Of Dengue and Driving

Remember this?


I put it up a few months ago, promising to return to it someday. I'd originally planned to blog about it after the STPM trials, but in the end decided to postpone it to the end of the year.

In a nutshell: I was admitted to the nearby Pantai Medical Centre in the last week of September, in the midst of my trials. Suspected dengue (the picture above is the dengue virus). In the end it wasn't dengue, because no dengue antibodies were detected in the blood tests. Seems to have been some other viral fever.


Meet Dr Ravi Apparao, a.k.a. Dr Rao, who monitored me. A man with an incredible sense of humour and a penchant for bursting into the room as if he were some kind of pop star.

Most memorable piece of advice: Don't listen to what your grandmother is saying, cannot eat this lah, cannot eat that lah. Nonsense. You make sure you eat well, OK? Eat anything.

He seemed convinced I was recovering very well; you see, in the few days before I was admitted, I had a terrible fever and basically suffered a good deal in school.

Thanks, Ming, for visiting me in hospital.

I suspect the virus might've come from an insect bite above my left shoulder blade while I was studying past midnight one of the days in the previous week. When I showed the bite mark to Dr Rao, he said, "This one looks like the vampire bite. Usually they bite the neck, but maybe this time they missed a bit."

This is the mark:


I suppose the hospital stay did wonders. It was a time of much needed rest, though I guess it was rather unfair that I was the one resting while the others were slogging over the trials. Some of my classmates even said they wished they had dengue.

But indeed, as this next picture will show, being confined to a hospital room gave me time to enjoy meals, reflect and write a bit:


This was breakfast on the day I was discharged, two days after I was admitted. I was feeling much better, and got up to take some photos before settling down to eat.


This picture is to whet someone's appetite ahead of this Thursday. I hope you're drooling even at this very moment... :-P

Li-Shia told me to try the nasi lemak there, so I took the liberty of ordering a plate after I'd finished the breakfast cornflakes. Truly the nasi lemak was one of the best I've ever tasted.


But, by far, the most remarkable thing about the hospital stay was the Great Bio Enlightenment. I asked Mum to bring my Bio book so I could revise ahead of the next week's Bio 2 test; I also wanted to prepare for the next day's Bio 1 paper, but missed it due to an extended stay.

However, the book taught me less than the intravenous drips. While observing the saline drips, it dawned upon me that all of biology rests upon one concept: potential. We speak of osmotic potential in water flow across membranes; pressure potential when it comes to water transport in plants; electrochemical potential across nerve membranes; and so on. And within each cell is the information/potential for an entire organism, a concept called totipotency.

In the picture above, some of my blood is flowing into the drip tube due to insufficient pressure from the saline bag end. This happened several times.


That's the end of the tube that was inserted into my wrist. It's not a needle, just a very thin plastic tube. It looks somewhat like the nozzle of a petrol pump. And this leads me to the next part of this entry.


I hate pollution, yet somehow I know I'll end up driving a car. I may begin lessons as soon as tomorrow, and, God willing, I will receive my licence by the end of January.

Yeah, it's been two years. Most of my friends already have their licences, some as early as Form 5 itself. But here I am, all 19 years, shocking most people who think that I already have a licence.

I've always been quite reluctant about this. I know it will be very convenient if I can drive, but at the same time I hate the idea of adding to the air pollution when I can just take a train and walk a bit. By the way, whenever I walk, it's the drivers out there who make life difficult for me.

I know what people always say:

It'll be easier if you can drive...
Must be able to drive your family...
Drive your wife...
Drive your girlfriend...

How to reconcile these mixed motives? Often when I'm in a car, I look at people walking by the road, and I sympathise with them simply because I'm often in their position. If only we could turn KL into a bicycle city...

As Hamlet says after killing Polonius,

"...heaven hath pleas'd it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister."

I know that one person cannot cleanse the whole of KL's atmosphere. I've a friend who recently decided to become vegetarian. Animals won't stop dying. But perhaps for some of us, there are things that haunt us, burdens that weigh upon our 'decisions and revisions' (to quote Eliot).

Cars overwhelm me. Monsters, really. Yet I am scourge and minister, neither one nor the other, but both in tandem, simply because I have stood to gain so much from cars.

As Hamlet says of Laertes before their final showdown,

"For by the image of my cause I see
The portraiture of his..."

In driving, I am my own enemy. I wonder if my conscience shall ever be clear.