My shoes

We find viral videos on social media showing how doctors skillfully turn injection visits into fun play time for children. Distractions work so miraculously that the little ones laugh their way through, noticing neither the needle nor the prick.

Back in the seventies at Fatimah Hospital in the obscure town of Ipoh, a kid’s screams tore through the waiting area. The hysteria emanated from the X-ray room. Episodes like that recurred every couple of months or so over a couple of years.

That was me. I was three. For every visit the radiographer in strapped eyeglasses shouted at me ordering me to keep still. The more he shouted the more I shook and the more X-ray shooting had to be reshot.

And then there were the plaster-cast-breaking sessions. Every staff was gentle but the spinning blade was too scary. So the entire crew had to restrain me from pulling away from the motorized blade—or else we weren’t going to get me out of the cast, right? Of course they weren’t going to let the blade touch my skin but I couldn’t possibly imagine how, given that the cast wrapped around my leg.

The corrective surgeries were 6 years apart. 6 years were long enough for me to bank on biomedical advances, hoping that the proceedure would become more bearable. Hysteria and screams all the same, as plaster-cast-breaking sessions turned out.

By standard psychoanalysis one would expect me to grow up traumatized by hospital environments. By putting oneself into my shoes one would expect me to be agonized into adulthood. But it is not like that. It turns out quite the opposite. Whether as a patient, staff or visitor, stepping into hospitals I feel home. It conjures up the same feelings when I step into university campuses whether as a student, staff or visitor. I feel home. Like fish returning to water.

I worked in hospitals. There was no emotional summersault to work through. That nasty radiographer and those spinning blades were totally overshadowed and eclipsed by two personalities: Sr. Hermine, the physiotherapist, and Dr. Sivananthan, the orthopedic surgeon. Both seeded me for hospital service (even as everyone was damn sure I wasn’t gonna to do well, whatever that meant).

In the morning following the surgery during the ward round Dr. Siva came and sat by the edge of my hospital bed, took my hand, smiling ear-to-ear, “How is my young lady doing today?” I adored that grace. That grace flooded my medical career.

When we were young I was often asked what my favorite color was. I didn’t have any favorite color. Maybe because I was in survival mode; there was no space for preferences. Maybe all was too bleak for the faintest color. It was only in my fourties that I started noticing: not only do I like the color orange but I get drawn unknowingly to anything orange, be it book covers, store fronts, whatever. So hidden that I need to constantly catch myself before make decisions: do not fall into that orange trap.

More recently I started to connect: I think Sr. Hermine’s curtain was orange when she lived at the end of the hallway right after the physiotherapy suites. She was my physiotherapy for arouns 3 years, before leaving for Indonesia. Reuniting decades later she recounted how, from the far end of the hallway she would hear my arrival, “Sister! Sister!” She has been the icon of not only goodness but gladness. She served with gladness, a gladness I continue to strive to copy. She liked to pull my hand with a jerk of energy and excitement. Today I continue to try to empower as she did.

That’s my pair of shoes no one would have guessed, least expected for many. People can get things awfully wrong if they try putting themselves in my shoes. So there is really no need to put ourselves in people’s shoes.