Satisfaction

I proudly carry a hospital pager - known colloquially as a bleep - with me seven days a week. I view my pager the way soldiers view their honour badges - they're insignia not to be taken away. That sounds good for a workaholic like me.

The only mistake I made was not realizing the importance of pauses.

I learned about the beauty of the pauses and silences when I watched Circle Mirror Transformation by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker last night. There were quite a number of pauses between drama scenes, and every one of them was as important as the dialogue. This is, of course, correct. We need pauses.

I daresay this is important after taking a break today. It's not that I don't want to go back to hospital and see patients - believe me, I do. Luckily, I did something as meaningful as going to work. I learned the richest of lessons from a medical ethicist (such as the moral dilemma of doctor's deceiving patients) after attending a daylong workshop. Then I finished my reading Your Medical Mind by Jerome Groopman who discussed how to navigate a medical decision, all the way from doctor's rubber-stamping to dictating patient's decision. If you ask me, this book is a must-read for the medical students and doctors.

But perhaps the most satisfying way to finish my day is that I have a chance to teach a group of elite medical students this evening, and for that, I am grateful.

Game

Imagine someone asking her son, "How was school today?"

"Good."

Not so uncommon to find such economy of words, huh?

"What did you do?"

"Stuff."

Is this always the case when we ask our children about their experiences? It might not be, though - not by a long chalk.

Heck, it's sometimes harder to get a school-age child to open up than that of Ebenezer Scrooge's wallet. Try as you might, you just can't make a child talk to you. The more you ask, the more you get stuck. If you've ever poked a snail to coax it out of the shell, you know what I mean.

Recently, I learned a new trick to encourage my daughter to recollect and share her stories after school.

This is how it works for me: "Tell me two things that really happened today - the best part of your day and one not-so-best part. And one thing that are fake. Then I'll guess which two are true."

A good mix of memory integration, humour and imagination. This sidesplittingly funny game has now become the ritual of our dinner.

Working Hours

We doctors have a long history of working long hours. We're trained to do so. Shortly after graduating from medical school, accomplishing the task of internship requires that we define forty-eight hours - not twenty-four - in a day.

With time, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop of long-hour working, which means staying on task until it's done instead of breaking the whole thing into manageable chunks. That explains why I won't be home until eight on most of my working days. I started to worry when I read an meta-analysis published in the medical journal Lancet last week.

The downside of working 55 or more hours per week, they report, is that there is an increased risk for stroke. Bile and dread inched up my throat. I thought to myself: Scary.

Well, that's what the researchers found after pooling data from nearly 530,000 adults who were free of stroke at baseline. During roughly 7–8 years' follow-up, the longer working hours one is engaged in, the higher the stroke risk. That is, the dose-response relationship between working hours and the risk of stroke speaks volumes to the threat - and for good reasons. For one thing, our brain weighs three pounds (only 2% of an adult's body weight) but consumes 20% of all the energy the body uses. The wear and tear of long working hours could have explained the energy crash or sudden exhaustion of the brain. For another, those who overwork tend to ignore their health. That doesn't mean the increase in stroke risk simply comes from smoking and drinking after long working hours; those risks have been factored in when the researchers calculated the odds.

Ahem. Sure enough, I'm not calling for a cut in doctors' working hours based on an observational study. All those conclusions drawn without a more experimental way - such as random allocation of individuals working long hours to reduced working hours - should be taken with at least that much of a grain of salt. To that matter, what am I to think? I am not sure what to say, but I didn't go back to my hospital after giving a lecture in another hospital yesterday. I went to meet my daughter in the playground instead of heading back to work.

Playground. Yes, it's unusual.

Even if the Lancet paper isn't rocket science, it makes me less guilty of leaving work early this Friday. Hooray.

River

There's almost too much to do and see around Melbourne. Covering everything is impossible. We didn't include Phillip Island in our original itinerary. We changed the plan at the end - sorry, after the cut-off time for cancellation of hotel book with refund.

Such flexibility on my part is uncommon: my survival framework has been built on the harmony of clearly written plans. For that sort of impromptu schedule change on the fly, I can't. Or won't.

It speaks to the nature of my stubborn head. But then I read the book by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson - The Whole-Brain Child - and learned about the metaphoric river of well-being. Children are thought to float along in their canoe, with one bank representing chaos, the other being bank of rigidity. Near the bank of rigidity, the water smells stagnant and stinky. Another extreme, on the other bank, is a total lack of control. We're zigzagging back and forth between the two.

The easiest way is to integrate the two.

There's more buried treasure hidden in Phillip Island. I consoled myself with this thought: we cancelled the hotel booking at the last minute to make our trip there to see the little penguins (Eudyptula minor), the smallest ones and probably the cutest on the planet, waddling ashore at dusk. From their chaos in the rough sea and back to the comfy home.

Tranquility

After the hotel stay next to the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, we moved to an isolated and virtually traffic-free area, French Island.

The main attraction of this island is its serenity. Being two-thirds national park, French Island has a population of around 100, far outnumbered by their resident koalas.

We didn't camp this time. We stayed in an eco-friendly cabin which provided cosy dinner and basic facilities - minus hair dryer and wifi network.

So that's the bad news: you have to wait for your hair to dry. That's right. Waiting without net surfing.

Well, there are some pretty good alternatives.

Yikes.

The good news is that you can go outdoor stargazing before bedtime. Chances are you won't come back after your hair has been dry. Or even, in the blink of an eye, when it's frozen.

Heart

Living right next to a hospital always ranks low when it comes to holiday. That's what we did in Melbourne during my daughter's term break. Our hotel is right next to the Royal Children's Hospital.

When I say "next to", I mean we shared the same elevator and car park. And I mean the hospital cafeteria is an integral part of our daily life. My daughter really appreciates this special place.

The Royal Children's Hospital, I must say, is a fabulous place for kids and visitors, especially those with a kid like our family. The hospital is surrounded by the 181-hectare Royal Park, the largest of Melbourne's inner city park. With the hospital's child-centric decoration (including a more-than-real size tiger behind the story The Tiger Who Came to Tea) and innovative design (with the ward location named after animals like kookaburra instead of those boring number and alphabets), this place is a showpiece for their love for children. Everything that happens to patients - the picture they see on the corridor, the playground they visit, the books they find at the convenience store - profoundly changes the way a hospital journey is perceived. And more so for children hospital journey.

The location of our hotel didn't really get off the beaten track, but it gets us to the heart of a place.

Lego

Consider for a moment staying home with a child when it's all wet outside - what makes it more miserable is the strong wind and then typhoon signal.

If this sounds humdrum, that's because it is: "Borinnnnnnnnng." Any time this word boring is part of a child's whine, it's as scary as fingernails on a chalkboard.

Nothing in the parenting almanac says we have to put up with boredom like that, so we decided to unwrap a box of Lego when we were hit with heavy squally weather last weekend. That's not a small set of interlocking plastic blocks. A set of more than 800 pieces, big enough to build Christmas village with elves, reindeers, sleigh and Santa's workshop.

I didn't know I would have opened the set that early when I bought it online: the set is supposed for kids aged 12 or above. I was even more surprised at the way Jasmine was absorbed in the project. The length of her attention span amazed us by the time we looked at the watch after finishing the Lego set. Six hours.

Unbelievable.