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.

Insult

Digital communciation is one of the most common channels for discussion. Whenever we can't (and often we can't) talk face to face, we make use of the live chat, emails, text messaging or voicemail.

What many people don't realize is that navigating the digital communication – and being successful in getting the message across – is a herculean task. If there's one thing you should know about the pitfall, it's the way to respond to an insult.

I soon came to realize that I am not the only one who had been having difficulty with coming up with a perfect witty reply. An article in this month's issue of Time magazine taught me the way to shut down the dialogue instead of being nervous after sensing a threat. 

Many a time I wished to fight back like a dingo slashing a bloodied wombat and dropping it in front of people. That doesn't work and isn't wise. Don't fight back. Smile.

The two most useful replies I'd learned from the Time magazine include: "I don't get it. Can you explain the joke?" and "What a wild thing to say out aloud."

Either of them is a reply that I'm sure sends shivers down the spine of anyone who dares to insult me.

Try it next time and you will laugh and laugh and laugh and wonder who is happier, the one who insults or you.

Cassava

A commonly quoted reason for working memory failure is overload. We try to hang onto too much, and then push our memory past its limits. No less important than overload is mind-wandering. We're grabbed by some attention-seeking thoughts and our mind gets hijacked.

The question, for me, is how many books I should start reading. One after another? Different books at the same time? Once again, this is a question I don't have the answer but I tend to be promiscuous, for that matter.

Two days ago, I was reading about the intriguing streams of paralyzed patients, most of them on crutches or carried by relatives, arriving at Hans Rosling's clinic in Mozambique. They all told the same story: suddenly, both their legs had become useless. No pain, no fever and no other symptoms. The number of new cases was doubling every week. They felt like a television set with bad reception; nobody knew what was happening, and started to move the antenna around and bang on one side and then the other hoping the picture would improve. Could that be polio? Or biological warfare? None of this seems very likely, does it? 

Hans Rosling was flummoxed.

At the same time, I was in the middle of reading another book Sleeping Beauties written by evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner. He taught me the multitalented molecules developed by plants. One of the superpower chemcial defence armaments is cyanogenic molecules. The name says it all. When an animal or human takes a bite out of a plant containing such a molecule, the molecule releases cyanide. That's the same lethal poison used by the Nazis in the gas chambers of Auschwitz – that much I was certain of. I've never heard about cassava or manioc tubers – staple foods in African countries including Mozambique – which contain such molecules. Macabre as it was, the Africans will get poisoned and become paralyzed after eating cassava unless the tubers are cooked or soaked.

When Hans Rosling drew up detailed maps of the geographical spread of the paralysis epidemic, there were several striking findings. First, it emerged that the disease hit children in particular but none under the age of two. Second, the majority of victims got paralysis during the summer period of no rainfall. It didn't take long for Hans Rosling to find out that the indigenous people could have left the cassava in the ground, hoping for rain but in vain. They soon pulled up cassava – neither cooked nor soaked – when they got nothing to eat. 

That's how people get the cyanide-releasing poisons.

A truly eye-opening read.

Poverty

It's hard for us to imagine the life in Mozambique with a shockingly high child mortality rate. It's even harder for me to read the stories haranguing the Swedish doctor Hans Rosling serving an emergency clinic in Mozambique.

Better known for writing another bestselling book Factfulness, Hans Rosling has written a memoir How I Learned to Understand the World. 

I admitted that his stories are indeed opening our eyes to poverty outside our comfort zone. And it is impossible to read without ooh and ahh. 

One late afternoon in the hospital, Hans Rosling met an elderly with a leg fractured, as carried in by her two sons. The ends of the broken bone were protruding through her skin. There were no X-ray machine and he had run out of anaesthetics. Hans Rosling had not much choice; he asked two nurses take hold of the patient under her armpits and the strongest junior nurse to pull the foot in the opposite direction. After much grappling, he managed to line up the fracture surfaces and close the wound, stitch the skin margins and put her entire limb in a plaster cast. 

Next morning, the patient insisted on leaving hospital, when she was not supposed to put any weight on the leg. I could imagine furrowed brows of Hans Rosling, who tried to explain in sign language, in vain. He then discovered that something had gone very wrong: the immobilised foot was pointing sideways instead of forward. He simply forgot to check alignment before putting on a plaster cast. To his chagrin, he could not persuade the patient to let him reset the foot.

"Doctor, my hens might get stolen so I have to leave," the old lady insisted. 

Hans Rosling never saw her again but learned later she had survived. The plaster had cracked and fallen off after a month and her foot was utterly misaligned. That badly shaped foot didn't bother the patient as long as her chickens were all right.

"When you work in a place of extreme poverty, don't try to do things perfectly," said his mentor who had been a mission doctor all her life. "All you will accomplish is wasting time and resources that could be put to better use."

That's a lesson Hans Rosling learned from the old lady too.