As a River Flow into the Sea

I used to hear people say that the feeling that we have about life, is as a river trickles, gathers, navigates, rush, and finaly flow into the sea. I am coming into agreement with that sentiment. I paved for myself a difficult path. One that torments me further by parading my foolishness, exposing only scum of the supposed human intelligence. Not that i had expected that i was a genius, but i did have an imagination that i could at least be the better specimen of this category of existence. I have since been saved by the magnimity of the most dense of thick banana chocolate shakes, whose calories may prove to be the more superior in servicing the advancement of mankind than my meagre, quivering brain.

"It's strange but true, people just wake up one day, and for no reasons or apparent causes, simply made the decision to be a medic!" One of my colleagues once shared his observation on how people come to squander their time in the ambulance. Mine, started with a broken arm. I used to own this small piece of soft, yellow blanket printed with tiny flowers, that was absolutely the favourite of all my favourite things. The best thing about this blanky, was the squareness of its cut. In a stroke of serendipity, perhaps that was in the brew from all the cantonese soap opera i had been watching from TV, an idea formed in my tiny 5 year old head. I went to my father who was sitting quite comfortably in the living hall, decided that i now had a patient, and he most definitely had a broken elbow (even though he had to keep his right arm nicely in place for the whole procedure). That was my first self-taught skill of applying the triangular bandage, in the form of a yellow blanky which i am still proud to annnouce that it held my daddy's arm for a good part of the day (how much was assisted performance i will never know)!

Thus is how so many paths etched in their most primitive beginnings. I'm unsure if this decision of becoming a paramedic is made entirely out of this caramelised memory. To a kid, the boundless relief, and love that is borne out of healing meant the whole world. I started appreciating the idea that once people know they are ok again, it makes them smile, smile so bright, even if not seen from their lips. At the back of the ambulance, frankly, we rarely see people smile. Those are the privileges reserved for the surgeons, doctors and nurses who work with the patient until they are fixed and good enough to go home again; we would be lucky if our patients don't faint while on their way to the hospital. But these sun-lit smiles are, albeit imaginations, good enough for one to hold, and believe is my rightful part to share, even if i never get to see it.

Emotions, i have since surmised, offer a very convenient basis for making decisions such as a dream career. But it is also one of the hardest to defend. Without clarity as to how that moment of vulnerability supply the grounds for commitment, one may never toil enough to really find her way into that dream she thought she so very wanted in the first place. And i am starting to believe in greater magnitude, that this is what i'm here to do in Penang. To find a way to be comfortable in this skin of a healthcare person. To really decide in the course of my time here, that i belong in that dream i dreamed, no matter how i falter in the beginning, or how i feel out of place in my current environment.

My only solace (other than my good dog and cute colleagues, and a local coffee house), is the gift of thought and reflection. That at least in the midst f it all, there is a voice of literature, in the form of Anton Chekov, that had once taught me to understand "We shall wait, and we shall see..."