Visitors, Both Ways

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAn early start, and one that had been arranged for me the night before. Syahril rang to say Imran was being admitted with dengue — the sort of call that doesn't ruin an evening exactly, but does quietly rearrange the following morning before you've had a chance to plan it yourself. He's stable, which was the first thing I asked and the only thing that mattered. Dengue has a way of making everyone anxious out of proportion to how a particular case is actually going, and stable is a word worth holding on to.

Clinic, in the meantime, was busy. Properly busy, in the way that turns a morning into a single continuous stretch with no obvious seams in it. You look up eventually and discover that several hours have passed without your permission.

The afternoon brought its own traffic. Anita and Idlan turned up — Idlan wanting a blood test, which he had apparently decided upon himself and pursued with the calm determination of someone who has not yet developed any strong feelings about needles. Admirable, really. I've met adults who negotiate harder.

Then up to see Imran. Syahril and Yatt were both there, and it was good to see them, even in a setting nobody chooses. There's a particular etiquette to a hospital visit among friends — you keep it light, you don't hover, you ask the right number of questions and not one more, and you leave before the room starts to feel crowded. He's in good hands and doing as well as can be expected, which is the sentence everyone wants to hear and which, on this occasion, happens to be true.

From there to Mid Valley, because Idlan had clearly decided the day's medical cooperation entitled him to hot pot, and it's difficult to argue with that logic. Hot pot is a good family meal precisely because it takes a while — nobody can rush it, everyone has an opinion about what goes in next, and there's a companionable disorder to the whole thing that other meals don't manage. A fair exchange for a blood test, all told.

Home after that, and an early night — or the intention of one. Anita had cleaning to do, because Mak arrives tomorrow, and there's a particular species of housework that only ever happens in the twenty-four hours before a mother's visit. It bears no relation to how clean the house actually is. It's ritual more than maintenance, and pointing this out has never once improved anyone's evening, so I didn't.

So: a friend's son in a hospital bed but doing fine, a son of my own volunteering for a needle, a shared pot of something bubbling at a table at Mid Valley, and a house being readied for inspection. A day of people coming and going, which is how the good ones tend to arrange themselves.

Mak tomorrow. The cushions are already lined up like they're expecting her.

A Night on the Couch

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days arrive quietly and then keep adding to themselves. This was one of those — the sort that starts with one item on the list and ends somewhere entirely different, with you sitting in a room you hadn't planned on being in, wondering where the hours went.

It began, reasonably enough, with the Starex. It's being sold to make room for the new car, which is the unglamorous half of buying something — the part where the old one has to be moved on, priced, described, and eventually handed over to someone else's driveway. There's no great sentiment about it. It's a vehicle. It carried people and shopping and the occasional argument about directions, and now it'll go and do that for somebody else. Still, there's a small pause in it. Cars accumulate a surprising amount of ordinary life without ever asking permission.

That, though, turned out to be the easy business of the day. Anita's stomach trouble, which had been an irritation over the weekend, decided to get properly serious — the sort of worsening that stops being something you manage at home and starts being something you do something about. So: admitted, and put on a drip for fluids, which is one of those interventions that sounds more alarming than it is and works rather better than anything you could have offered her from the kitchen.

By the afternoon she was improving, steadily and visibly, which is the best kind of improvement — no drama, just a gradual return of colour and conversation. Relief arrives quietly in these situations. You don't announce it. You just notice, an hour or two later, that your shoulders have come down from around your ears.

There was a brief escape for dinner at Upstairs Cafe — quick, functional, eaten with one eye on the clock — and then home, not to stay, but to collect clothes. There's something faintly absurd about packing a bag for your own hospital-room sleepover, standing in your own bedroom at an odd hour, deciding how many shirts constitute optimism.

Back to the room, then, for the night. Hospitals have their own peculiar relationship with time — the corridors never fully dark, the sounds never fully quiet, and the furniture designed by someone who clearly believed that visitors don't really sleep, they merely wait horizontally. Luckily, tomorrow's a public holiday, which took the edge off the whole thing considerably. Whatever the night did to me, at least it wasn't going to be followed by a full working day.

I went down early, which felt like a small triumph at the time. Less so this morning, when I woke up with a back that had strong opinions about the couch and wasn't shy about sharing them. Sore in places I hadn't previously thought of as places.

Still — she's better, which is the only line of the day that really matters. Everything else was logistics. The car will sell, the back will recover, and the holiday is here at exactly the right moment, which almost never happens.

Anita's Turn

Looking after her father must have taken its toll. Anita had been under the weather for the last couple of weeks. Initially we thought it was just a simple infection. The antibiotics didn't clear it.

A couple of trips to the ER for nebulisers later and still she was struggling. The fever was persistent. Finally we decided to do some tests and it suggested that she had some bacterial infection in her airways.

Anita was admitted for four days, for IV antibiotics and other treatment. By the second day, her appetite was back. She lost a bit of weight while in the hospital. She was still lethargic when she went home but after a couple of days, things started to improve.

She was off antibiotics now and just taking some medicines for her sinus. She had a couple of busy weeks ahead of her sorting out her mother's new maid in preparation for her father returning back to Gombak.

At UKMSC Last Night

I got the news that my Sister's mother-in-law taken ill last night and after work, I picked up my Mum and went to visit. She was admitted at UKM Specialist Center and would be operated last night.

Alhamdulillah the surgery went well. I got the news that she finally left the operating theatre just after 3 in the morning. Unfortunately at Specialist Centers such as this - UMSC included - some of the surgery could only be scheduled outside office hours due to commitments of the Doctors to their University services.

Added to that, the surgeon was due to fly over to India for a meeting the next day, so the surgery was performed at these odd hours. The main thing was everything went smoothly. Hopefully the recovery would also be just as uneventful.

Tonsil Time

I went to visit my niece in Kajang last night. She had been having fever for the last few days, with really bad sore throat. They were up in Penang then, and initially thought nothing much of it, until the fever became relentless. She could hardly swallow nor speak by the time she was admitted on Saturday.

Poor girl was still having fever when we visit last night. Caught in traffic, we were hoping that we didn't reach there to late in the evening. When we got there, she was rather toxic-looking and keen to sleep. Still with fever despite the antibiotics.

Sunshine lighting at the top of her bedLet's skipHopefully she gets better soon .... And as for her room at KPJ Kajang - her Dad an anaesthetist there - it was rather cute .....