The Lessons of Lorong Haji Taib: Part 1

You want a story? I've got a story for you.

There were five of us - Vincent, Jeremy, Siew Tat, Khong Nam and myself.

We were eighteen then, bored and restless one night. Let's go clubbing, said Siew Tat.By the time we got to the clubs, it was already about three a.m., and they were closing for the night. Sien ah.

We were sitting in my car, wondering what to do next when Jeremy pipped up- 'Hey, what about we go and see Lorong Haji Taib?'

Five teenage boys. Whose ears perked up at the mention of Lorong Haji Taib - a place only whispered or laughed about in school in hamsup (lewd) conversations about sensual massages, transvestites and streetwalkers.

We swallowed hard. Our goosebumps raised at the thought of doing something so dangerous, our hearts raced and our penises throbbed at the thought of the forbidden fruit.

I looked around at the other four boys. Loud braggers who had always described how we would 'do' it with this or that girl, one day - the usual big talk for five virgin boys. Always.

After a few wrong turns, I finally got us there in my Dad's car. We did the smart thing and parked our car far, far away from the actual street itself. Being the cautious Malaysians about to wander into a potentially dangerous situation, we took out all our wallets and the ones who had handphones bundled them all into the glove compartment, although Jeremy brought his, just in case.

Fifty ringgits in each of our pockets, with two hundred sitting safely in the car. Steering wheel lock - on. Car alarm - on.

Set.

We looked at each other, guilt flashing in our eyes briefly before we broke out into smiles and headed off into the night in search of adventure.

Lorong Haji Taib 

was everything we imagined. The shops below had their metal shutters drawn for the night, but the stairs leading up to the second and third floors of the old shophouses were lit with cheap fluorescent lights, drawing customers like moths to the many prostitutes/transvestites standing at the entrances below.

We motioned each other to the single cars parked with their brake lights on in the distance, their windows open, the driver haggling a price with the hooker leaning against his window.

We sniggered. We swallowed harder.

'Oi, brudder!' we suddenly heard a call to our right. "You want massage ah?"

We stopped and turned to look at the Indian man calling out to us.

"You want massage?" he repeated.

We hesitated. "Er no lah, uncle, thanks very much." I brought up my hand and weakly smiled my declination.

"We got all kinds of girls... You don't have to try. Just see first lah... Can choose anyone."

I didn't like the look of the seedy Indian man, and quickly glanced at Siew Tat, Vincent and Khong Nam, motioning to them to keep walking. When I turned around, I saw Jeremy's back, following that man into an alley.

Ah, crap.

"Eh, shit lah... Jeremy!"

Jeremy briefly turned, his big head of hair covering his chubby, enthiusiastic "Come on, guys, this is our chance!" face. I ran after him, and the rest of them ambled along unsurely towards the alleyway.

It was a really narrow and dimly lit alley between the shops, and we walked past these two Indian aunties who looked briefly up from their newspapers at us. I could have sworn I saw them shaking their heads. 

I caught up to Jeremy, and both him and I followed the man into this dingy shophouse. There was a solitary lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and nothing else. No furniture. Nothing else. Not a single damned thing. This was bad news.

We suddenly heard the steel shuttered gate slam behind us. And then the uncle locked it. This was really bad news.

Two other Indian men suddenly appeared, and all our initial excitement was now replaced with a more recognisable emotion - fear. Their eyes were redshot from the mix of toddy and whatever drugs they had been taking, and my knees suddenly went weak with the very real thought that we could get hurt tonight, or worse.

"So kamu mahu massage ah? (So you want massage ah?)" one of them smiled leeringly at us, his features accentuated in the scant light offered by the bulb.

"Er... No lah, brudder. I, erm... we're actually quite tired already... I think we're going to go lah.... No need massage already."

"Masuk sini, mesti mahu massage. (Come in here, must massage)" He had lost his smile, and I was about to lose my continence.

"N--n--no lah, brudder," I stammered. "I'm really quite tired. Anyway, my three friends are waiting outside..."

The Indian uncle who had lured us in motioned to the other drug-addled sidekick, and within a minute, we were joined by Khong Nam, Vincent and Siew Tat. The steel gate slammed shut sickeningly again, and I looked at the three of them apologetically.

All three picked up the fear in both our eyes, and it was contagious - their nostrils started flaring and they started breathing shallower as well.Our fight-or-flight response kicked in, and we were ready to take our chances with these three Indian men. Number-wise we were on top, but if you compared our sizes, despite being five on three, I would say, we were pretty even.

"So, who wants the massage?" the uncle growled, interrupting the virtual fight that we were taking on in our heads. 

Our pupils dilated, our heads almost shook in unison.

"Eh, uncle never mind lah. We give you money. Forget about the massage."

"Eh. Fuck you! You come in already. You must have massage. I don't care."

I looked at my friends, and felt responsible for getting them into this situation. My mind worked overtime. Maybe it wasn't time for mortal combat. Maybe it was time for diplomacy.

"Eh uncle, okaylah, okaylah. Just me and my friend here. We'll go for the massage."

I pulled Jeremy with me and we turned around to look at the rest briefly before the uncle led us to

The Second Floor

Imagine two beds side by side. Imagine two beds that've been used by many men over the years, that's never been cleaned the whole time. See the rust collecting on the steel frame, see the stains showing up by the fluorescent light above, smell the years of bodily fluids crusting on the mattress.

"Okay. Take off all your clothes. Your girls will come soon."

 "Pay first ah. Fifty ringgit."

What?!

"Each."
 
Shit lah. I knew we were being taken for a ride, but the menacing uncle had convinced me one hundred ringgit was a small price to pay compared to, oh, say, a slow painful death, our bodies never to be found  again. 

Let's get this over with, I thought. Jeremy and I quickly undressed, and we folded our clothes into the only other piece of furniture in the room - a bare cupboard at the back of the room a distance away from the bed.

We barely had time to pop ourselves down onto the rickety bed before our 'girls' arrived. You guessed it - the two Indian aunties who we had passed on the way in. I am being kind here when I say that one of them looked like she had been run over by a truck and never really recovered from it, while the other one looked like her uglier older sister.

"Okay, baring depan (Okay, lie face down)." We fearfully did as we were told as I had the strong sense of the uncle lingering outside the room.

Jeremy and I lied next to each other on the bed, almost naked. The night was turning out swell. I looked at him, and whispered,

"Hey, Jeremy? If we survive this, I'm going to kill you."

Green Thumbed

I woke up this morning after four hours' sleep and decided that I would do something that I had put off for a long time - cleaning the backyard.

The last time I remember cleaning the backyard was for my brother's 30th birthday celebrations, oh, let's say two years ago.

Okay, I am not your typical slob... I do clean the house when inspired (every few months) and I like a relatively organised space. I am not a neat freak, though - it's not like I have colour-coded my underwear (anymore) and I am happy to leave certain things unwashed in the sink until there is a critical mass (or until the leftover food on the plate starts to grow legs).

My previous housemate, Li and I took up the enormous task of cleaning the backyard two years ago. Like explorers, we took our gloves and machetes (read: meat cleaver) to the jungle that was the backyard and started pulling away at weeds and hacking away at overhanging branches. I had the added advantage that Li worked part time as a gardener in one of the local houses to supplement his student income.

Several hours later we stood over the empty courtyard, victorious once more over all that nature had to throw at us - some poor defenceless grass and a few helpless branches.

This time, however, I have had to go at cleaning up two years of accumulated mess alone. I lifted up a garbage bag of leaves that had been sitting there for some time to reveal a tiny ecosystem of earthworms and a hundred silvery wriggling things (which I thankfully did not recognise) as well. Gross.

As I pulled away at the grass and weeds with my rubber-gloved hands, the number of creepy-crawlies amplified - here a spider pregnant with eggs, there a fluttering moth, and mosquitoes everywhere.

The tree in the back had overgrown again, and I looked pensively at it after an hour or so of clearing the weeds and dead leaves below. I finally got my brother to bring the meat cleaver again, and I whispered a quick apology before hacking away at the branches.

You know that scene in ninja/kung fu movies where the hero cuts through a forest deftly with his sword and bamboos and branches fall around and behind him as he takes a stance and faces off his enemy coolly?

That was so not me.

The meat cleaver was blunt, and after hacking at the green branches for ten minutes, the branches had barely a graze. The tree shook in the wind, as if laughing at me, and saying 'Is that all you got?' before smacking me around with some of its branches.

I remember all my training in my sporadic years as a Boy Scout (Tenderfoot extraordinaire) and took to the branches but this time at a 45 degree angle and then pulling as hard as I could as the bark showed. It started to work, and soon it was me laughing at the tree, cutting off its multiple low lying limbs and clearing the pathway for the sunlight so that the weeds below could grow healthily once more.

Oops. I think I just undid a morning's worth of hard work.

Random Memories: Eight Years Old  

I remember when we were still kids, we used to have a garden outside our home in TD. We had a mango tree and a papaya one as well, with a healthy layer of grass underneath to complete the Home of The Year look.

Every few months, the grass would grow to a point where we were sent out to go and 'pluck the grass'. We would grab at it with our bare hands, throwing it into a pile in a corner, wishing all the time that we owned a goat that would eat our work away.

The reward after two hours of hard work was that you got to set the grass on fire. This was before the days of hazes and environmental consciousness and pollution. We would set a newspaper on fire at the kitchen stove and then run through the dining room, walk gingerly past the living room and then try and stuff it into the stack of grass.

I remember as kids we were entrusted with the task of blowing up the fire - we would huff and puff until our faces went blue and we staggered a little from the hyperventilation - it was then we decided fanning it with newspapers were the smarter option.

I would laugh gleefully as the flames finally consumed the grass, sending puffs of smoke and dancing pieces of charred newspaper up into the air. All that was left in the end was a mound of ashes which we used to fertilise the trees, and the... grass and... weeds again.

Oops. I think I just undid two hours worth of hard work.

A New Year. A New Resolution.

Happy 2011 to all my friends, family and readers, who have given up reading this blog entirely for the sole reason that they have married and remarried, have had four babies and moved into nursing homes waiting for me to put up another post since my last one!

Haha! Indeed, this blog has been forsaken for the far quicker gratification of the mistress that is Facebook. Add to that the iPad and hanging out at Karen's and there you have my year in a nutshell. 

But no longer. This will be a year of returning to my first love - of writing, and telling stories.  Terribly.

Random Memories: Nine Years Old

Karen and I were walking along Box Hill aka Asian Central after dinner yesterday, and out of curiosity, we strolled into what looked like a candy and snack shop.

The shop itself was a curiosity - it sold your average snacks and drinks, but then there were display cabinets displaying soft toys (understandable) and bras (what the?!) for sale.

We sauntered around the shop a bit, picking snacks at leisure. As we were checking out, my vision strayed onto these little square boxes sitting enticingly along the counter, and my eyes suddenly lit up with nostalgic recognition!

These bubble gum boxes were the stuff of my childhood - sold everywhere, from supermarket counters to the old grandfather-vendor who used to sit outside my primary school.

They were sold for the measly price of 10 sen each, and brought me much happiness as a child. Four little baubles of bubble gum, bursting with fruit flavours! My favourite was the grape flavour, and so I bought a box with little hesitation.

For the mere price of 30 Australian cents I suddenly held a key to my childhood again, as I have not seen this bubble gum for a very long time.

I remember how as a child of nine, this very box of bubble gum taught me a very important life lesson - inflation.

The cost of living had gone up, and trying to keep the price of the bubble gum the same, the manufacturers had taken instead to the sneaky task of removing one bubble gum, so that only three balls of pleasure were left in the box.

I remember when I first opened the box with three gums in them. I stared blankly for awhile at the three purple balls and turned to look suspiciously at the supermarket that sold it to me.

My little mind raced to the factories where these magical bubble gums were made, and I imagined this poor Japanese auntie, tired from overwork, accidentally miscounting the bubble gum quota per box, making the life of this nine year old particularly miserable for the day.

It was only later, when my second and third boxes all had only three gums in them as well, did my mind finally compute that my nine year old life was never going to be the same again.

It was a harsh lesson for a young kid to learn, and I recounted my story to Karen, who laughed and we made a little bet on how many this box would contain.

Karen, the eternal optimist, said four, while I - all illusions broken at the tender age of nine - said three.

My fingers fumbled clumsily with the outer plastic wrapping  and I popped open the box to find - four! little bubbles of joy!

I actually let out a little laugh of disbelief, my childhood self restored once again. Sure, they cost the equivalent of 90 sen today, but even hope has not escaped the claws of inflation.

Every bite still burst with (artificially flavoured) grape flavour, and I did what my nine year old self would have done - two gums first, then wait for the flavour to run out, then one, wait for the flavour to run out, and then the last one.

It's amazing how the mouth remembers.

The God Of Parking Lots

"I have come to the conclusion that I am God's favourite son."

Everyone gathered around the table looked curiously at him as he declared those brave words with his trademark toothy smile.

What do you mean? someone ventured.

"Well, when I was doing the shopping for the Halloween party for the kids, right, I was going with A to the city. And you know how hard it is to park in the city, right?"

"A was telling me that there was no way in the world that I would get a car park in the city at 5 pm. I told A not to worry; that I was God's favourite son!"

"Guess what? As soon as I reached the city and started looking for a car park, suddenly a car indicates right and pulls out of its parking lot."

"Yes!" I looked at A, who lifted a corner of his mouth in a smile to congratulate and curse me at the same time for just being lucky.

"We were walking away from the car when A suddenly remembered that we had to pay for parking, and so we hurried back to the parking space. And guess what? The parking meter was spoiled! Hahaha!"

"I turned around to A and shouted 'Yes! Woo Hoo! See? I told you I was God's favourite son!'"


Everyone at the table laughed, although some were a little bemused.


The God Of Small Things


I was with K the other day looking for a park in Victoria Market, when a car space suddenly opened up. As we drove into the car park, I joked, "No, I am God's favourite son."

K laughed a bit, remembering the above thanksgiving meeting, but then raised this point - "I think that we don't truly understand who God is, I think we trivialise Him if we think He is at all interested in finding us parking lots."

"I mean, God was never a God of covenience, what. Think about it - if anything He is a God of Inconvenience."

I think about Abraham, who was told to sacrifice his son Isaac at the altar. Or Noah, who had to endure the ridicule of everyone when he was told to build the Ark for the flood that no one thought would come. Or Daniel getting thrown into the den of lions, or Joseph being sold to the Egyptians.

I thought about my friend from the Overseas Christian Fellowship last time who was convinced that God loved her because she was desperately looking for her favourite brand of instant coffee in the Asian grocers, and there was one last packet remaining.

I truly don't know what to think - is God truly interested in the small everyday things of our lives? The Omniscient Micromanager? Or is God interested only in the Big Issues at hand - world poverty, wars, the environment, our sin and salvation?

I love that after being a Christian for some 23 years, I'm still trying to make up my mind about who God is, and to know His heart. He remains enticingly mysterious, as that day some two thousand years ago, when he came down as man, and spread his hands on that cross for our sins.

Other People's Love Stories: All Dressed in White

She stands in the darkness, arms and legs poised, her rapid, shallow breathing betraying her anxiety.

Anxiety was better than tears, she decided. One hand reaches to smooth the ruffles of the wedding dress.

Come on, God, she says under her breath. I don't know why You're putting me through this, but You'd better see me through this.

Please?

The lights come on.

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

They were together for three years before he finally popped the question. She remembers it well - they were at the park where they had first met. He had walked ahead of her, which she thought a little rude, but her head suddenly lifts up as she hears him turn abruptly. She is shocked to see him on his knees.

He is stuttering his proposal youknowwe'vebeengoingoutforalongtimenowandIthinkwhat ImeantosayisthatIwantyoutoWillYouMarryMe? She brings her hands to her face, and nods vigorously, surprised by her tears.

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


"I'm saying sorry in advance, 'cos this won't always go to plan..."

The music starts, and she is trying to keep time with her partner for their hip hop performance. Her body moves in memorised rhythm but her mind is a million miles away.

Her partner does not seem the least bit bothered. He is in his bridegroom vest, and dancing like he was the only one on stage.

They are dancing to Guy Sebastian's Art of Love (ft. Jordin Sparks), and it talks about the bliss and pain of relationships. The words of the song are knives which cut away at her heart, and her legs.


"... and we're all about giving up..."

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

It was two weeks before the wedding when she gets the phone call.

He is stone cold as he speaks over the phone. I'm sorry, I'm calling off the wedding. I can't go through with this.

She is stunned. Sure, there were arguments about the venue, and who they were going to invite, but they could talk it through, surely...

Something snaps.

Why? What do you mean? she protests. What do you mean you can't go through with this? We've had everything planned - the invitations have been sent out and the venue booked, for fuck's sake!

I'm sorry, he fumbles. I'ma... I... uh...

I'm sorry.

Sorry?!! Sorry??! Sorry is not what you say to someone to call off a marriage! Sorry is what you say when you accidentally bump into someone or when you're going to be late to something. YOU DON'T FUCKING SAY SORRY WHEN YOU'RE CALLING YOUR FIANCEE TO CALL OFF THE WEDDING!

She drives over to his place, her mind racing faster than the car, and she almost kills two cyclists who scream profanities into her unhearing ears.

She races up the stairs to his place, and it is only after a few minutes of angry knocks that he lets her in.

Her arms are folded, and she storms in. He is silent while she unloads on him. Her heart's content is emptied of its discontent.

Her tears are hot, and her mascara trickles down as she seeks to understand his change of heart. He is a wall, and she does not understand where she had misplaced the key to the heart of someone she thought she knew.

His silence frustrates her increasingly, and she throws himself at him, her arms flailing. She didn't know what she was hoping to achieve. Maybe she could beat a reason out of him.

He is caught off guard by her sudden charge at him, and he reacts by pushing out, and she lands hard on the floor.

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

He picks her off the floor.

"Sometimes I'm going to miss, I'm still learning how to give..."

Her body launches into the chorus with sharp, angled turns, and her choreographed body quivers a little in the wedding dress, but betrays nothing.

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

Why? She asked a friend. Why is God doing this to me? 


Maybe, says her friend quietly, Maybe it's a chance for you to finally let go.


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


She stands before the thunderous applause of the crowd, and nods a tiny nod of acknowledgement. Her partner is lapping up the ovation of what he was convinced were new members of his self-established fan club, and gives a peace sign as they run off stage.

Her heart is beating in her ears. Her heart. Which scabbed over clumsily when he stabbed it in all the different places. She had pulled off a big scab today, and prayed that it would now begin to heal properly.  

... I'm gonna get it sometime, 'cause I'm still trying to learn 

Still learning (art of love)

Still learning (art of love)

Still learning (art of love)

The art of love. 

Not Florence Nightingale

"You've got to be tough as nails to be an Emergency Nurse," he says, recounting his time in Liverpool. "They're a special breed."

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

"There was this one time there was this girl lying on the waiting room floor, right? Screaming hysterically. Everyone had come out with the trolley and were standing over her."

"Get up!" the Emergency Triage Nurse screamed at her, exasperated by how melodramatic this teenage girl was behaving.

"GET UP!" she yelled again. "I've just had my hernia operation and if you think I'm going to lift you up, you're fuckin' mistaken, so GET UP!"

The others around her lifted the girl up and threw her onto the trolley before they wheeled her into the department.

"We found out later that the young girl had this massive frontal lobe brain tumour when we scanned her head, and that was probably why she behaved the way she did. I went up and told the Emergency Triage Nurse about the result, and you know what she said?"

"Well," she just shrugged unapologetically, "the rest of them are fuckin' dickheads anyway."

He laughs while recounting the story.

"Tough as nails," he shakes his head. "You've just got to be tough as nails."

A Dog Named Pebbles

The maid is walking out with the urn in her hands. She is wailing inconsolably, indifferent to the annoyed stares of curious onlookers.

There are some things just worth crying for. Especially if they've been a part of your life for the past 17 years.

Not every one lives to be 119 years old. 

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

Pebbles, when she was just a tiny stone

She remembers the time when Pebbles saved the house from fire. It was in their old house, where an altar sat facing the door.

One of the candles had slipped and caught fire.

Pebbles' keen sense of smell brought her to the fire, and she immediately yelped in panic, and the family rushed out to see what the commotion was about. They put out the fire just in time, and Pebbles was treated like a hero.

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

Too cool for doggy school

There was a time when they had let Pebbles' fur get a little out of control...  Pebbles looked like it had a big white afro on its head and its body - a walking, yelping doggy cloud.

Her friends who came to visit often exclaimed "Wah, this dog lie down that time ah, like Persian rug ah!" or "Man, it's like a fluffy tissue box holder!"

Pebbles the tissue box and Lucky

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

Pebbles loved her durians. They had just finished eating some one evening, and had thrown away the seeds into a basket. Pebbles duly rummaged into the bin for the seeds with bits of flesh remaining on them, but she didn't have them herself first.

She nudged the first piece to Lucky, their other dog, first. Because Pebbles is all about sharing.

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

Doggy style

Pebbles had taken part in various competitions with Karen. Sure, she was not a pedigree to enter into the proper competitions, but little Karen didn't care.

She walked past the judges for the Most Cuddly Dog, and a collective "Awww..."  arose from the judges as little Karen doddered by, with a fluffy Pebbles clinging around her neck like a little baby.  They won that one, hands down.

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

"Come here, Pebbles!" the maid said, holding the bowl with the mid-sized folded papers in her hand. They were numbered from zero to nine, and Pebbles would pick a number, which the maid would quickly snatch before Pebbles could chew it, and then replaced it into the bowl.

Pebbles was right on four occasions, and Karen's grandmother and maid won up to a hundred and fifty dollars each time. Pebbles was good luck, it was.

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

To the Batkennel!

There was this other competition where they had dressed little Pebbles up in a Batman costume. It was cute beyond belief. But Pebbles was a shy dog. Instead of strutting proudly like a superhero dog should, it whimpered fearfully instead, its supertail between its superlegs.

Lucky was also in the competition, decked out in sunglasses, a beach shirt and a scarf around its neck, like a doggie Sophia Loren on a day at the beach. Lucky walked past the judges like it owned the place, and won first place while Pebbles came in second.

They went home and told everyone that Pebbles had won instead.

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

This was a dinner routine - the maid would finish cooking dinner, and then lean down and say to Pebbles - "Pebbles, go get mama and nana."

Pebbles' four little feet would scurry to the bedrooms of Karen's mother and grandmother, and it would leap on their beds, its eyes looking intently with its mouth half open, its tongue half sticking out as it breathed heavily in anticipation. Karen's mother and grandmother would stop whatever they were doing and make their way to the dinner table.

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

Karen had a pair of yellow and orange Garfield slippers which fascinated Pebbles no end.

Whenever little Karen wore those slippers around the house, Pebbles would snap at her ankles - trying to catch the cat that was pretending to be a pair of slippers.

Dog-napping

One night while little Karen was studying at the table in her bedroom, she felt something tugging at her feet. A telltale little puffy tail was visible from the edge of the table.

"Pebbles!" Karen scolded.

Pebbles caught Karen with its guilty puppy eyes, before running away into the living room. It stopped once it was at a safe distance, its doggy mind planning its next attack on the feline slippers.

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

"Ohh... My poor gou gou is dying," Karen tells me, looking twenty-eight but feeling all of five.

Pebbles was a grand seventeen years old, and age was catching up with her. She had lost her eyesight, and was going around being guided by her weakening sense of smell. She had lost her furry coat - her proud puffy coat - due to skin problems, and her worn out knees had lost their spring.

She had only enough energy to eat, and pace around the house a little before falling asleep again.

One day, Pebbles fell into a sleep she never woke up from.

They came home with her remains, the family weeping as if they had lost a child.

Now there is a vacuum in the little corner of the house - and of their hearts - which Pebbles made all her own, and only echoes of the familiar pitter-patter of feet which would come to call them to dinner.

Rest in peace, Pebbles. I'd like to believe all doggies do go to heaven.

Nights Like These

It is a madhouse in the Emergency Department. The corridors were filling up with ambulance trolleys carrying the Saturday night specials of drunken assaults and suicide attempts. Somewhere in all that chaos were nursing home residents waiting to be seen, and the thousandth chest pain, abdominal pain or sick child.

There was a gentleman they had to intubate and move out of their Emergency Department to a tertiary hospital. He had been assaulted that night and had blood in his brain, with a fluctuating conscious state. That meant one less senior doctor in the department, as the other registrar had to accompany this man on the ambulance.

And then there was the lady, who was on blood thinning medications, who had come in a little confused with blood in her urine, and so the doctor had quickly seen her and ordered a brain scan, just to rule out a bleed into the brain. Which was exactly what she had, and he sighs as he picks up the phone to make the necessary calls to move her out of the department.

Even Though I Walk Through The Valley of The Shadow

In the midst of all this comes a man, in his fifties, on a trolley. From all the way across the department, you could see that this man was dying. He was all skin and bones, his eyes were rolled heavenwards, and his gasping breaths suggested that he had not very long left to live. There is a woman standing next to him, her tears and eye bags suggesting that she is probably the wife.

He was given a Category 1, which meant he needed to be seen immediately. There was a bit of a delay finding him a cubicle, but the nurse-in-charge expedites the process, trying to save this man the indignity of dying on an ambulance trolley.

"The wife wants everything done for him," whispers the nurse-in-charge once they place him in a cubicle, as the doctor reels back at the suggestion.

"Go have a quiet chat with the wife," says his consultant, who had kindly stayed back to help manage the extraordinarily busy Emergency Department that night.

He hesitates a little, and tries to distract himself with other less urgent tasks at hand, as he envisioned a lengthy discussion with the wife about why they shouldn't be taking blood tests or performing scans.

The nurse in charge of admissions sees his hesitation, and calls him to task - "You'd better see him, now, doctor, or he might not be breathing when you do get to him."

He stands up and taps the table twice in frustration, as there had been nothing easy about tonight. Sick patients all over the department, and he was about to lose another senior staff for a few hours.

He is about to walk into the cubicle when he sees the teary wife, whose weary eyes spoke volumes about the awful journey she has had to endure these past few months. He finds out that this gentleman was on the palliative care team for metastatic gastric cancer, which means that the cancer had traveled beyond the stomach into other parts of the body.

I've been sleeping on the floor just to be next to him you know he was having trouble breathing tonight and he had coughed up blood and he's just not himself you know and he was telling me yesterday how his mind was absolutely perfect but it was his body that was weak... 

He puts an arm around the wife, and a nurse sits her in a chair outside the cubicle. The doctor pushes past the curtains, to be greeted by the sight of this man. His cheeks were sallow, and his eyes looked as if they were bulging out of the sunken sockets around it. There was barely any fat or muscle, as the skin hung limply around his arms and legs - signs of cancer ravaging his body, greedily stealing nutrients from him.

A quick assessment reveals that this man was dying. He barely responded to the doctor's questions, and one of his pupils were bigger than the other, suggesting that there may have been undiagnosed cancer going to his brain, and the way he was breathing - the dying gasps - suggested this man didn't have very long left.

He walks out to the wife and he kneels beside her. I'm sorry, he says, and stops there.

Should I call the children? is all she asks. He nods quietly.

To Be Surrounded By Loved Ones

After a mad scramble around the department, the doctor returns to the cubicle on request of the nurses. The gentleman's passed on, they said quietly.

In this tiny room were now cramped this man's four children, overflowing to the outside. He walks past the red eyes, nods his condolences to the family, and gently offers them a few more minutes with him.

The doctor walks away, and tries to suppress the memory of losing his own father about that age. He wanted to tell the family that they would be all right in the end - that life would work itself out - but now was not the time.

Now was the time to grieve.

The Lucky Ones

They move the body into a quieter room, with enough space for family to surround him. The Catholic priest is called in to pray over the gentleman.

The doctor and the nurse-in-charge walks in to the family, almost intrusively into this very private space of sadness, and offer their condolences. They explain what needed to happen from this point, and handed out a brochure to the wife.

He's so young, protested the wife, lovingly brushing the head of the man she will never wake up next to again.

Well, at least he's one of the lucky ones, says the nurse-in-charge.

Everyone's head in the room looks up, including the doctor's. What an odd thing to say. What was so lucky about dying young?

At least he's surrounded by family who loves him. Most people don't even get that, says the nurse-in-charge. The doctor is not sure what scant solace this must offer the family, but they seem to nod their heads in agreement.

This is not the man we know, this is not the man we know, the wife cries, her face grimacing in tears, as she kisses him on the forehead. Her words bring fresh tears to the eyes of all those present.

The doctor steps away quietly, trying to ignore the lump forming in his throat.

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

He sleeps like the dead when he returns from his night shift. He wakes up and sees the evening sun through the drawn blinds in his room. He gets up and takes a much needed walk in the park opposite his house. It is a pleasant spring evening, and there are dogs running around the park, chasing tennis balls catapulted by their owners into the air. The park is filled with joggers, and friends kicking the football around, and five year olds stopping their bicycles for a quick drink by the water coolers littered around the park. 


He breathes in the evening air, and watches the tiny new leaves springing up on the naked branches of trees stripped bare by winter's cold touch. He thinks about the cycle of life, and death, and his heart holds on to the promise of spring.