Showing him her wedding gown
At the corner of our eyes, there we caught but just a glimpse of a girl glimmering in white, amidst the row of dim and dull hospital rooms lining the ward corridor. Isn’t that Jerry’s room?, we asked immediately — indeed it was, and we couldn’t help but to turn our steps around to sneak a peek.
She was Jerry’s granddaughter. She just turned twenty not too long ago and she was getting married soon. She spun around once in the room, her hands in elbow-length white gloves held the hem of her white flowing gown high to show her grandfather, and I caught a glimpse of the ring on her finger. She was partly embarrassed, partly proud, and Jerry watched with part smile, part unbelief. Jerry was the most pleasant elderly man, even with the physical pain we knew he was going through at his terminal stage. A week ago he was still walking about when he saw us in the clinic, but a few days later we paid him a visit in the Emergency Department, and now a nasogastric tube hung from his left nostril, draining material from his bowels. His bowels were no longer working due to a combination of cancer and scarring from previous surgery and radiotherapy.
But for that moment, I thought, there was so much overwhelming joy in that little crowded single room. The two of us stood there as uninvited guests, but thankfully welcomed by Jerry and his son and his daughter-in-law to join in the thrill.
If I could capture those moments in video — the girl with the puffed bouffant skirt of her gown trying to find a comfortable position stooping beside her grandfather on the hospital bed for a photo, her mother trying to work the camera with her presbyopia, her father standing beside in his tradesman work clothes, and the relatives watching and laughing and making comments amongst themselves — I don’t think I would even need to put music to it to bring a tear to those watching it.
The girl who lost one of her eyes
When she was nine years old, this girl had an abscess on her leg that spread to her face. It became so rampant that the doctors had to remove her right eye to control the infection. Since then she wore an artificial eye on that side — immaculately made to resemble her natural eye in the colour and even the fine details of the pupil. Her external eye muscles were sewn onto the prosthetic eye so that it moved together with her good eye on the left, only with minimal squint on the extreme lateral gazes. You could barely tell that it was artificial — I certainly couldn’t, until I closely examined with a torch!
When she was in her teens, she had a boyfriend. She decided to tell her boyfriend that her right eye was actually fake, and her boyfriend left her immediately.
Later in her twenties she met a guy, and they fell in love and got together. When she was deliberating whether to tell this guy the truth about her eyes, there was anxiety and she wasn’t sure what to expect.
But she told him the truth — and the guy looked at her and replied, “So what? I’ve only got one eye too.”
Just a few years ago, the guy had got into a major motor vehicle accident with severe facial trauma and skull fractures. The doctors had to fix a metal plate in his forehead and tie his left cheekbone together with wires. His left eye was still intact, but the optic nerves had been cut. The scars have healed up well now and only a very slight displacement of his left eye is what remains. Just by looking at him, you couldn’t tell that he was seeing only from his right eye. She had not known until then.
“I guess we were made for each other,” the woman said to me, sitting beside him. They are soon approaching their seventies, and have been together as husband and wife for more than forty years now. This is a true story.
The guy and his girlfriend
This friendly guy had a stable girlfriend. Yet he was having sex with other girls, unbeknownst to his partner, and he was still doing it. Without condoms too, because he didn’t have them around when the situation called. He had already made two women pregnant. He already had a few children around in the community. He confessed to me.
He came in when I was working in the aboriginal GP clinic in the Northern Territory, wanting to have a check up for sexually-transmitted diseases.
He had good intentions, if I dare say. I could sense his frustration at knowing what is right and not living it out — and don’t we all know the feeling well. Yet as I talked to him I came to know that he had already made some other changes in his life that was worth commending. Decided to stand up to peer pressure and cut down on alcohol consumption. Starting to pick up the discipline to exercise. “But I still don’t know how to control this sexual urge,” he said as-a-matter-of-factly, “I just can’t control it, y’know.”
He saw the tray of free condoms in the room and grabbed to store more than a few in his pocket, with some embarrassment. I never paid much attention to that tray — now I know how important it is to refill it!
“How would you feel if your partner did the same?” I asked.
“Oh I’ve heard that one before. … But I won’t do it when I get married, it’ll be different,” he answered.
“How do you know you can control yourself after you get married, when you can’t do it now?”
“Yeah,” he shook his shoulders. I was sure the question had crossed his mind before too.
I opened my mouth but I stumbled to take it much further. If I said anything more, I felt, I would have been a true hypocrite. It doesn’t have to be sexual dishonesty. My words would come back to bite me.
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oming to you
from a junior doctor who is color-blind, cleft-lipped and left-handed — this is where
I largely write about my
somewhat weird and wonderful encounters in Medicine. I wish,
though, more often than not,
that I could rather spend my days
drawing colorful pictures and bringing stories to life...... -
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