Report Card

I talked earlier about resetting my thermostat during university days. But it was before my primary school graduation when I realized for the first time in my life that I was capable of pressing the amazing reset button.

Looking back on my primary school days, I don't recall much except my mediocre academic performance; I just know I always ranked more than ten in my class. At any rate, I remembered the soccer league tables far better than what the teachers said during the class.

Then one afternoon in my final year, out of nowhere it crossed my mind to feel that the odds of getting a perfect report card were almost zero. I could only take that last chance before leaving my primary school. I am not quite sure how I did it, except that I fell sick before the final year examination. Still, I managed to reset and rise to the top among all the eight classes in that year.

If I were to give a slide show of the next six years in my secondary school, it would begin with my report card. I brought home a report card ranking me the first in the class nearly every time through secondary school.

I felt changed and reset, and a little weird. I know.

Reset

Needless to say, nephrologists talk a lot about the blood's salt or sodium content. We teach our medical students that kidneys help to keep our body's solute (composed primarily of sodium) concentration or so-called osmolality within a narrow range. No more, no less. It would be hard to imagine how nature works it out to keep everything in such a fine balance.

Now. Maybe you think our body is too unwieldy or rigid to operate only within a narrow range of osmolality. "Why," you might ask, "isn't life constructed to get along okay with a wider range of osmolality?" Ten points and a gold star if you ask this question. And it makes sense. It turns out that some people are doing perfectly fine after resetting their osmostat, and live happily ever after with a lower blood sodium concentration.

Speaking of reset osmostat, this concept is a gem of wisdom on the way to live our life. Which brings me to the story of resetting my thermostat. I remember how I shivered during each winter when I was a child. My mother used to say that I was the most "utterly lazy cold-blooded animal." I simply looked like a stationary lizard when the temperature plummeted. A lizard flicks the tongue out of its mouth only if necessary. And me too. I sat in front of my textbook with my hands buried in my pocket, and then turned the page using my lips.

My hibernating life cycle continued until my travel to Beijing during the university winter break. I was twenty, enthusiastic with my first ever trip on my own. It was that winter I first saw snow. That helped. More than anything else, resetting my thermostat after return from the snowy trip gave me the energy to wear less and less at winter. I soon went to spend one of the subsequent winters learning ski and dogsled across snow-covered lakes in a Outward Bound wilderness course in northern Minnesota.

Decibel

One of the best-kept secrets about communication is that we always turn a deaf ear to the loudest, outrageous, unceasing, honking, banging, screaming voice. Few things are easier than making a big noise, and few things are harder than keeping our volume low when we're making requests.

Uh-oh, you thought I'm referring to our Chief Executive's deaf ear to the protest about express rail fight. That's undeniably true – up to a point. But it's also true that similar stories can be found anywhere. I woke up at four this morning to feed my six-week old daughter, and then heard the low battery ring tone of my mobile phone. Well, the signal is simply as soft as a cat meowing. They needed help. That's what came to my mind when I heard the meow. I fed the mobile phone as well as my daughter, no questions asked. In two hours, my alarm clock shouted at the top of his lungs. And no prizes for guessing how efficient I was to give a good hit at the snooze button and go back to sleep.

How much that has to do with the noisy alarm clock and how much with my falling into bed weary to my bones after feeding in the wee hours, I cannot say. But surely there is good reason to feel and react differently to the varying loudness of requests. Given my beeper's noisy way of indicating the low battery status, for example, it should come as no surprise that I seldom replace my beeper's battery right after hearing that uproar.

Eggs on My Face

There's a good chance that you agree with me that hard-boiled egg doesn't taste good. Of all ways created by human beings to prepare an egg, none is more humdrum than a hard-boiled egg. But I'm pretty sure not too many of you would have difficulty with the know-how to boil an egg. I have.

When it comes to making an egg, I have no problem with cooking a fried egg, scrambled egg or omelette. Now that my baby has arrived, I have to prepare hard-boiled eggs for the celebration pot with sweetened black vinegar and pork trotter. I ended up plunging my eggs that came straight from the refrigerator into boiling water. I can almost hear you scream. No, before your scream, I heard the crack of my eggs first.

Go slow, at least in certain situation. That's the lesson I learned from my eggs.

New Year's Eve

I do not have New Year resolution to make. It's not that such resolution doesn't work – it does. However, why should we make resolutions simply to make ourselves feel better? Why should anyone? Does anyone? I don't, and I never did.

I turn forty next year. Come to think about it. It didn't take long for me to realize that I haven't had my baby until somewhere near the "half time" of my life. What I do at this point, as the panic mounts and I think about my age by the time my daughter graduates, is to stop. I stop just short of actually dropping dead from worrying. Then I think about something I really treasure. A beautiful Christmas gift, say, arriving long way after the festival is still much better than a run-of-the-mill box that arrived on time.

Thurgood Marshall, an eminent jurist who helped bring about the desegregation of America's schools, said it best when someone asked him what he wanted written on his tombstone: "He did the best he could with what he had."

It reminds me of a clinical trial I'd recently completed. The study design is almost impressive – except that it's not. I first launched the study around three years ago. Since then, the recommended treatment has really changed, leaving my treatment design obsolete. I sighed. Yet I know I did my best I could with what I had three years ago. I then tiptoed into writing up the study.

Let's move on. That's all any of us can do – try our best with what we have. Forget about the New Year resolution.

Pi

Recent reading the novel Life of Pi brings back my overseas training memories that are engraved in a way I know will never fade.

Yann Martel's Life of Pi chronicles the tale of a 16-year-old Indian boy moving to Canada. One time, during my training in Montreal eight years ago, I started reading this novel, and never got the chance to finish it before coming back. I know I won't remember the story and will have to go back to page one again.

Wait. I talked earlier the memory that has stayed with me for years. There is another story I like to tell.

Those books I read in Montreal, over twenty of them, made clear ripples and then less and less so. Obviously, I can never remember every detail. One thing I know for sure is that lovely memory of the Chapters bookstores in Montreal, where I buried my nose at all kinds of books every evening and weekend.

Over the course of one-year laboratory training in Montreal, I didn't have to look after patients. When the day's work was done, it would be hard for me not to hang out at the Chapters. I found plenty of chairs and couches inside the store. They were not the most comfy couches on earth, but they were mostly very kind with hospitality. I loved them and stretched out on the couches to read. By the time I closed a book with a sense of triumph and satisfaction, I would have almost sunk to the bottom of the couch. There was just one problem: most of the blood would have settled in my legs after sitting in a locked position during my avid reading. Next I tried to stand up, and every so often would pass out. But the point is that, like shooting heroin, the experience of near-fainting feels so good.

Colic

Preparedness is no laughing matter. It's real. Just when I think I've read up and prepped myself on a subject, the real thing will happen exactly.

To give you a little bit of the idea, I would say it's just like looking into a crystal ball. I believed that I should take a good look at Dr. Spook's Baby and Child Care yesterday; I then read the advice how to nurse and breast-feed a baby when the mother is ill. This made me feel like I was already in control of it. I was less scared after being told, to be sure, there is a chance of the baby's catching the ailment, but this would be true even if the infant weren't being nursed. I can rest assured that babies on average have milder colds than other members of the family because they received many antibodies from their mothers before birth.

I told my wife all about this. Then the real story unveiled itself last night; my wife caught some bad virus and began to throw herself up. She moaned. No, she grimaced as she continued to feed our baby. Ugh! Colic is much less a problem for our baby. It's her mother who got into nasty colic. Her stomach was in knots. Oh, my. That's exactly what I had been told. I know.