Bittersweet

In my quest to help my patients, I do my utmost to keep them alive and safe. Not a must for some patients.

So. What happened?

One of my good friends - and my patient - died tonight. Kübler-Ross was hovering over the room when I brought my daughter and her classmate to say farewell. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit. I began to feel a lump in my throat. Okay, I whimpered. We cried.

There are doctors who are particularly skilled at not letting the suffering get to them. They seem impervious. I can't.

Susan Cain tells us that compassionate instinct - the way we humans are wired to respond to each other's troubles with little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others - is as much a part of us as the desire to breathe. A fundamental human nature. If someone pinches us or burns our skin, this activates the anterior cingulate region of the cortex - an unique part of our brain responsible for high-level tasks like paying tax. And our anterior cingulate region of the cortex activates in the same way when we see someone else get pinched or burned. This is what I have recently learned from Susan Caine's new book Bittersweet.

What does it mean? This implies that our impulse to connect and experience sadness of other beings sits in the same location known as anterior cingulate region of the cortex. Our need to breathe? Anterior cingulate region of the cortex. To digest food? That, too. To reproduce and protect our babies? Anterior cingulate region of the cortex again. Read: right at the heart of human existence.

Match

Dr. Vanessa Grubbs has been in love with a man called Robert Phillips. That's a beautiful story I have read from her book Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers. On the day Robert made proposal with a diamond engagement ring, Vanessa smiled at him, surprised at how nervous he was. How sweet, she thought, because there could not have been a surer thing - she had just given Robert her kidney. Of course she would give her hand.

Yes, you heard it right. Vanessa has already donated her kidney to Robert, even before their engagement. She believed at her core that giving Robert a kidney is the right thing to do, and far better than seeing Robert's ordeal of three-times-a-week dialysis.

You won't read about this type of living kidney donation very often. Most of us would respond similar to what Vanessa's colleague did, "It's not an extra pair of shoes."

The answer lies deep in Vanessa's mind, as she puts it nonchalantly, "He needs one and I have two."

Try as we might, many of us could not follow the noble example of Vanessa. But that doesn't matter. Everyone is in debt, and many of us are takers. As long as we remember to be givers now and then, it's going to make a better world. Recently, I tried my best to help a good friend of mine after her diagnosis of metastatic stomach cancer. An incurable disease for a twelve-year-old boy's mum. It's as unbelievable as the moon catching fire. The bad news is that she has bleeding from the stomach and, at the same time, dangerous blood clots lurking inside her leg and lungs. Each clot damages her lung a bit more, each insult sending the signal for me to start blood thinner until, soon, the bleeding intervenes.

She needed transfusion and we gave her blood. One unit. Another one. And on and on. And so I went to donate blood this afternoon. Blood group B. Same as my friend. I wished that helps. Amen.

Human Kind

On my way to a public education event this afternoon, I was reading Mitch Albom's story of ten people on a lifeboat. Imagine them making an inventory of their rations after a yacht explosion: half can of water, three protein bars from the ditch bag, four bags of cookies, two boxes of cornflakes, three apples, and few peanut butter crackers. Wait a minute, one more: one seasickness pill, and that’s all.

On my way home, I delved into another book, Humankind, written by a historian and provocative thinker Rutger Bregman. He asked us to imagine two different planets.

On Planet A, the passengers turn to their neighbours to ask if they're okay. People are willing to give their lives, even for perfect strangers.

On Planet B, everyone's left to fend for themselves. Panic breaks out. It'd be like the cut-throat reality competition Survivor in which you either trample others underfoot or you get eliminated.

Now the question: Which planet do we live on? Choosing the planet is like opening our mind's eyes so that we can see humanity from the most positive possibility: upgrading from the operating system of surviving to thriving.

Live Concert

We've all been programmed - at all levels including school, work and socal - to think, act, and live in a virtual world under various restrictions. We have Google Classroom; we attend virtual scientific conferences; we watch Netflix movies.

With time, the good news is that we are now gravitating toward out-of-home activities after relaxed social distancing. Who in their right mind would choose not to go out?

Going to live concert by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra last night has been one of our best family activities after the fifth wave of Omicron. In my opinion, none is greater than their idea of blending music with the Blue Planet II nature documentary.

As I sat staring at charming puffins rattling their beaks together after fish hunting expedition, mouth hanging wide open (mine wider than puffin holding a mouthful of sand eels), I was in awe and blown away by the matching music on stage. Live music by an 80-piece symphonic orchestra in a concert hall. Giant screen of the BBC marine life series, side by side. Ebb and flow. Mind-blowing. I was elated.

Grip

To be honest, I'm not good at remembering characters. But that's what most novels ask us to do. 

So, the gods and goddesses, mythical beings, as what my daughter's reading of Rick Riordan's book series entails, would be almost impossible for me to comprehend. I don't even know how to figure out "who's who" when I read the not-so-divine novel Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.

But there is a catch: It's not every novel that has a large cast of characters for us to keep track of. If you're easy to get lost in the cast, you may decide to pick up the novel by Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt, as what I recently did after my brother's recommendation. There aren't too many characters: a Mexican mother and her son, and sixteen other family members. If you worry about the number of characters, I will be the first to reassure you. The sixteen of them, for that matter, were dead bodies in the backyard by the end of the first chapter. All killed by the end of the first few pages.

Seriously, though, story of the mother and son after the massacre is riveting enough to grip our attention.

Terminology

Language is a rich tapestry of what we feel, what we see and what we record. Think of language as our lens to perceive the world. Chances are, as what exactly Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states, you will be led to believe that the language we speak influences how we think.

Odd as the counterargument would sound to you, the relationship between language and culture can be the opposite way round. That means our language we speak doesn't shape the way we percieve the world. Quite the opposite - one might argue that it's language that reflects our view.

I'll bet the debate can go on forever. The only thing we can agree is that we should mind our words. A recent British Medical Journal article about medical language will show you why.

A real-life scenario that exemplifies how doctors' language belittles patients: "Patient denies fever, chills or night sweats." To deny, according to the authors, is to refuse to admit the truth. Isn't that connotation of untrustworthiness?

Another not-too-uncommon language usage that emphasises the patient as passive of childlike: doctors "take" a history, or "send" patients home.

Now, there's no question that we can use language to blame patients after treatment failure: "the patient failed chemotherapy" rather than "chemotherapy failed the patient."

Noise

I genuinely believe that credibility of recruiting interviews is overblown. To put it more starkly, as explained by the authors of Noise, they are often useless.

Job interveiw sounds robust and effective, but turns out to be as predictive - or unpredictive, for that matter - as any information source from marketing.

What's missing is the awareness of cognitive bias: an illusion of interviewers who think they can make sense of information collected from an interview. The same is true in our imaging a shape in the contours of a cloud. That's literally having our heads in the clouds: spend enough time looking at the sky and we will start seeing pattern out of the clouds. We use the term pareidolia to describe our natural tendency to perceive a specific image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. You read that right: the interviewers are often imagining a pattern out of answers given by the candidates.

To figure out how likely interviewer is to have excessive tendency to seek and find coherence, researchers had designed experiments by asking some of the interviewees to answer questions randomly. Can you imagine giving a random answer "yes" or taking the "this" option as determined by the first letter of the questions? But you know what? Not a single interviewer realised that the candidates were giving random answers. This might sound counterintuitive, but the interviewers in this "random" condition were as likely as those who had met truthful candidates to agree that they were "able to infer a lot about this person given the amount of time we spent together."

Such is our accuracy of recruiting interview. As good as throwing a dice.