1. Steak is quick and easy to cook and clean up, and tastes so good with the right spices.
2. One of the perks of working in oncology is the frequent chocolates and fruits that we kindly receive from patients. The best cheesecake I’ve had by far is made by a patient (so good).
3. What is even more inspiring is how some of the poorer patients give the best gifts — boxes of “high-end” chocolates from the local supermarket for each and every staff member (not a trifle amount), or a good sum of money donated despite their financial circumstances — from the poorer patients.
4. An hour of walking to the supermarket, shopping, and walking back is worth more than an hour in front of the computer thinking that you are relaxing.
5. When going out for dinner with colleagues, order an entrée to share with everyone.
6. Higher octane fuel, although more expensive per litre, works out cheaper as you get more mileage out of it, and the engine is smoother to drive.
7. Happiness in life is partly related to discipline (the discipline to sleep on time, get stuff done, refrain from certain things etc) — without discipline, life is unbalanced and unhappy.
8. When motivation is waning and you are questioning whether you should be going to the gym, the answer is yes you should go.
9. When trying to be frugal in saving up for something, do not forget to be generous in everyday life.
10. Accidents happen often because things are not put back to where they are supposed be.

Surely there are many more, but here are some of them. Happy 2012 too! (Yes, it is already one month into the new year.)

If you have your tips of wisdom please share too.

This is my first time shooting a wedding in Malaysia. While there were some minor differences in wedding customs, the excitement and jubilee were just as infectious. Allen is my cousin, and it was my first time meeting his long-time girlfriend Amy. It was a real joy to catch up with extended family after so long too.

It has been a while since I touched my aging camera (proof of how amateurish I am), but it was fun looking at the world through the viewfinder once again. Here is to say congratulations, and all the very best wishes to Allen and Amy in the years to come!

That’s my nephew, during the wedding reception, by the way.

As you may expect, now on top of my hospital work I have clinical assignments and self-study to do. With a small change in priorities, it is inevitable that I will be updating this blog less often, at least for now. I will definitely still be writing – and I still have many things I want to do! – but I will just be updating less often.

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Thank you to those of you who are still reading. Write to me because I would still love to hear from you!

She was Jerry’s granddaughter. She just turned twenty not too long ago and she was getting married soon. She spun around once in the room, her hands in elbow-length white gloves held the hem of her white flowing gown high to show her grandfather, and I caught a glimpse of the ring on her finger. She was partly embarrassed, partly proud, and Jerry watched with part smile, part unbelief. Jerry was the most pleasant elderly man, even with the physical pain we knew he was going through at his terminal stage. A week ago he was still walking about when he saw us in the clinic, but a few days later we paid him a visit in the Emergency Department, and now a nasogastric tube hung from his left nostril, draining material from his bowels. His bowels were no longer working due to a combination of cancer and scarring from previous surgery and radiotherapy.

But for that moment, I thought, there was so much overwhelming joy in that little crowded single room. The two of us stood there as uninvited guests, but thankfully welcomed by Jerry and his son and his daughter-in-law to join in the thrill.

If I could capture those moments in video — the girl with the puffed bouffant skirt of her gown trying to find a comfortable position stooping beside her grandfather on the hospital bed for a photo, her mother trying to work the camera with her presbyopia, her father standing beside in his tradesman work clothes, and the relatives watching and laughing and making comments amongst themselves — I don’t think I would even need to put music to it to bring a tear to those watching it.

When she was in her teens, she had a boyfriend. She decided to tell her boyfriend that her right eye was actually fake, and her boyfriend left her immediately.

Later in her twenties she met a guy, and they fell in love and got together. When she was deliberating whether to tell this guy the truth about her eyes, there was anxiety and she wasn’t sure what to expect.

But she told him the truth — and the guy looked at her and replied, “So what? I’ve only got one eye too.”

Just a few years ago, the guy had got into a major motor vehicle accident with severe facial trauma and skull fractures. The doctors had to fix a metal plate in his forehead and tie his left cheekbone together with wires. His left eye was still intact, but the optic nerves had been cut. The scars have healed up well now and only a very slight displacement of his left eye is what remains. Just by looking at him, you couldn’t tell that he was seeing only from his right eye. She had not known until then.

“I guess we were made for each other,” the woman said to me, sitting beside him. They are soon approaching their seventies, and have been together as husband and wife for more than forty years now. This is a true story.

He came in when I was working in the aboriginal GP clinic in the Northern Territory, wanting to have a check up for sexually-transmitted diseases.

He had good intentions, if I dare say. I could sense his frustration at knowing what is right and not living it out — and don’t we all know the feeling well. Yet as I talked to him I came to know that he had already made some other changes in his life that was worth commending. Decided to stand up to peer pressure and cut down on alcohol consumption. Starting to pick up the discipline to exercise. “But I still don’t know how to control this sexual urge,” he said as-a-matter-of-factly, “I just can’t control it, y’know.”

He saw the tray of free condoms in the room and grabbed to store more than a few in his pocket, with some embarrassment. I never paid much attention to that tray — now I know how important it is to refill it!

“How would you feel if your partner did the same?” I asked.

“Oh I’ve heard that one before. … But I won’t do it when I get married, it’ll be different,” he answered.

“How do you know you can control yourself after you get married, when you can’t do it now?”

“Yeah,” he shook his shoulders. I was sure the question had crossed his mind before too.

I opened my mouth but I stumbled to take it much further. If I said anything more, I felt, I would have been a true hypocrite. It doesn’t have to be sexual dishonesty. My words would come back to bite me.

What makes a good wedding? There were no white Mercedes convertibles parked outside the church. No Christian Louboutin stilettos in the dressing room. No Tiffany & Co. diamonds on the altar. The location was not an exotic paradise in Bali. The hands were not immaculately manicured; they showed signs of hard work. There was no front put up to impress, and the people who turned up you could relate to everyday.

This is an honest girl being wed to an honest boy. All the very best for Melvin and Eunice. Thanks for letting me be part of this joyous celebration.

Many other natural disasters continued to occur throughout the world, of course, and I later crossed the Tasman Sea to move to Australia just after the earthquake in Haiti hit in early 2010. It was then the anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires that licked up a huge part of Victoria the year before. People were recounting the horror stories over radio.

Then the major floods in Queensland happened only a thousand kilometres from where I was staying, followed by Cyclone Yasi sweeping the northern parts of the same state. This time I had actual friends and people whom I knew who were in the area. Cyclone Carlos followed shortly after to hit Darwin in the Northern Territory — and I have only just been to the place earlier in 2010! The photos in the news were scarily familiar — yet now barely recognisable with the flooding, fallen trees and flattened houses on places that I have just stood in not too long ago.

And then the earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand, just yesterday, this time levelling the city area, catching all of us completely off-guard. My two brothers are there, and it was amazing to hear their first-hand experiences of the hospital blacking-out, being evacuated, and the general destruction of the city. It is unthinkable to imagine Christchurch without the century-old landmark buildings now — the day surely is history-changing.

I was flicking through my phone’s text messages when the earthquake happened, and the happy text messages only from a week ago of a friend finally finding a job in Christchurch, and of my brothers inviting me to play a game online together with them, suddenly seemed so distant and irrelevant now. Oh how things can change in a blink of an eye.

It is amazing too how these happenings seem to be getting scarily close both on Earth and in heart — in neighbouring states and in places I have grown up in. It is even more frightening, however, to think of how I can turn my eyes away from the news, walk along streets of Melbourne suburbs and immediately so easily get hypnotised by the calmness here.

I can’t help but to think it is not evitable that a disaster will strike my location one of these days. It almost feels like a guilty conscience! When and how would that be? Would I have a family of my own at that time? Who knows it will come when I least expect it.

It crossed my mind that if someone said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” again, would it make more sense now? It is a crazy time we live in these days, how far is this going to go?

I was asked to review the radiotherapy plan for Marie when I noticed on the CT images that her entire left lung was opacified. It turned out to be a haemothorax, as suspected. Her malignancy had resulted in auto-antibodies rendering her clotting system defective.

Two weeks ago I first met Marie in the clinic. She came with her son, daughter and daughter-in-law. They were obviously concerned about their mum and wanted the best, yet they understood there was only so much Medicine can do. Marie was in her fifties, but she did not look so at all. She came in well-groomed; her cheeks and lips were rosy with mild makeup. She had the gentlest speech, and her smiles were small, but frequent and sweet.

Now Marie was on the hospital bed in the trolley bay. No makeup this time — her complexion was pale, her lips grey, her hair messy from prolonged bed-stay. But she was still soft-spoken, and her smiles were still lovely as before.

I slowly explained to Marie what I found. “Things are progressing quite aggressively… And I’m not sure how rapidly this is going to continue,” I said as I watched for her reaction. “I’m really sorry, Marie.”

“That’s ok,” she said with a smile. It was as if she had expected this all along. “As long as the children are ok,” she added in passing. I didn’t quite understand at the time, but my mind drifted, for an instant, to recall the image of her son, daughter and daughter-in-law during the first clinic consult. She passed away the next day in the hospital.

Kenny and his dreams

In the same week, I had a conversation with Kenny. Kenny was a young man from Hong Kong. He had a wife Yen, and together they have a 5-year old son, who couldn’t understand yet that his dad was dying from colorectal cancer.

In a matter of days Kenny went from walking to being wheelchair-bound. On the CT images, his whole abdomen was solid with metastases. We knew his wife, brave as she was, was struggling to care for both Kenny and their little child at home. It came the time when I advised for inpatient admission to the palliative unit. It may very well be Kenny’s last destination in this life, and I wanted to make sure he and his wife understood the situation.

I remember his wife was wearing a T-shirt with verses from the book of Phillipians on it. I asked her about it, and it turns out I knew the church they attended. I realized too that when patients have a faith and hope to hold on to, these grim conversations become so much easier. I asked how long have they been in Australia for. It was two years ago when they came with their young son, on a working visa.

“What is it that you do?” I asked Kenny.
“I’m a lecturer at RMIT…”
“Oh what do you lecture on?”

“Building construction,” he replied, then added after a pause, “But all of that doesn’t matter anymore, Joseph.”

I guess that’s true. The following day Kenny’s cancer perforated his bowels. He was transferred to a private hospital, and that was the last I heard of him.

These conversations with Marie and Kenny at their deaths’ door helped me put some things back into perspective.

We took these photos over two consecutive weekends, immediately before rushing to do YK & HT’s photoshoots. My work and personal life turned into ruins that month (yes, that bad!).

But it was good fun. I was glad to be the one dressed casually when we were walking on the busy streets of Melbourne with a hundred by-passers glancing at us!

I was more liberal in the tinting of these photos as Eunice liked photos with “ambient” pastel highlight and shadow hues. Many photos are non-standard size too, just to be artsy. This is not a style I normally go for; in fact sometimes I think I have allergies with them… But tell me what you think.

Here we are, a small humble selection:

And some behind-the-scene shots:

Quite a contrast from YK & HT’s ones! I enjoyed playing with the two different themes. I must thank Melvin and Eunice for trusting me too.