Font

Kids, by nature, resemble their parents.

"See, she gets my nose."

"But hey, her eyes look more like mine."

So yes, we parents are somewhat keen to see the similarities with the offspring. And I bet every dad and mum are just going to compete for their babies to look more like them. I sure do.

And yet it also dawned on me that we should not pray for a child being an exact clone of ourselves. Too much and I'd worry about her inheriting bad trait from me, too little and I'd feel distant.

I suppose the magic behind the game of fatherhood is watching his daughter grow up - a new character but with occasional dash of father's style. Even if we're not two peas in a pod, every so often we find ourselves sharing the same blood. We came close to bursting into laughter, say, when we recently realized that the favorite typeface for both of us is Century Gothic font.

Scoreboard

Not long ago, our hospital outpatient clinic has been equipped with electronic queue management system. That means we don’t have to use a microphone to call patients at the waiting hall; the automated audio system will do.

It didn’t take long for me to find out the perks of this tracking system. Patient tracking can become its own form of reward. And for good reason.

Let me explain. If you haven’t yet heard about the Canadian stockbroker named Trent Dyrsmid, go read James Clear’s hands-on book Atomic Habits. Dyrsmid began each morning with two jars on his desk. One was filled with 120 paper clips. Soon after making a sales call, he would move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty jar. One by one. Day by day. He kept dialing until he’d moved them all to the second jar. Thanks to the visual cues of moving paper clips, Dyrsmid made brisk progress and good fortune.

In fact, we had been also relying on the paper clip counts to keep a tally of patients we had seen at the end of each clinic session. It works, I know. On the other hand, I'd much prefer an automated system with the real-time computer screen display of the names of patients seen. I fall in love with chasing my scores with rapt attention. The thing is, it is way more satisfying to watch your results grow - the size of your investment portfolio, the number of pages you have read, the number of patients attended - and if it feels good, then you're more likely to endure. Visual proof is immediately gratifying. Gratification of watching the computer screen reminds me of the scoreboard for sportsmen in a stadium. With time, I stick with the habit of recording or tracking the "score" during and after each clinic session. Even if you aren't the type of person who enjoys recording your data, you'll find the measurements insightful. This is why I feel satisfying to track my progress.

The more rewarding it feels to track our progress, in other words, the more our brains’ reward system will spur us toward getting things done.

What if everyone turns out to be too obsessed with the numbers in our data-driven world? In Atomic Habits, James Clear reminds us the measurement is not the only thing that matters. In other words, if we focus solely on that number, our motivation will sag. High scores or not, no measurable data will stay interesting forever. At some point, we are advised to shift our focus to something different and not that measurable. The smiling faces of doctor colleagues who can finish clinic early after my extra hand, for example, are ephemeral but much more meaningful. Ditto for a grateful patient whose name might not appear on my scoreboard.

Burns

There is more in a vigil around a deathbed than prayer. Tears are shed when cancer cells are scattered around a patient's abdominal cavity like pearls from a broken string. Conversations are intermingled with beeping alarm from the infusion pump for pain medication. Then there are muttered mumbles from neighboring beds.

I have been aware of how heart-wrenching it can be when I reserved a book written by a palliative care doctor Kathryn Mannix: With the End in Mind.

By the time I picked up the book about dying this week, it has become clear to me that conversation about death isn't too challenging. After all, most diseases follow a predictable pattern of trajectory towards the very end of life. But this is not the case for calamities from human clashes.

Now that Hong Kong is sick, stories of dying patients under palliative care specialists are much easier to swallow. The day after our alma mater campus turned into a smoking battlefield with teargas fired, I had experienced much more difficulty in reading news story than Kathryn's chronicle of a woman dying from widespread bowel cancer.

If I had the choice, I'd rather read Mannix's lessons on how to live and die well, instead of the news feed about how our campus burns.

Curiosity

Smartphones are not allowed for candidates in our professional examination. The same rule applies for the examiners, who are supposed to switch off or silence the device, in case of being distracted like Pavlov's dog to that ping! in the middle of examination.

It was already three thirty in the afternoon; I had examined more than ten candidates sitting for the membership examination, and my energy - that of the sweaty candidates, too - was nearly burned out, when I took a sheepish glance at my smartphone. There was an interesting email from a medical student. A curious student asked me why I had cast doubt on giving morphine to patient suffering from heart attack.

"Largely an old wives' tale in the era of dogmatic medicine," I'd previously taught him. Conforming doctors have used the word classical teaching with romantic promiscuity. We have been handed a long list of we-must-believe dogmas, to be strictly followed without asking why. Watch what happens when we exercise our curiosity, investigate and seek after new evidence, and think again. The myth of morphine in myocardial infarction, for example, will be debunked.

 If we are to follow the time-honoured advice, it will be that of Sir William Osler who cautioned that "the greatest enemy to the scientific practice of medicine is the practice of the routine."