Thursday, July 7, 2011

RE Reflections 5:

I finally got back to HCA after such a long absence. Honestly, it wasn’t really my fault: My braces appointments fell on Thursdays, so I had little choice in the matter. Anyway, I enjoyed myself more than usual this week. Since we dropped the ‘hitch a cab’ idea a few weeks ago, we got there later than usual, but we still had quite a bit of time to spend with the patients. I was quite surprised when I noticed the patients playing Wii Sports. To be honest, it was one of the last things that I was expecting. On hindsight, I suppose it would have been logical to expect something like that, since it was certainly great entertainment (and good exercise at that), but I was still expecting budget issues.

Joseph couldn’t come due to some Chinese remedial, but the rest of us had fewer issues getting into conversations than when I last saw them, despite a two week break. Either way, I finally managed to select the patient whom I intended to write a biography on. Although I know quite little about her as an individual, I know more about her than the rest of the patients, so I shall state in brief what I know about her before my memory fails me. Her name is Mrs Tang Kum Yong, although I’m not really familiar with the details about her family. She currently lives in Toa Payoh, and her current HDB flat is quite near one of the schools there. She did mention once that she had been living there for over thirty years, and she bought it for a much lower sum of money than her home’s current value (about 10%, if I recall correctly). Regarding her as a person, she has a slight growth under her right eye, which helped me distinguish her from the rest of the patients before I was familiar with her. She’s generally cheery, although a little tired, and is the kind of person who lives life as it comes, instead of trying too hard to change everything. She is slightly hard of hearing, and hence she also has a hearing aid. Unfortunately, due to the usual hustle and bustle in HCA, I often found myself repeating my questions, and occasionally she would misinterpret my question. Although frustrating, I found her to be a good chat companion, since she’s not the kind to ramble on for hours about her life story. The only problem would be that I am sorely lacking on her background, but I shall try my best to make up for it in the coming weeks.

The Hwa Chong students who were supposed to come today were quite late, but they certainly did a better job interacting than some other schools, especially since most of them were quite fluent in Chinese. They were planning to play ‘musical ball’ (basically, pass the ball until the music stops, then the poor soul with the ball does a forfeit, or appoints a student to do it for them), but although it was somewhat entertaining to see the HCI students performing their respective forfeits (such as singing their school anthem), the patients in general felt quite bored. As I found out later, apparently they played these sorts of games all the time, especially whenever students came by for CIP. As Mrs Tang told me, she preferred playing mahjong with her fellow patients in the mornings or just after lunch. After I probed a little further, she did mention that she learned mahjong from young, and also talked about how she wasn’t allowed schooling (as per the tradition then), but I didn’t manage to get much further than that.

The good thing was that we finally picked up the courage to ask the patients if we could take pictures of them (since that was required in our report), and they actually agreed. Honestly, I was not expecting such openness, especially since I would not have reacted similarly. However, with the go-ahead given to us, we went ahead snapping shots of whoever wanted it. If I’m not wrong, we’ll be bringing my camera next week to photograph them some more, not so much for the sake of our report as entertaining them.

Since one of the buses was going towards the east this time, I volunteered to go along with Jo and the appropriate patients. I have to admit, I learned a lot about HCA in general, much more than what I could have in HCA itself. For example, discovered that since St Andrew’s Village was so near HCA, the patients used to go for outings there, but since only the hall was air-conditioned and the schools were not particularly wheelchair friendly, HCA decided after about 3 outings that it would be better if the students went to HCA instead. According to some of the patients on the bus, they did not really enjoy going there either. Also, I learned that PIE, at that time (just past 1610) was already jam packed with cars, despite it being nearly an hour to peak period. We took until 1645 to crawl past the accident that had caused the jam, which was quite frustrating for everyone, excepting the patients who had fallen blissfully asleep.

I found that the patients, despite their various physical limitations, were all determined to live as normally as possible. One particular patient, for example, despite being wheelchair bound, was determined enough to insist upon boarding the HCA bus his own way, instead of the much safer, but much slower method of sitting down on each step before pushing himself to the next. He was quite set upon standing up, and with the support of Jo he stood up (somewhat) and sat on his seat without the hassle of progressively moving up. Even though he was evidently experiencing discomfort, he nonetheless insisted upon getting off quite the same way as he got on, but found it too tiring. It was impressive though, and I definitely learned a lot about the patient’s attitude and concept of self-dignity.

I felt that today, out of all the trips, was a very meaningful one, especially since I learned a lot from and about the patients. I’m really looking forward to next week’s trip.

Andrew Yap

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