Most people choose to celebrate the birthday with fine dining. Well, that is fine but we decided to celebrate my birthday by having a day off to take my daughter to her school (and pick her up after class).
My chest swelled with pride, as would my daughter's, to know that we dedicate a birthday holiday to go with her to school. If we could calculate a birthday happiness index, it would be marching toward an all-time high yesterday. After another lovely afternoon with Jasmine at the beach, we then spent our evening at her kindergarten's parent teaching meeting.
It was late in the evening, and listening to her class teacher sounded more important than a birthday dinner. We stared at each class photograph and wondered how our kid gets used to the school. Normal, that's what. Parental anxiety is a fact of life, a behaviour that's virtually universal among the dads and mums - beginning for some as early as the first trimester of pregnancy. When it was our turn to talk to Jasmine's teacher, we asked if it's too difficult for our daughter to enjoy the English-speaking class.
"No, I see no reason why you should stop using your mother tongue at home," began her teacher. "After all, we will take care of her English and you can teach her Cantonese. Things might be a bit tough for her in the beginning. Don't worry, I know Jasmine has a lot to tell me, and she is talkative. Our assistant will translate her words in English (for her to learn how to say it) and let her realise that she's equally important to me even she doesn't speak in English."
We smiled. We were surprised to learn that her teacher can remember every bit of our daughter - her way of interacting with other kids, the colour Jasmine loves, her longest sentence in English in the class (about her story at the Disneyland).
"Look, if Jasmine loves our school (which she does), she is going to be fluent in English (which she is not - at least not yet) in a few months," her teacher added.
We then dutifully said thanks and goodbye to her teacher. We went home, pretty sure that the teacher is good to her and (we suppose) good for her.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Murphy
Over the years of medical practice after graduation, I recall an awful lot of good and bad memory, with stories interrrupted by medical errors aplenty, from wrong drugs to wrong patients. Many of these things, like leaving behind a gauze in patient's body, missing an important laboratory report, forgetting to consider the possibility of another serious illness, are the inevitable downside of having a (human) brain. And let's be clear: one definition of "human error" is "human nature."
One of the well-phrased laws is that "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." It's a line that's been used ad nauseam by people who teach medical safety. Is it true, even a little bit, that doctors are never good at filling the gap between how things are and how we want them to be?
Murphy's Law is difficult to beat, whether we admit it or not. People might rightly scratch their heads and wonder why doctors can make careless mistakes. But trust me, I am no exception. Two weeks ago, I was sick and running a temperature. It was my view then, and still is, that I should not take sick leave without terribly good reasons. High temperature, I know, wears on the body, nipping away at the brain cells that keeps us awake and sane. Unsettling as it is, it's hard for me to resist the notion that I can pay extra attention to keep myself in the right mind, and not the other way round. I was sitting in front of the computer when I tried to copy my patient's name and identity number (to send out a special laboratory request for a blood test that is only available abroad). I looked dazed, my head spinning, and my eyes wide open but seeing nothing ahead of me. Wait. I told myself to be careful and not to copy the wrong patient's number. Who in his right mind would want to send out an expensive blood test and end up with a wrong patient's identity?
Good, fine, you think. Did I end up with the wrong number? Yes, I really did.
One of the well-phrased laws is that "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." It's a line that's been used ad nauseam by people who teach medical safety. Is it true, even a little bit, that doctors are never good at filling the gap between how things are and how we want them to be?
Murphy's Law is difficult to beat, whether we admit it or not. People might rightly scratch their heads and wonder why doctors can make careless mistakes. But trust me, I am no exception. Two weeks ago, I was sick and running a temperature. It was my view then, and still is, that I should not take sick leave without terribly good reasons. High temperature, I know, wears on the body, nipping away at the brain cells that keeps us awake and sane. Unsettling as it is, it's hard for me to resist the notion that I can pay extra attention to keep myself in the right mind, and not the other way round. I was sitting in front of the computer when I tried to copy my patient's name and identity number (to send out a special laboratory request for a blood test that is only available abroad). I looked dazed, my head spinning, and my eyes wide open but seeing nothing ahead of me. Wait. I told myself to be careful and not to copy the wrong patient's number. Who in his right mind would want to send out an expensive blood test and end up with a wrong patient's identity?
Good, fine, you think. Did I end up with the wrong number? Yes, I really did.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Cockroach
During a recent lunch meeting, my trainee met a startling cockroach in his lunchbox. He hadn't even noticed that his mouth was hanging open. He rushed out of the room as if he had stepped on the teeth of a rake or slammed his thumb with a hammer.
Uh-oh.
Which leads me to the theory of negativity dominance hypothesized by the pyschologist Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust. Just imagine a single cockroach in your most favorite dish such as a bowl of cherries. I can hear the screaming already, although I can't make out if the word is "Help" or "Hell". Now you see. A single cockroach really is enough to render a bowl of delicious cherries inedible. But what about the other way round? Consider a a dish of food that you dislike: a bowl of lima beans, cockroaches, or whatever. What could you touch to that food to make it desriable to eat - that is, any suggestion of anticockroach? Nope. As anyone in his right mind will tell you, a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.
That Russian adage said it best: "A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar."
The point is not that it is never possible to make positive influence nor that there is no way to compensate. Rather, the point is simply that bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones.
Uh-oh.
Which leads me to the theory of negativity dominance hypothesized by the pyschologist Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust. Just imagine a single cockroach in your most favorite dish such as a bowl of cherries. I can hear the screaming already, although I can't make out if the word is "Help" or "Hell". Now you see. A single cockroach really is enough to render a bowl of delicious cherries inedible. But what about the other way round? Consider a a dish of food that you dislike: a bowl of lima beans, cockroaches, or whatever. What could you touch to that food to make it desriable to eat - that is, any suggestion of anticockroach? Nope. As anyone in his right mind will tell you, a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.
That Russian adage said it best: "A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar."
The point is not that it is never possible to make positive influence nor that there is no way to compensate. Rather, the point is simply that bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Mobile
I was reading the Time magazine cover story Your Life Is Fully Mobile when my broadband service at home was upgraded to 30M yesterday.When it comes to the wireless mobile technology, Nancy Gibbs has commented that more people have access to mobile device than to a toilet or running water, and the average smart phone today has more computing power than Apollo II when it landed a man on the moon. She dares us to name one example of tool with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones. Two-thirds of us, myself included, take a mobile phone to bed with us.
Seriously, technology is a series of changes, some good, many bad.
Which makes me wonder: Just how much the intimate relationship with our gadgets improves the human relationships? Yes, I can now text my wife faster and better than two decades ago. The faster, the better. Everything, that is, except one: romance. When I started dating my wife at the dawn of the cell-phone era in the 1990s, we were calling one another on telephone landlines. For most of us, the memory of that long queue at the student hostel telephone kiosk has stayed for close to twenty years. Because waiting at the end of the queue can last forever in those days, every now and then I ended up running for one kilometre to meet my sweetheart instead.
"What," you might ask, "if you two are separate by far far apart, awfully longer than one kilometre? How can you possibly talk to each other without that mobile device?"
And really, there was no such mobile device (at least not available to me) when I went to Montreal for overseas training around ten years ago. Making a long distance call was one thing: we all know, each of us, that makes the world flat. Paying the phone call was another. So we wrote to each other. That's an added bonus. Believe me, there is a humanity to pen and paper that typing or taping with a stylus (or our thumbs) lack.
A letter with ink - to be exact: hundreds of letters over that one year - lasts much longer than the text messages on the smart phone screen.
Seriously, technology is a series of changes, some good, many bad.
Which makes me wonder: Just how much the intimate relationship with our gadgets improves the human relationships? Yes, I can now text my wife faster and better than two decades ago. The faster, the better. Everything, that is, except one: romance. When I started dating my wife at the dawn of the cell-phone era in the 1990s, we were calling one another on telephone landlines. For most of us, the memory of that long queue at the student hostel telephone kiosk has stayed for close to twenty years. Because waiting at the end of the queue can last forever in those days, every now and then I ended up running for one kilometre to meet my sweetheart instead.
"What," you might ask, "if you two are separate by far far apart, awfully longer than one kilometre? How can you possibly talk to each other without that mobile device?"
And really, there was no such mobile device (at least not available to me) when I went to Montreal for overseas training around ten years ago. Making a long distance call was one thing: we all know, each of us, that makes the world flat. Paying the phone call was another. So we wrote to each other. That's an added bonus. Believe me, there is a humanity to pen and paper that typing or taping with a stylus (or our thumbs) lack.
A letter with ink - to be exact: hundreds of letters over that one year - lasts much longer than the text messages on the smart phone screen.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Dogma
Most shutterbugs had heard, at one time or another, the unmistakable question concerning the number of pixels when people think about the choice of digital cameras. Every so often we consider high-pixel number to be sine qua non of high-quality camera. It isn't.
If you are to go looking for a place where people fall in love with magic figure - which is not magic at all, in fact - the field of medicine is a pretty good candidate. Overwhelmed by the work at hand and with neither the support, know-how, nor the time to step back for detailed history taking, doctors long for a magic figure from laboratory test to make decisions.
I would be remiss not to mention the coagulation test (the prothrombin time and activated partial thromboplastin time, in case you're in favor of big names) as the haemostatic oracle or passport for safe surgery. Not a day passes without some doctors postponing a procedure to wait for that laboratory result of coagulation test. Of course, we don't have a whiff of evidence to support that such battery of coagulation tests offer a good prediction of bleeding risk. Ahem. Perhaps what a normal coagulation test can serve is to make doctors "feel better," and nothing else.
If you are to go looking for a place where people fall in love with magic figure - which is not magic at all, in fact - the field of medicine is a pretty good candidate. Overwhelmed by the work at hand and with neither the support, know-how, nor the time to step back for detailed history taking, doctors long for a magic figure from laboratory test to make decisions.
I would be remiss not to mention the coagulation test (the prothrombin time and activated partial thromboplastin time, in case you're in favor of big names) as the haemostatic oracle or passport for safe surgery. Not a day passes without some doctors postponing a procedure to wait for that laboratory result of coagulation test. Of course, we don't have a whiff of evidence to support that such battery of coagulation tests offer a good prediction of bleeding risk. Ahem. Perhaps what a normal coagulation test can serve is to make doctors "feel better," and nothing else.
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