patrons.

My bucks saw that thought creep into my head, and then laid down the law. Oi, you're only allowed to ask one girl per street, they said.

One girl per... Luckily I wore my underpants on the outside, otherwise I would have soiled it.

And so, began my journey into the heart of town, and the Saturday night crowd.



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

The first major street we walked down was Bourke Street. The harmless, faceless shopping strip in the daytime suddenly was filled with every eye upon me, and it didn't help that my friends kept singing the Superman theme song (Da da da dum, da da dum, Da da da dum, DA DA DUM!) every time I crossed the street.

I approached women who seemed nice, enough - Asian if I could (usually more obliging) although I had some really nice Caucasian women join in on the fun. And so it was a cycle of  'Excuse me miss, I'm sorry to trouble you, but it's my bucks, and my friends are b@stards, and I would like to ask if I could take five minutes of your time to answer some questions for me?'

That's me - The Apologetic Man Of Steel. I felt like I was trying to convince them to join World Vision or Save The Children. (work done by actual superheroes)

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

Some highlights of the night:

1) A few adventurous women who kindly played along and answered my questions, rating me a 10 on a hotness scale, who said that yes, they would date me, and kissed me on the cheek (no one dared kiss me on my lips. Thankfully.) (I am a carrier of 2 communicable diseases. Haha!)

Melbourne city welcomes superheroes.

2) The random drunk guys who yelled out Superman! at me or the girls flapped my cape behind me as I stood at the traffic lights waiting for it to turn green (law-abiding superhero, that's me.)

3) The best comment for the night was from a young kid who found out I was getting married who asked, 'You're getting married? That's like, committing yourself to one pussy for the rest of your life, man!' to which I shot back, 'Better make it a good one then!'

4) People singing the Superman theme upon seeing me, or some variation of it. (I'm sorry, why is everyone telling me to Superman that ho?)

5) Having my Super-nipple tweaked by a guy as I walked past him (okay, so it wasn't a highlight, it was more like a WTF can't you see this uniform and know what I am capable of doing to you moment?)



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

And so after an hour of walking through the heart of the city and getting sequentially loved/rejected by Melbourne's women that night, we ended up in Fed Square close to midnight. I had 85 points and was almost on the home stretch.

Her invisible plane is parked atop that cop car behind us.

That was when we saw Wonder Woman.

It was a rub your eyes, are you kidding me, this is too good to be true moment. There she was, standing in all her Wonder Glory waiting for her partner The Riddler to get his fries.

My bucks pushed me up to her and I started my awkward questions. Luckily, she was a great sport and answered all my questions in her Scottish Wonder-accent.

I got a 14 out of 18 possible points, which brought my total up to 99 marks. Some of my bucks wanted me to go up to one more girl but the others said that this was a perfect way of ending the night.

Relieved, I swung my cape around and we headed back towards the city. We were all smiling after an enjoyable buck's day, and night, and ending it on a high.

But the night was not yet over.

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

We were walking along Swanston Street, approaching Flinder's Lane when suddenly there was the sickening sound of crunching glass, followed by a collective gasp from the Saturday night crowd which suddenly came to a standstill.

It was eerily quiet for two seconds before you could hear a couple of the girls saying 'Oh my God, look away! Don't look, Becky!'

Instinct told me an accident had happened and years of emergency training had conditioned me to run towards the danger rather than away from it.

A man lay crumpled on the floor, the offending car stopped a few metres away from him, the windshield spidered from where his head had hit it.

His friend was squatting over him, and a group of men had gathered around him, seeing if they could help.

'Someone call an ambulance,' I said.

'I can help, I am an emergency doctor.'

His friend, a big guy with thick rimmed spectacles looked up at me, visibly tense, and shouted at me, 'Mate, I'm a paramedic. Piss off!'

I looked up at him, before realising that I was still in my Superman costume and told him, 'No, you don't understand, I am an emergency doctor.'

'No, you're drunk and dressed in a Superman costume, and this is a real emergency, so piss off!'

We would have wasted a good few minutes reasoning this way but luckily Alex, a senior emergency registrar friend of mine who was dressed in a more respectable clothes crouched beside me and said 'We're emergency doctors at the Northern. We can help.'

It was only then when the friend relaxed and we discussed about how best to manage the victim. There was a trickle of blood under his head and I was a little worried when I had trouble finding a pulse, but soon the victim groaned and began to rouse.

'Mate, you're in the city. You've just been involved in an accident, and the ambulance is on the way. Now stay still, all right?' He couldn't remember that it was Saturday, or that he was in the city, and was quite obviously concussed, but looked otherwise all right.

The police had begun to arrive and started forming a parameter around the victim. Not two minutes had passed when the sirens of an ambulance pierced through the night, the flashing red and blue lights bringing salvation.

We soon collectively log-rolled the man onto his back, where the bleeding gash above his left eyebrow became evident, which we put a pressure dressing on before helping him onto the stretcher.

My good friend Anthony took this awesome shot.

The police and paramedics saw that the man was awake, at least, and relaxed a little. Soon the inevitable wisecracks came - 'Thanks, Superman! Couldn't have done it without you!' or 'Saving the day again huh?' or 'They pay you overtime for this?'.

I gave my statement to the police officer, who asked quietly whether I thought this would go pear-shaped, and I said to him, he'll probably be okay. You could see the young blonde driver in the distance, being comforted as she was still shaken by the accident.

There was a veil of seriousness amongst my friends as we departed from what was a near-tragic situation but that soon lifted as we told them that he was going to be okay. Soon they were joking and laughing again, everyone going on about how truly epic this night had turned out to be, and how they had it all on their cameras.

One friend joked that no matter how amazing his buck's turns out to be one day when he finally gets married, he will say 'Ah, but it isn't Heng Khuen's buck's.'

We said our goodbyes, and I finally got home and crawled out of my spandex suit (Quick joke: Why is Superman's suit always tight? Because he wears a size S), plonking down on my couch and nestling to sleep, tired after an extraordinary day.

The rest of what happens to the story you know about.

Special thanks to my brother for planning the buck's (including the accident, some joked) and to all my friends who celebrated my last week of singlehood with me.

Who knows why these things happen, but let's just say that today was proof that my God has a wonderful sense of timing and humour.

Super friends.

The Bucks Stops Here (Part 2)

Activity Two: Shouting Until You're Horse

After a quick lunch at Anglesea, we said goodbye to Ciaran who had to leave for a friend's 30th. We drove to Aireys Inlet for the next part of our buck's - horse-riding. 

Horse-riding conjures up all these wonderful images - of the elegant Rohirrim riders of Rohan in Lord Of the Rings or of the majestic William Wallace atop his horse in Braveheart convincing his Scottish countrymen to remind the English that 'they may take our lives, but they will never take OUR ...FREEDOM!'

You know, these guys.

(P.S. How about your mullet, Braveheart?
Can we take that instead?)

All the armoured-knight and kilt-laden fantasies disappeared the moment we opened our car door and took a huge whiff of reality - the scent of horse manure. It was a smell we needed to get used to, yet it took all our strength not to close our car doors again. 

"Horse Poo 4 Sale - $2" somehow didn't have the same poetry as Mel Gibson's stirring speech. 

Although the horse might beg to differ.

Most of us there - with the exception of my brother, Jonathan and Wai Hong - were first-timers.We were keen, however, to develop our masculine instincts for taming these graceful yet wild beasts which men have travelled on for thousands of years.

As beginners, however, we were given the sedate horses. Horses with names like Chucky, and Bayley, and Lorrie (and Sleepy, and Doc and Grumpy).

I think my horse was named Chucky because that's what you
felt like doing after riding him for awhile.
Chucky, hurhurhur.

We were given a quick ten minute lesson on where to put our feet into the stirrups, how to hold the reins, and how to get the horses to move forward, stop and turn. 

Having immediately forgotten everything we were taught, we were then helped up onto the horses, and headed off into the direction of the well-worn trail path with our somewhat sedate horses. (They were really so sedate I'm tempted to call them horsies).

About ten minutes into the trail walk, our instructor turns around and tells us that we were going to learn how to trot now. She taught us how to kick our horses in the side and how to time our rhythm with that of the trotting horse. We were supposed to rise with each trot and fall as the horse lands.

Apply generously to bottom.

Supposed to, being the operative word here. Having all the coordination of a drunken sailor with a middle ear infection, I somehow managed to sit as the horse's body rose and stand as the horse's body fell. Which is the same effect as having your ass/groin paddled consistently for a 60-second period. Which is bad news for all intentions of having children in the future. (Sorry, Mum).

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

That was not the only drama of the day. En route to the beach, where my brother was insistent we would canter with the wind whipping into our hairs while lasso-ing unsuspecting sunbathers, the lead horse suddenly got spooked by strong winds and took off.

The other horses, never having ever had to think for themselves before, bolted as well and soon we were cantering through the small paths in the forest for a good thirty seconds. I was grabbing hard onto my saddle and pulled on the reins with all my might, telling Chucky to slow the hell down. All my horse whispering worked, and soon Chucky slowed down from his blistering pace.

There was an eerie silence as I looked up and saw our instructors' shocked face looking back towards me, her eyes surveying the damage. Her open mouth betrayed the fact that all was not well behind me.

I turned around and saw that two of the riders were on the ground, having been thrown off their horses.

One of them was Hawch, who had taken to jumping off his bolting horse, and attempted to cushion the floor by rolling on his shoulder. The other was my brother, and he wasn't moving at first.

I turned Chucky around and approached them slowly. Both my brother and Hawch soon started groaning and painfully got themselves up, dusting themselves off before checking for damage. Both of them were a little bruised, but thankfully nothing seemed broken.

The mood of the party had dampened then. This close shave served as a reminder about how potentially dangerous today's activities could have been. Hawch and my brother walked a distance before being convinced by the instructor to get back on to their horses, which they did gingerly and a little reluctantly.

It was all a cautious walk with the horses from this point, as both our instructors talked between themselves to figure out what went wrong back there. The trodden dirt paths soon turned into gravel roads as we approached civilisation - we were now in a residential area, giving way to cars, and waiting patiently while the horses pooped or peed at will.

Today's interesting lesson about horses - when male horses pee, their generous penises come out, and then they bucket out their pee, as if they were putting out a small forest fire, and then, just like magic, their penis retracts completely out of sight. That is a party trick I would lov... erm, never mind.

Haha! You thought I was going to put a picture of a horse's 
you-know-what here, weren't you?
I think this one's best left to your imagination!

We all stopped our horses at a car park near the beach. The wind whipped strongly against our faces. Our two instructors, already wary from today's accident, had a discussion between themselves and then decided that it was probably unwise to continue on to canter on the beach.

We all agreed, being a little shaken by the incident, although my brother was still keen to go ahead as he wanted to complete our experience.

Majority won in the end, and we turned around and walked our horses back the way we came. The trip home was less eventful, thankfully. We even managed to trot for a bit of it, our collective confidence returning.

One of the unforgettable moments we had to capture with the cameras of our minds was the breathtaking view of the lagoon shimmering in the evening sun beneath us as we made our way down the hills.

We all made it back in one piece, and were relieved to get off our horses, our gait a little unsteady from being on the rocking horses for a good part of two hours. We each let out a laugh of relief that we weren't too severely injured, and removed our protective helmets and boots, taking photos before heading for our next destination.

No one died! High fives all around!

The Bucks Stops Here (Part 1)

My brother had been planning my buck's night for awhile now, keeping it a secret and flashing his silly grin whenever I tried to worm out of him what he had in store for me. All he had to say was that it would be 'epic', and I am always worried whenever my brother says that, because:

1) It may not be epic.

2) It may turn out epic, but in a bad way.

We got up bright and early Saturday morning and convened at his house in Royal Parade. There were nine of us - Ciaran, Anthony, Jonathan, Wai Hong, Haw Chuan, Ben, Juwen, my brother and myself. 

Pleased to meet you. Prepare to be hurt. 

After a round of quick introductions, we hopped into three cars and made our way to Torquay where our day was about to begin.

Activity One: Surfin' In The AUS

We made it to Torquay about ten minutes late, and we walked into the surf shop and quickly paid for our lessons before heading off to the beach. 

Smiling, because ignorance of the impending pain is bliss. 

The beach was a fifteen minute drive away, and we got lost on the way, which made us even later. Our two instructors were not pleased about this, and one kept barking at us to quickly get changed and pick up our surfboards while the other one was nicer, and kept away all our car keys. 

We were shown the basics of surfing by having some mock exercises on the beach - the nicer guy made us form a circle and then showed us all the nuances of surfing - 

1) First, grab the sides of the surfboard - the "rails" - when you see the white waves about a sufboard's length away from you

2) Then paddle really, really hard as if you were being attacked by sharks

3) When the wave hits you, clamber up on your knees while keeping your hands touching the deck of the surfboard

4) Put your right or left leg through your hands

5) Stand up with one foot in front of the other

6) Maintain your balance

7) Congratulations, you are officially surfing

There were some of us who were naturals at this - Juwen was riding the waves on his first attempt while Ciaran was obviously a beast at surfing and tackled the waves with ease.

All of us had some measure of success. All, except for one. 

Guess which one. 

Well, let's just say that after two hours of toil and a repeat demonstration on the beach by the nicer instructor, I managed to get to step 5) for all of one second before falling butt-first into the sea. 

It was the best one second I've ever had on a surf-board.

I was this guy for all of one second.

My brother, who's usually quite nice, looked at me and even he conceded 'You, and balance, you're not really friends, are you?'

'Friends? We're not even acquaintances!'

Two hours later, drained by the cold water, battling the waves and repeated butt-falling, we walked out of the sea, exhausted but exhilarated from trying our hands (and butts) at surfing. It was a first for many of us, we walked out with surfboards in hand, feeling like real men, having conquered the waves.

All, except for one.

Guess which one.