Worm

When most people think of school, they think of homework. But that word homework means different things for my daughter's kindergarten than it does for many of us.

It's hard to imagine that my daughter's homework is to raise a darkling beetle.

Last week, I borrowed a book How Not to Be Eaten written by an entomologist, but haven't had time to read. When I went home tonight, my daughter could not wait to tell me the great news, "Dad, come and have a gander. A mealworm. A worm that won't eat you and me." Jasmine was holding a box in which I found a wormlike larva. That's a baby creature that doesn't look like its parents at all. Her teacher isn't teaching her complete metamorphosis, of course, but the theme of her class is "Change" this month. Yup, the reason of asking my kid to raise a darkling beetle from the larva rings clear as a bell.

Wait. I got puzzled when I thought more about it. The teacher gave Jasmine the box to bring home this morning. And my maid picked up Jasmine after school. Oh no, my maid has never really come to terms with her visceral distaste for any crawling creature. The mere thought of a caterpillar could have provoked a squirt of stomach acid into the back of her mouth. How could my maid bring that box of ugly worm home? That's on par with giving her a heart attack. I could hear her heart thumping around her chest like a tennis shoe in the washing machine.

If I had to summarize the second part of this mealworm's story in a sentence, I could say that it's a story of observing how Jasmine changes to a mature girl. I was expecting a tale of my panicky maid covering her eyes, but all my daughter said was, "I know; it's too scary for Wati, and I told her the worm won't eat her. I didn't ask her to hold the box. I bring the box home all by myself."

Proud

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.

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.

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."

Telephone

Telephone manner cannot be found within the undergraduate medical curriculum, but it's something that doctors have to learn throughout the years of medical training.

Doctors are regularly called upon to answer pager. Some are summoned to resuscitate patients whose hearts stop beating, while others are called because their patients have difficulty with counting sheep. Several of them are paged in the middle of a concert. The question could sometimes be about the doctor's indecipherable handwriting, or else, an unnecessary intrusion into the doctor's sleep. More often, the doctors are called when their juniors feel uncomfortable.

Just as a doctor needs to choose his words carefully in front of patients, he must tailor the answer to his junior doctor's query. I know that it's not easy and I'm not here to tell you that we're hard-wired to answer the phone call patiently. Actually, we aren't, most of the time.

This brings me to a remarkable story from a surgeon friend of mine last night. We had dinner and talked about an eminent chief surgeon in the field of liver transplant. The true story is not a tale of hero on one side and villain on the other. Few true stories are. "He is really mean on giving out good marks." lamented my friend. "Not even his own team members." Yet those poor grades in the annual assessment, harsh as they are, don't tell the whole story of that chief surgeon. "When it comes to calling him in the middle of a difficult surgery," she told me, "he never says no over the phone. He will come back and sort things out. Guaranteed."

That chief surgeon's passion reminds me to behave myself over the phone, when I am on call tonight.    

Mary Poppins

I began to get a pretty good sense of kids' stories. Mary Poppins is a case in point. That's one of Jasmine's most favorite stories recently.

In particular, she loves the character of jovial Uncle Albert who floats up in the air whenever he laughs. All visitors of Uncle Albert can join him in a tea party in mid-air, as long as they chuckle together. One word of caution: thinking of something sad will take away your flying magic.

That says everything about the magic of laughter. "It's laughing that does it, you know." This may sound easy - and it is - but it requires our own thinking. There are no licensed laughterologists. For many bedtime story times, I'd reminded my daughter to learn from Uncle Albert, "So. We can decide ourselves whether we fly or fall."

You are probably thinking that it's too early to teach her the lesson, but it isn't. I just knew somehow, after learning a painful lesson ourselves, that she understood. Alas, my wife actually ruined her car's rear bumper while backing out of a parking space tonight. We decided to buy a box of chocolate and then Jasmine helped her mom through the let-go steps.

For the next half hour, we played all sorts of games together. When Jasmine heard her mom talking about the insurance coverage, she told her mom matter-of-factly, "Hey - haven't you got the chocolate? Why are you still sad?"

Kid's Diary

I can easily go on my errands after picking up a book at random. That includes kid's story books, like Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Don't laugh - unless you're laughing at the story's character Greg Heffley instead of me.

Well, I learned a lot from Grey Heffley, too. His school playground started off the year with all sorts of things, like monkey bars and swings and stuff. But that was a year ago. Then the playground became an empty sawdust pit. It's hard to say how long it takes but Greg was rock-solid certain that the school was having trouble paying the insurance for the playground. Every time there was some kind of accident or injury on a piece of equipment, and imagine, the easiest thing to do was just remove it.

When I read Greg's comment that "people are getting too carried away with all this safety stuff," my "uh-oh" bell rings. The same is true in hospitals that have come up with all those mighty safety measures.