Of all the words a proud, jovial daddy might use to describe her daughter after a holiday trip, perhaps only I would choose quiet.
It's no secret that as a toddler continues to grow, so too will the list of parents' surprise items. The very last thing that a toddler needs is our suggestion to make up a thousand ways of playing. The toddler learns the trick by herself.
Hear that thumping sound? That's my daughter's game of flying pillow (when we stayed in a two-storeyed resort at Taiwan). Oops! Did you hear hundreds of bombs dropping on the city? No worry, that's my daughter jumping on the bed. The list goes on and on. Dad and mum are supposed to listen and stay calm, leaving room for imagination. If you're worried that you might really get a big surprise, don't worry - you will.
The biggest surprise for me happened when we visited the Taipei Fine Arts Museum at the end of our holiday. It suddenly seemed absurd for a three-year-old to whisper to her dad to lower down the voice. Things got a lot easier than I could have imagined. She had figured out herself to use indoor voice in a museum gallery. Well, even lower volume than her dad's.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Monday, February 11, 2013
Vacuum
I never delight much in the Chinese New Year.
The feeling of emptiness occurs when you know that even the daily newspaper will come to a break. Newspaper stops, shops are closed, and a lot of hospital services come to a halt. Everything stands still, the way a city stays behind after all the clocks vanish and the minutes quit their orderly tick. Pause.
I can also remember all those legendary words of greeting one has to say in front of the elderly. It isn't that I hate to say kind words. But a lot of them are coming out of courtesy, not from the heart. Add a few more those pretentious sentences, and you end up in a hollow vacuum.
In trying to get out of the vacuum, I have developed my own rituals. Every year, I use up all my library card quota before this long holiday, as if the library won't open again. I made good picks this year, and now end up reading four books at the same time: Michael Sandel's Justice, The Glamour of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Fiction 100: an anthology of short fiction.
Now there's a man living fully.
The feeling of emptiness occurs when you know that even the daily newspaper will come to a break. Newspaper stops, shops are closed, and a lot of hospital services come to a halt. Everything stands still, the way a city stays behind after all the clocks vanish and the minutes quit their orderly tick. Pause.
I can also remember all those legendary words of greeting one has to say in front of the elderly. It isn't that I hate to say kind words. But a lot of them are coming out of courtesy, not from the heart. Add a few more those pretentious sentences, and you end up in a hollow vacuum.
In trying to get out of the vacuum, I have developed my own rituals. Every year, I use up all my library card quota before this long holiday, as if the library won't open again. I made good picks this year, and now end up reading four books at the same time: Michael Sandel's Justice, The Glamour of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Fiction 100: an anthology of short fiction.
Now there's a man living fully.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Feel
One of my colleagues got a bout of serious gastroenteritis last week.
When we went through the patients together during the morning round, he could hardly walk. His stomach hurled heavenward, bile and acid scratching his throat as he told me the discharge plan for our patients one by one. He talked as if his tongue turned into flypaper; he walked as if he trousers would fall. My poor friend stopped after each patient (which he seldom has to) before he could go on, insides cramping.
But, and it's a very big but, what he learns from his own experience of being sick to the pit of his stomach turns into something that really sticks in the heart. He was rather surprised at himself after the illness, feeling what a patient feels. "As doctors, we should never be satisfied simply with how quick we send our patients home. Learning to talk to them and listen to them is the license we need to get," he told us.
Absurd as the moral of this story is, being sick himself is as important as a flu shot when it comes to what a doctor needs. Knowing how a patient feels is like an itch. Every day we reach for it and can't quite scratch it. Every day, it itches a little worse.
Some 50 years before, Herrman Blumgart, a Harvard Medical School professor, said it best: "The patient knows how he feels but doesn't know what he's got — while the doctor knows what he's got but doesn't know how he feels."
When we went through the patients together during the morning round, he could hardly walk. His stomach hurled heavenward, bile and acid scratching his throat as he told me the discharge plan for our patients one by one. He talked as if his tongue turned into flypaper; he walked as if he trousers would fall. My poor friend stopped after each patient (which he seldom has to) before he could go on, insides cramping.
But, and it's a very big but, what he learns from his own experience of being sick to the pit of his stomach turns into something that really sticks in the heart. He was rather surprised at himself after the illness, feeling what a patient feels. "As doctors, we should never be satisfied simply with how quick we send our patients home. Learning to talk to them and listen to them is the license we need to get," he told us.
Absurd as the moral of this story is, being sick himself is as important as a flu shot when it comes to what a doctor needs. Knowing how a patient feels is like an itch. Every day we reach for it and can't quite scratch it. Every day, it itches a little worse.
Some 50 years before, Herrman Blumgart, a Harvard Medical School professor, said it best: "The patient knows how he feels but doesn't know what he's got — while the doctor knows what he's got but doesn't know how he feels."
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