Packing Between the Lines

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere's a specific kind of tiredness that comes with knowing tomorrow is a half-day, and today isn't. The whole of it had a slightly restless quality — one eye on the clock, one eye on the beach that's still two sleeps away, and both eyes very much required for the actual business of getting through the hours in between.

Started with the MSH meeting, which is the sort of fixture that demands full attention and rarely gets a full audience — everyone present, half of everyone already somewhere else in their head. I'd like to say I bucked the trend. I did not.

Clinic ran long, deliberately so, on account of it being the last proper one before the week quietly empties out. Better to absorb the load now than leave it waiting, resentful, for whoever's desk it lands on next. It's an odd kind of front-loading — cramming the week's worth of attention into a single stretch so the rest can breathe. By the time the last patient left, the room had that particular hush that only comes after a long session, the kind where even the air conditioning sounds like it's exhaled.

Lunch broke it up nicely — a friend from the pharma side, off to Canada next month, which is one of those departures that still doesn't feel quite real even as the date gets closer. We talked about the move the way people always do before it's actually happened: logistics dressed up as excitement, excitement occasionally showing through the logistics. Cold winters, warm goodbyes, that sort of exchange. It's strange how a lunch can double as a small farewell without either party quite naming it as such.

Afternoon brought the long round, unhurried in pace but not in length, the kind that eats an afternoon quietly rather than all at once. By the time it wrapped, the light outside had gone properly gold, the sort that makes even a car park look faintly cinematic.

Home for dinner, which felt earned rather than routine tonight. And then — packing. Never my favourite chapter of any trip, mostly because it always reveals how optimistic I was about how little I'd need. Desaru doesn't ask for much: shorts, a book that will probably stay shut, sunscreen bought with good intentions. Anita, predictably, packs like someone anticipating four different climates and two unplanned formal events.

Tomorrow is a short round, mercifully, before the road to JB and then on to the coast. There's a particular pleasure in packing the night before a proper break — not the holiday itself yet, just the promise of it, folded neatly into a bag by the door. Lights off early tonight. The sea can wait a few more hours; so, thankfully, can everything else.

A Day Measured in Fares

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days announce their length early, and this was one of them. It began, as the busier ones tend to, with rounds — the steady morning ritual of working through the ward, that unhurried procession of names and notes that grounds a day before it has a chance to run away. I moved through it knowing the rest of the morning had other places to be.

From there the city took over. A Grab across town to Hospital Ampang, that particular Klang Valley experience of watching your estimated arrival time negotiate quietly with the traffic and losing. The occasion was the launch of the new CPG — one of those events that exists somewhere between ceremony and admin, equal parts polite applause and genuine usefulness. There's a satisfaction in seeing one of these things finally put down on paper and sent out into the world; a great deal of patient work goes into a document most people will only ever skim.

Lunch followed, and then I dropped by Jerome's office — the kind of unscheduled detour that turns a working day into something more companionable. A conversation here, a familiar face there, the small social mortar that holds the professional bricks together.

And then the long crawl back to SJMC, which is where the day presented its bill in the most literal sense. Sixty ringgit. I sat in the back doing the arithmetic of distance against fare and arrived only at a quiet resignation. Surge pricing has a way of finding you precisely when the city is at its most congested and you are at your least patient. I paid it, of course. One always does. But I noted it, the way you note a small injustice you've no intention of contesting.

Home, mercifully, came early — early enough for a proper sit-down dinner rather than the rushed, standing-over-the-counter affair that long days usually produce. There is a particular pleasure in an early dinner after a day spent ricocheting across the city: the food unhurried, the chair welcome, the sense of the day finally consenting to slow down.

The evening, though, still had one thing left to offer. I settled in to listen to a talk by Elias Jabbour, over from MD Anderson, with Jerome in the chair — the same Jerome whose office I'd lingered in hours earlier, now presiding from a stage. Jabbour is the sort of speaker who makes a complicated thing sound almost conversational, and there's a quiet luxury in being able to take it in from the comfort of home rather than a conference hall's unforgiving chairs. I listened with the contented attention of a man who has done his travelling for the day and intends to do no more of it.

A long day, then, and a crisscrossed one — measured out in fares and finished, fittingly, with someone else doing the talking. I was happy enough to sit and absorb, the city's traffic safely on the other side of the window.

A Day Without Clinic

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere is a persistent myth, chiefly held by people who do not do the work, that a day without clinic is a day at leisure. I am here to report, once again, that it is nothing of the sort. The clinic may have been absent, but the day filled its place with the brisk efficiency of nature abhorring a vacuum. By mid-morning I was already several commitments deep, with no obvious bottom to the list.

The centrepiece was a podcast recording with the Max Family, alongside my friend Dr Razak — a man whose company makes most things more bearable, recording sessions included. It went well, by which I mean the conversation found its rhythm early and rolled along without the usual stilted patches. There is a particular pleasure in talking with someone you genuinely like in front of a microphone; the audience rather fades, and you are simply two people enjoying the thread of it.

The trouble was that I had, with characteristic optimism, scheduled another meeting much earlier than the recording could decently accommodate. So we were obliged to stop midstream — that slightly graceless moment where a good flow is paused on the promise of being resumed, like leaving a film at the interval. I made my apologies, made my exit, and went to honour the prior claim on my time. The recording will keep. Conversations of that sort usually pick up where they left off, even after a gap.

By the time the last of it was done, the tank was running low. There is a specific tiredness that comes not from any single exertion but from the sheer accumulation of obligations, each modest on its own, formidable in aggregate. I had earned my fatigue honestly, which is at least some consolation.

I made it home before sunset, which felt like a small triumph after the recent run of late returns. There is something restorative about arriving while the light still holds, the day not yet surrendered to the evening. The flat was warm and unhurried, and I let myself decompress into it.

Idlan was full of his university doings, eager to recount his presentations from the day before. He is, by every sign, thoroughly enjoying his programme — and there is a particular gladness in watching that. The enthusiasm of someone in the thick of their studies, before the world has had a chance to dampen it, is a tonic. He talked, we listened, and I found my own tiredness quietly easing in the face of his momentum. To see him relish the thing he has set out to do is worth more than I could easily put into words.

So the day closed as a good one, if a busy one. Plenty done, a recording half-finished and a friend's company enjoyed, a meeting honoured, home before dark, and a young man's eagerness to round it off. Not every full day leaves you depleted. Some, the better ones, leave you tired in a way that feels rather like contentment.

Casual Day

The Malaysian Society of Haematology would be holding our yearly Scientific Conference later this week and I had been gearing down my clinic for that as I would be involved. This morning in fact, I have cancelled my clinic in Subang but had to make my way to Park City for a session. And today, I was just dressed casually in jeans and sneakers, and everybody was wondering why.

Well, best to wind down the clinic fast as I have some things to do this afternoon plus a talk to attend from tonight.

Happy Conferencing!

MSH Meeting 2015

Traditionally, the Malaysian Society of Haematology held their scientific meeting yearly, alternating between Kuala Lumpur and outside. It was held at Shangri-La last year and Penang the year before that. So, this time it was again time to venture outside of Kelang Valley. So, it was Kota Kinabalu.

It was the first time the meeting was held there, and the initial plan was to both do a small meet up with a very selected topic covered. Initially, we wanted to talk about bleeding in pregnancy. It soon turned into a two-day event, the first day being about bleeding and the second about clotting, both with emphasis in women. It turned out to be a great program, with the help of the International Society of Thrombosis and Homeostasis. We got speakers from abroad to chip in, plus have a nursing workshop the day after. It was great.

Le President, Dr Alan Teh with his welcoming speechOn top of that, we had 500 delegates and secretariats turning up. It was much better than expected. I must say that I learned plenty. On top of the of course, there were great food!

I chaired one of the session and live blogged the whole event - except during Friday Prayers of course.

The participation from the Pharmaceuticals were also strong, with the booths oversubscribed. All the symposium slot were also taken. The whole weekend was a resounding success. There are also write-ups from yesteryear's meeting here.