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.
And then the earthquake struck
When the world was ghastly shook with news of the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 and the earthquake in Sichuan, China in 2008, I counted my blessing to be living in New Zealand, tucked away safely in a tidy corner of Earth’s colonisation.
Many other natural disasters continued to occur throughout the world, of course, and I later crossed the Tasman Sea to move to Australia just after the earthquake in Haiti hit in early 2010. It was then the anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires that licked up a huge part of Victoria the year before. People were recounting the horror stories over radio.
Then the major floods in Queensland happened only a thousand kilometres from where I was staying, followed by Cyclone Yasi sweeping the northern parts of the same state. This time I had actual friends and people whom I knew who were in the area. Cyclone Carlos followed shortly after to hit Darwin in the Northern Territory — and I have only just been to the place earlier in 2010! The photos in the news were scarily familiar — yet now barely recognisable with the flooding, fallen trees and flattened houses on places that I have just stood in not too long ago.
And then the earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand, just yesterday, this time levelling the city area, catching all of us completely off-guard. My two brothers are there, and it was amazing to hear their first-hand experiences of the hospital blacking-out, being evacuated, and the general destruction of the city. It is unthinkable to imagine Christchurch without the century-old landmark buildings now — the day surely is history-changing.
I was flicking through my phone’s text messages when the earthquake happened, and the happy text messages only from a week ago of a friend finally finding a job in Christchurch, and of my brothers inviting me to play a game online together with them, suddenly seemed so distant and irrelevant now. Oh how things can change in a blink of an eye.
It is amazing too how these happenings seem to be getting scarily close both on Earth and in heart — in neighbouring states and in places I have grown up in. It is even more frightening, however, to think of how I can turn my eyes away from the news, walk along streets of Melbourne suburbs and immediately so easily get hypnotised by the calmness here.
I can’t help but to think it is not evitable that a disaster will strike my location one of these days. It almost feels like a guilty conscience! When and how would that be? Would I have a family of my own at that time? Who knows it will come when I least expect it.
It crossed my mind that if someone said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” again, would it make more sense now? It is a crazy time we live in these days, how far is this going to go?
One of my biggest dilemmas as a doctor
I was once asked to put my signature down as a witness for a nurse’s divorce papers. She approached me completely out of the blue — and it remains one of the biggest dilemmas I have come across as a doctor, to be honest (and it’s not even remotely medically-related)!
I only found out then that in New Zealand (and in some other countries too), doctors are among a group of professions legally allowed to witness statutory declarations.
She has had enough of the years of his abuse, she said, flatly. I would hate to be the person completing the last part of the legal paperwork allowing the breaking up of what was supposed to be a cherished and sacred matrimony (and how those words ring hollow in today’s society), but I signed my name almost too trustingly.
At that time, I just felt doing anything else would be like preaching cold ideals to a hurting world in need of something much warmer. Perhaps I can start somewhere else if I wanted to make a difference.
I was reminded of Matthew 19 too. But I still wonder if what I did was right.
I don’t know, what do you think?
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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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