Clarity

"We don't always have to be clever, thank goodness. Often simply being clear is enough." So says the linguistics expert Christopher Johnson in his book Microstyle.

Apply this maxim to crafting the 140-character tweets. It works. Or, if you like, Facebook updates. And prayers too. As a doctor, I know that should also be the code for writing patient's discharge summary.

Neat summary leans heavily on the writer's efforts to distill the real important messages. Oh well, that won't happen if the computer allows us to copy and paste with ease. The first doctor jots down ten lines. The next copies them and adds some more. The third builds on that. The fourth joins. The discharge summary simply grows like the very hungry catepillar, eating one apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, three plums on Wednesday ...

Why bring up this overfed caterpillar and longer-and-longer discharge summary? Let's consider a case in more detail. One of our patients had a recent heart attack, and the cardiologist propped open the clogged coronary arteries with metal cage-like tubes, or stents. To keep these stents from blockade, our patient had to take two anti-clotting medications that stop platelets from sticking together. The price to pay for such "double anti-platelet" medications is a higher chance of bleeding.

Soon, the patient suffered from a stroke. A stroke is no joke; it means a clot is impeding the flow of the blood to your brain, wreaking havoc in your ability to talk or to walk. Doctors can't fix that, but can stop another blockade by adding a blood-thinner drug. In other words, that patient ended up taking an anti-clotting cocktail of three drugs. The bleeding risk of such "triple therapy", as you might imagine, is even higher.

Just don't expect the doctors to know (we don't) the best way to handle the tricky situation. The doctors discussed and decided to whittle down the time of taking triple therapy.

To cut the long story short, the resolution goes something like "drug A plus B plus C for 3 months, then A plus C for another 9 months, followed by B plus C forever." This is complicated, I know. The most complicated part of the story, alas, is how the discharge summary was written. That simply looked like a diary with one event after another, one medical decision after another - so much so that the summary ran for two whole pages. The last paragraph, under the heading of management plan, (where you expect to see the concluding remark) was "Home. Clinically stable and fit for discharge." Finding the crucial drug cocktail details within that two-page discharge summary is tough. Or at least, it's like finding a needle in a haystack.

I don't think I need to tell you the ending of the story: the patient ended up receiving the drugs in wrong way.

Teddy

Every so often we hear about a kid who can't separate from his or her teddy bear. The kid views the teddy bear the way an atom needs a proton - you simply become negative after losing one single proton.

A much overlooked teddy bear is another wet teddy bear that we all keep one at home. If you haven't heard of your wet teddy bear, you ought to read the picture book Cheer Up Your Teddy Bear, Emily Brown by Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton. I read this book with my daughter recently, and found out about the very wet teddy bear hidden in a toy-box. The toy-box belonged to a little girl named Emily Brown.

Emily Brown had been having great fun camping and then picked up this wet tearful teddy bear. What follows is classic contrast between Emily Brown and Tearful Teddybear. Emily first invited Tearful Teddybear to the Outback of Australia, and thought that lighting campfires and spotting kangaroos would cheer up Tearful Teddybear. They didn't. So Emily took Tearful Teddybear to the wild woods of Yellowstone Park, where they saw small bears and large bears and black bears and grizzly bears.

"But there is no teddy bears," wept the Tearful Teddybear.

Emily Brown tried many ways, but each time Tearful Teddybear repeated, "Po-o-o-o-o-o-or ME ... po-o-o-o-o-oor ME ... Poor little sad little wet little ME ... I'm a Lonely Only Bear and I'm feeling very blue, I've got no teddy friends and there's nothing here to do ..."

Emily Brown talked over and over again about the magic power of overcoming the weather and gloomy thoughts: that in the hands (or heads) of cheerful boy and girl, the drippy, drizzly, wet weekend will never be too wet to enjoy life. If you're a believer that the story should finish with the sun coming out, think again. What impresses me most in this book is how Emily beats the weather, and be happy. The moral here is simple: No one can make sew our mouths upside down without our consent.

Language

When it comes to the how of English language, there is a genuine thrill of discovering and decoding kids' lingua franca.

Before my daughter entered kindergarten, she coined words like "mouses." With time, she made fewer grammatical mistakes and observed new rules from her teachers. One of the classic clues that she was making (some) progress comes from her question: "Daddy, who is the beautifulest princess?"

Remember, my daughter goes to international school, and has been exposed to a rich verbal environment full of native English-speaking teachers. Many a time her spoken English is better than me. Much better. In time, my little one learns English faster than I can imagine.

Just a few days ago the two of us watched a drama adapted from the book Stick Man by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. That's one of her favorite books. We love to replay the story as if on stage, "I am not a stick. I'm a Stickman, can't you see?"

"Oh, well," my daughter added, "you're Miss Stick Man, daddy."

"Excuse me. Why do you call me Miss Stick Man?"

"Hey, 'cause you're silly and make lots of mistakes. You're Mistake Man."

Buddies

For most parents, the choice of travel destination matters a lot.

It is not really that important. The real question is find the right playmates.

My daughter is one of the fortunate girls who has good friend's family whose company we enjoy. We traveled to Taiwan this week, and went with the family of Jasmine's best friend met in kindergarten. That's the best part of our trip.

Affectionately called the twins, the two girls look alike, smile alike, play alike, and talk alike. Almost the same as the Latina girl Dora and her companion Boots. When we announced that we're traveling together, my daughter's "wow" showed me that it's much more important to load the "luggage" with the close friend than packing anything else.

A huge difference.

And a guarantee to do away with the spell of "Are we there yet?"

Sandwich

To watch Salma and Lily, one from Jordan and another from the United States, play at school is to witness children's friendship in action.

These two girls appear in the fascinating story book The Sandwich Swap. (There's even a YouTube version with the same title of the book.) They're close to each other like a pair of gloves. Or at least sort of. They spent a lot of time together at school, played on the swings together, drew pictures together, jumped ropes together, ate their lunches together. In many ways, they are pretty alike, except the color of hair: Salma's is black and Lily's blonde.

Nobody could have predicted the day when Salma and Lily shouted at each other.

Why did they shout?

The weird sandwich.

This is their cultural conflict - what to think of the foreign (Middle East) hummus and pita, and what to keep for herself (peanut butter and jelly sandwich). Treading that line, keeping one's culture in mind, and accepting other's cookery, is what we call tolerance. And it isn't a trait we're born with. Lily didn't have the heart (or the stomach) to accept her friend's hummus sandwich.

"Your sandwich looks kind of yucky,"

It could have been Lily's slip of the tongue, but seemed to be bad enough to set up a tsunami of dirty words. Ewwww, yuck, gross, garlic breath, bad smell, weird, you name it - the surefire ways to start World War III. At the height of the War, the two girls made rude insults that had nothing to do with peanut butter or hummus. They just yelled. In effect, it insults, it intrudes, it intimidates. The insults can hurt, and are shockingly mean.

Although I was unaware of it when I borrowed this book from the public library, my daughter had just made the same mistake as Lily. I then told her the story of curse words that hurt the best friend.

She promised she would not do it again, and I tried not to think about the last time I promised this myself.

Blessed

Caring for a sick child, and what's the first thing you want to do?

Jasmine started to throw up for quite a few times last night. My wife had a quick examination of her tummy and didn't find anything serious. Or, to be strictly accurate, not that serious for a doctor. I dare say there won't be something called minor ailment for all parents. Ah well, still, there isn't much we can do except waiting for the virus to go away.

She looked less tired today but didn't want to eat. On our way to the music class later this afternoon, my daughter and I were rapt in conversation when I read her a story. She interrupted me, toward the end of our train ride. "Daddy," she said. "I have to vomit."

Without thinking, I handed my daughter a bag.

She paused, then looked at me. "Maybe I can hold for a while ... and try not throwing up."

I glanced at my daughter, and then at the bag I was holding. Oh, I'd given her a duffel bag with her name on it. That would have ruined the nice bag. Which is what my daughter didn't want to do.

I looked around and found another plastic bag for her. She was by now feeling better. I put the plastic bag away, sat closer to her, leaned over and hugged her.

There was a momentary silence. "Dad," my daughter looked at me and whispered, "I'm afraid I could give you my germs."

Then I realised my daughter has grown up a lot.

Cops

Over the course of seeing patients for many years, I've referred some of them to have their bodies cut open for further examination even after their cardiac monitor tracing went completely flat. It's a detailed process of cutting and digging into each and every organ of a dead body. Not all patients have to undergo such critical examination. The medical term for this process, autopsy, is the last thing we want to hear after losing a beloved family member.

It seems an odd thing - it strikes me now as it did then - that I read about a black teenager's autopsies in The New York Times two months ago. Autopsies, not autopsy. I mean it. The 18-year-old Michael Brown, as it turned out, had gone through no fewer than three autopsies. The story of three autopsies for a dead body is unsettling.

Wait. It's even more unsettling when you read on: Michael Brown was shot at least six times, and all bullets were fired into his front. He died in a storm of bullets from a police officer. Most people believed Michael was innocent. In any case Michael was unarmed when he was killed by a white policeman.

The public uproar and outcry are best summed up in the #handsupdontshoot hashtag on Twitter, not to mention the tension during the nine nights of protests. Sure enough, requests for three autopsies (one for the locals, one for the feds, and Dr. Baden on behalf of the family) spoke volumes of disapproval and untrust. Dr. Baden, in case you don't know, reviewed the autopsies of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Two months after reading this story in St Louis, I witnessed how armor-clad cops treated the law-abiding protesters with tear gas and pepper spray in our city. Quite similar really, except that we're yellow, and not black.

What wrong did Michael and the local demonstrators do? Why did Michael deserve six bullets and why did Hong Kong protesters deserve the volleys of noxious chemicals? You tell me!