DPC

Historical fiction is often the most gripping witness to war. My recent favorite is Kristin Hannah's The Women, which takes me to the Vietnam War around 1967.

One of the women in this fiction is a twenty-year-old nurse Frances McGrath who joined the Army Nurse Corps. Let us not forget, indeed, that women can be heroes. 

The story of this green nurse Frances McGrath in Vietnam is all blood and sweats. Her workplace was an operating table on wheels, and she lived in the middle of nowhere. There were bits of shrapnel embedded everywhere, cyring casualties, moaning and shouting medics. Frances had never performed a tracheotomy before, but she'd watched and assisted on dozens within one year of joining the hospital. One day, she was facing a dying soldier who could barely breathe. He looked sucked dry, hollowed-out, with sunken eyes and sunken cheeks characteristic of the prisoners of war. The gasping soldier struggled and probably couldn't make it. Frag wounds had torn up his arms and neck, and there was probably something swollen or lodged in his airway. 

"What are you doing, McGrath?" the doctor asked.

"Letting him say goodbye to his friends and die in peace." 

"Be quick. I've got a sucking chest wound that needed you ten minutes ago."

Frances McGrath felt sad, and decided to change into clean gloves and wiped the soldier's neck with antiseptic solution. Holding her scalpel, she took a breath to steady herself, then made a cut between the thyroid and cricoid cartilage.

The dying man took a deep, wheezing breath, with relief coming into his eyes. Frances took hold of his hand, held it in hers, and leaned close, whispering, "You must be a good man. Your friends are here."

The soldier took his last breath, and went still.

That was her way of facing a never-ending fight of wartime Whac-A-Mole. Once a wounded soldier was settled (or sent to morgue), another would be brought in. That was a fact of life.

During the Vietnam War, Frances McGrath saw everything from amputations to rat bites to what's left of a soldier after a land mine (many of which were planted with sharpened sticks and coated with human feces to assure both deep wound and infection when stepped on). Most wounds require delayed primary closure – DPC – which means the medic clear and debride wounds but don't close. The wait – at least four to five days – before wound closure offers time for the human host defense system to decrease the bacterial load. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything, be they words or healing sessions, that could bring closure to the wound suffered by Frances McGrath.

GUP

I kept being amused by Steven Rowley’s novel The Guncle this week. 

Funny as it may sound, the fiction character name refers to a 43-year-old former sitcom star Patrick. Or else, you can call him Gay Uncle Patrick. Or, GUP, for short. 

Patrick had to be a guardian of two children, a niece and a nephew, who kept acting out. They were either using outdoor voices inside or asking for YouTube, even on an airplane. 

After the nine-year-old niece Maisie refused to order off the kid’s menu – because she said she’s not a kid – Patrick set his own menu down and reminded Maisie of something wise. 

"Don’t be in such a hurry to be older. You’re going to spend the rest of your life wishing you were younger."

Although the last sentence doesn’t count as one of "Guncle Rules", that’s certainly a truism. So true. You don’t know what you’re missing till it’s gone.

Patrick, as a matter of fact, learned that the hard way, when he wrote a letter to his partner only after he was killed by a drunk driver.

Comedian

No manual of writing style that I know has a word to say of good humour; and yet, for me, a fiction about a comedian can sometimes be the most awkward theme to have laughable ideas.

It's a difficult subject, and try as you might, there is no way to make this sort of story a reading pleasure.

Not that the author Dolly Alderton thought it that way. She has written Good Material, a modern-day story of love and break-up; one of the main characters, Andy, is a comedian. 

In case you don't know, being a comedian isn't going to guarantee a Get Out of Jail Free card. A comedian is no different from anyone else who can have the blues. Or, even bluer.

The way Dolly Alderton wrote about a couple who broke up after four years makes us see the nightmare after romance. More than two-third of the book is speaking from the voice of a male comedian Andy, who lay awake after the break-up, thinking all the times about his ex-girlfriend Jen. He kept scrolling through the WhatsApp messages over the previous four years. Or else, an obsessive Insta-stalking.

It wasn't until the last few chapters that Dolly Alderton changed the voice to that of Jen. We then heard about the story of Jen trying to catfish Andy after their break-up. She set up an email address and then a believable Instagram account for a woman called Tash. That's how Andy was being tricked into responding to a message request from a girl, @Tash_x_x_x_, followed by all the flirting and funny conversations. The rest is history.

YA Fiction

Picture yourself staying home with your teenage daughter on a rainy day. What would you do? I knew I have to figure out the answer myself, as my wife is out of town. I decided to borrow the fiction book The Fault in Our Stars from my daughter, and watched the film adaptation together. Pretty sweet torture, right? It is. 

I read the story of Hazel Grace Lancaster who suffered from thyroid cancer spreading to her lungs. The cancer treatment gave her ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks; the satellite colony in her lungs made her carry cylinders of oxygen weighing a few pounds. That sucks. Totally.

When Hazel was told, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicked in and she figured that’s one in five … so she looked around the cancer support group and thought: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

It’s disheartening.

Issac was another patient within the cancer support group. He had retinoblastoma. To keep him alive, he had to have his eyes taken out. This is what hell would be like, his whole life without light. He told his surgeon that he’d rather be deaf than blind. If and only if he had the choice. Issac was, unfortunately, left with the only choice, according to his cancer surgeon, that eye cancer wasn’t going to make him deaf. 

Next, there is the story of Augustus walking with a prosthetic leg after osteosarcoma treatment, losing ground sometimes. He was the best friend of Hazel and Issac. Augustus had to learn driving left-footed, and failed the driving test three times. He passed in his fourth driving test, probably thanks to something called cancer perks. That refers to the little things cancer kids get that regular kids don’t: free passes on late homework, basketballs signed by sports heroes, and unearned driver’s licenses.

I admit – this is a fiction written for teenagers. But as it turns out, the story breaks the heart of adults too.