Fish

It's one week before the birth of my baby and I have many ultrasound photos capturing her adventure from the earliest embryo inside the womb. It is hard not to feel awestruck watching her growth from a humble-looking yolk sac to a lovely one with brain, heart, nose and legs.

Having a wife as an obstetrician means abundant opportunity for me to watch and adore my yet-to-be-born baby's face. Sure, the photos of her face invite lots of oohs and aahs from our enthusiastic friends and families. "Amazing! The nose looks like mum's and her mouth resembles dad's…"

In no ways is her face to be confused with others. No one will be surprised that we're obsessed with the question how different and unique our baby is to be. I really believe it's so.

After my recent bedtime reading of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, however, I start to look at our body in another way.

It turns out that we all look incredibly alike, instead of being unique in oneself. In his entertaining book, the distinguished paleontologist showed me all the exciting similarity between our anatomy and that of mammals, reptiles, and even fish. The chapter on the twelve pair of cranial nerves is the funniest. Most medical students, writes Shubin, should have had lost their ways amidst the maze of these twelve nerves, branching to take bizarre twists and turns inside the skull. Complicated as they are – believe it or not – cranial nerves inside our head shared a remarkable and elegant blueprint with every skull on earth. This applies, alas, to that of a shark, a bony fish, a salamander, or a human. Quite contrary to my imagination, virtually all of our cranial nerves are present in sharks, for instance. The parallels go deeper than having the equivalent trigeminial nerves, facial nerves, glossopharyngeal nerves, vagus nerves: these equivalent nerves in humans and our aquatic cousins supply similar structures, and they even exit the brain in the same order.

The message from Neil Shubin is clear: we're profoundly similar to each other. We are.

Team

When Stephen M.R. Covey told the story of a business student sitting her final examination, the punch line was the last question of that business degree exam: "What is the name of the person who cleans your dorm?"

What a question! This sort of question made the student want to pull her hair out. Crestfallen, she asked the professor if the question really counted on their final grade. "Indeed it does!" he replied. "A good leader takes nothing for granted and recognizes the contributions made by everyone on the team."

Obviously I am not a leader. Yet, I'm lucky to have someone clean my house. With my baby on the way to landing, we hire a domestic maid. The hardest rite of passage to go through before our maid's arrival is how to live with a newcomer. Well, adults and kids have a common affliction: stranger anxiety. I worried and moaned.

I used the past tense in the last sentence because my maid has arrived and we're having a good time living under the same roof. Several friends of mine sent me their recipes. No, they aren't talking about the recipes for cooking, but the rules to lay down for the domestic maids. An example of the rules is "to pay more attention to taking care of the baby rather than preparing the meal." That sounds reasonable to me. Next the rule states that "No kissing baby." Is there not something amiss when a maid must love our baby but not kiss her? We can only say, "It doesn't work for us."

Our baby hasn't arrived. We don't make particular rules in black and white, but seem to be doing well. She cooks dinner for us, and we treated her to a good seafood dinner at Sai Kung. My friends are stupefied to learn that we're even sharing the laptop (and broadband access) with the maid. But surely the time has come to ask: Why not?

Truth

When doctors speak casually to their patients, little do we realize our words mean an awful lot. Sometimes the truth hurts, and it pains me to say this, but there will be situations that challenge a prima facie duty for honesty. "A good speech isn't one where we can prove that we're telling the truth," Sir Humphrey Appleby once reminded James Hacker, "it's one where nobody else can prove we're lying."

Few, if any, moral philosophers would admonish us to always "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Telling a white lie might not do anybody harm. More often than not, it can do your patient a world of good.

Doctors are by no means having the monopoly to please their patients; the reverse also holds true.

Lately, I have been sharing a story about telling truth to doctor. It's a tale I wish didn't need telling. It all started when most of our team went to the States for a conference last week. I screened the referral letters to our specialist clinic for kidney problems. One of the patients had been seen in our clinic decade ago for the finding of heavy protein in her urine. She remained well after treatment but seemed to have the same problem coming back this month. I jotted down a note to expedite her care.

That patient was called back to see me yesterday. As she came into my room, she made a quick remark that she recognized me. "Indeed," I continued the conversation, rather superbly I thought, "I just realized that, after going through your case notes, I was the doctor who first saw you ten years ago." I was pleased to see her again, with pride written all over my face, because my patient remembers me after all these ten years.

"Yeah, yeah, you were young at that time," she replied.

I nodded reluctantly, as if my head was hanging over a guillotine. She is absolutely qualified, I know, to remind me I look older than ten years ago.