Birthday

A day away to escape the city during birthday is fun.

This year I have been blessed with good weather to enjoy my birthday hike in Section 2 of the MacLehose Trail. That's a coastal hike renowned for beach view from the slope with zigzag paths, majestic view of conical Sharp Peak, rickety-rackety footbridge at Ham Tin, and abandoned village of Chek Keng.

During the hike, I didn't set aside too much time for taking pictures, but it can always be relaxing to match photography with travel. At first glance, you might think photographing while traveling is not the same as traveling to photograph. The joy of bringing a camera has, however, been a second nature of mine. Many photo shooting opportunities emerged spontaneously as I walked on the east coast of the Sai Kung Peninsula.

In the end, I was rewarded with the joy of photographing and the joy of hiking, and that of celebrating my birthday in nature.

AIDS

Long before the coronavirus struck us, a mysterious case of pneumonia appeared in Los Angeles.

On a summer day in 1981, an unusual pneumonia, called Pneumocystis carinii, affected four persons, each of them had been in excellent health. Shortly after, the new kind of illness characterized by new acquired cellular immunodeficiency made its début in the New England Journal of Medicine. It’s a kind of “a distinct and unusual clinical syndrome. All were exclusively homosexual and had been in excellent health before late 1980.”

That story, as it turned out, signaled the beginning of the age of acquired immune deficiency syndrome known as AIDS. During my recent reading of three interns’ diary, I learned more about how the disease were soon recognized in five children with identical symptoms. The story of full-fledged explosion of paediatric AIDS was told by the interns when they worked in a major New York medical centre in 1985. They didn’t encounter that many deaths in paediatric wards (because children tended to recover from illnesses) until the AIDS brought in more and more sick children.

Before AIDS, those interns drew blood, inserted intravenous cannula, and did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation without giving it a second thought. Not any more with the concern over the rampant spread of AIDS. All house officers wear gloves. The increased use of latex gloves has caused a worldwide shortage of rubber around 1986.

Looking back, we saw many similarities between our fight against AIDS and Covid-19. The more I think about them, the more similar they look. At the beginning, we were all taken aback by a new kind of illness. Before scientific breakthrough, the only way to prevent HIV infection has focused on behavioural interventions. This was somewhat working but not a panacea. With time, we saw treatment options other than primary prevention. Availability of more than 30 antiretroviral drugs has given better quality of life for more than 38 million people who are now living with HIV, not to mention markedly lower mortality.

The rest is history.

Reframe

For most peole, a shitty situation is a shitty situation, but when your mindset is what affects how you feel about it, what you do about it and, in some cases, the outcome.

To feel more in control of our destiny, we can change the way we look at things, and then the things we look at change.

According to Deborah James, this is the best way to handle the shit. She was diagnosed to have bowel cancer at the age of 35. Not usual cancer. A nasty one with notorious BRAF mutation, driving very rapid cancer cell growth and giving rise to a resistance to standard chemotherapy. Relentless. Cannibalistic. Rampaging.

Even if her destiny seems bleak, she reframes it and sees the positives. In her book How to Live When You Could be Dead, she never uses the word "terminal" in relation to her cancer - she consciously refers to hers being an "incurable cancer."

The way she finds her hope and reframes her thinking would help all of us to become a happier optimist who sees the rose and not its thorns. 

Setbacks are part of any journey, as I come to realise from Deborah's, but not the destination.