Thirteen 13

台湾七人七日游 - 我的台湾日记

2012-02-03T02:42:00.000+11:00

It had been a long while since I embarked on a trip with friends, and thanks to the organisational prowess of Lester, I find myself setting afoot on Taiwanese soil on 2nd of February.

台湾日记，2月2日，雨天。

First day of Taiwan was a headlong immersion into the exquisite and varied cuisine of the place, from the 小笼包at the Michelin starred 鼎泰丰 restaurant to the night market selling funny looking but nevertheless delicious food.

After putting down our luggage in the impressive apartment we are staying - Apple House for those interested - we took to the roads on our bare feet to reach the train station 5 mins away. Our first destination – dinner at 鼎泰丰. The 小笼包 was just… out of the world.

In order to digest the food and breath in the cold Taiwan air, we decided to embark on a 2km to our next gastronomic adventure – 师大月市。

The night market was choke full of interesting food, from meat balls to noodles, desserts to drinks. Of all the things we tried, the 2 most outstanding in terms of the “interesting” factor being these:

As good things come in threes, we decided to continue our journey to 西門町 to try the famous 阿宗面线。

It was absolutely delicious, perhaps accentuated because it was a hot piping dish being savoured in the cold wet weather.

So there goes the first day in Taiwan – its all about food food and more good food.. what a nice warm fulfilling welcome！

Blast from the past

2012-01-08T00:25:00.000+11:00

It was a night scrolling through the previous posts, reminiscing at the cherish thoughts of yesteryears that spurred my decision to revive this blog.

There were so many forgotten snippets of my life that bobbed to the surface, like fishes enticed by just a short blurb or spiel in the blog.

Reading the blog filled me with mixed emotions; the occasional laugh out loud at my own wittiness, a soft glow while glossing through at my wondrous writing skills and the bashful smile reliving my naivety.

Lesson of the day: never underestimate the might of words and overestimate the power of memory.

The year 2011 ended in exactly the same spot where it had begun: surrounded by the same friends and hoards of nameless others, ears serenaded by the sounds of blaring music, eyes pleasured by the beauty of fireworks, minds in the making of perhaps the same wish, all under the pale edifice of the tallest building in Sibu.

But rest assured the year didn’t end in a full circle. In fact 2011 can be describe as the year of exponential growth as I struggled and strived to define myself and develop a persona as a unit head in a district hospital.

It was a year where I learnt a lot about myself: my strengths, my weaknesses, my leadership style, my fierce ambition. It was a successful year career wise, even though I had identified several personal demons that required some more hard work in 2012 to banish and overcome.

2011 ended on a high with an eventful December where we successfully organisation a “Meeting with clients” day, holding a nice Christmas dinner and a relaxing shopping trip to Singapore.

The Hari Bersama Pelanggan which made the papers.

The End of year/Christmas/Birthday celebration

Singapore revisited.

2012 will be a defining year. A year to build upon the foundation laid in 2011 and bring the pharmacy in Mukah to the peak of its glory and then making a graceful exit at the top. I believe 3 years is long enough before the search for new challenges begin. Hopefully, I will be hardworking enough to chronicle them in this blog.

The next mountain is always higher than the one I’m climbing

2011-05-22T22:16:00.000+10:00

I always thought that my pharmacy in Mukah is a very nice place. Relaxing but challenging enough to keep me on my toes and my brains working. Not too modern but young enough to be comfortable. A pharmacy that have the potential to be first-class with a little bit of hard work.

Then I visited Hospital Sarikei.

It is also a district hospital, but at first sight, it was already Hosp Sarikei 1; Hosp Mukah 0.

Then as I went into the outpatient’s pharmacy waiting area. immediately, the score became 2:0.

Dispensing counter, 3:0

Arrangement of medications, orderliness, neatness, completeness, 4:0

Beauti-ness of the notice board and displays, 5:0

Well, I think I should stop here before it became a thrashing. In shortness, Hosp Sarikei is a dream hospital. It is big, new, have a relaxing feel, new computers and furniture. Pharmacy wise, it is well-run, systematic and beautiful.

At least after the trip, I had now a benchmark – a clear vision of what I want the pharmacy to be. And hence I should work harder =)

Lest I fail, there’s also the step as per saying “if you can’t beat them, join them”. I am now keeping Hosp Sarikei firmly in my sight as my next working destination if I got tired of Mukah one day.

But now, its to improve my pharmacy with renewed vigor!

Happy Mother’s Day

2011-05-08T13:16:00.000+10:00

Mum, this is for you.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Kaul in pictures (2)

2011-05-06T00:22:00.001+10:00

Welcome to Pesta Kaul!

One of the elaborate booths on display. Each kampong around Mukah build their own booth, where they had cooking demonstrations, exhibitions and sell their unique food and wares.

I had actually been to the site four times. This is a pretty pic taken at night.

Stalls selling things from perfume to clothes to handicrafts.

Food stalls with lots and lots of unhealthy glorious food.

Fishes swimming in the sky.

Kite aero-show. Those six people at the bottom left of the picture skilfully made their kites fly in beautiful synchronised formation.

The parade of the ‘Serahang’. It had some cultural significant to please certain gods. But whatever it is, it was intricately handcrafted.

Close-up pic of the serahang.

The beach during sunset still looks very nice…

But Malaysians do need to learn one day not to litter.

Hmm….that’s all for this post. Its getting too long…^^

Watching paint dry

2011-05-05T23:17:00.001+10:00

Gone as a footnote in history:

For the past couple of years, this was the facade that greeted every patient who required some meds from the Mukah Pharmacy.

Towards the left hand side of the first photo was the door into the pharmacy, and next to it, the notice board which I was helping the hospital admin to decorate. Actually I hijacked it without permission for pharmacy’s gain =).

This was the interior of the pharmacy dispensing counter. Normal.

I had nothing against light colours, besides the fact that it is so without character. It just blended into the background as part of the ‘hospital furniture’. Lifeless. Mundane. Lack of vibrancy. So not cheerful. Not distinct. No way to go for a ‘top class’ pharmacy. No standard.

That’s why it had to be transformed. After waiting for a whole month, at last I had the novelty to watch paint dry for the whole day and continue to gaze and wonder at the brand new pharmacy for another. Tadaa! Presenting the final result:

The new look of the pharmacy counter. Bright youthful orange encrusted by a outer wall of contrasting dark brick-red.

The door into the pharmacy beckoned, surrounded by a welcoming brick-red warmth.

The cheerful interior of the new-look dispensing counter.

The view from afar which I took just before we close for the day. Now we look different and will be different. Hope the positive ‘qi’ can increase staff morale and work rate. I am already happier. ^^

Kaul Festival in pictures (1)

2011-05-01T00:33:00.000+10:00

Kaul Festival is the most happening thing in Mukah. It is sort of a Melanau new year which was celebrated annually around April.

The festival was held at the Kala Dana beach, which was the halfway point of my 6km jogging route. It was fascinating watching day-by-day as they slowly transform what was a barren field into a festive ground:

From this (above) to that (below) and that (below the below :)

They had also constructed a huge stage,

which was filled to the brim with local dignitaries and normal people at the day of the festival.

And who else to officiate and grace the opening ceremony if not the current most famous Melanau son. The one with white hair and beautiful wife.

I was there early and the usually serene and quiet roads of Mukah was already starting to choke with the unusual barrage of vehicles. And fellow human beings.

And since this is the most happening thing in Mukah, I guess I had to write about it in a few posts to do justice to it. And to finish this post, my take on youths playing the tibau – the famous Melanau flying swing that I think most Chinese parents will scream when their kids wander near it. Another version of this picture by an official photographer made it to the front page of the Borneo Post.

Watch out for the next photo-laden post! =)

2nd anniversary

2011-04-16T15:30:00.000+10:00

2008 2009 2010 2011

Today marked the second anniversary of me being a pharmacist in Malaysia.

That means I had already fulfilled one third of my contract with the government of Malaysia. At this rate, six years will be way faster than I imagined.

Two years down the road from the day I first stepped into the unknown landscape called pharmacy in Malaysia, I am now writing this in my wooden abode 500km from home, with the police sirens blaring outside as the luxurious convoy carrying the Chief Minister of the most current government sped through just 20 metres away.

You may ask, did it ever crossed my wildest imagination, that I will one day find myself in the current situation? Had I ever imagined when I first stepped into the hustle and bustle of Sarawak General Hospital two years ago as a greenhorn that I will now be in the middle of the Melanau heartland, holding the dubious post of Chief Pharmacist in a district hospital? The answer is “No”, partly because, as Mother told Sarah in the kindie song “whatever will be, will be, the future’s not ours to see..”

Nonetheless, the short span of two years had been an amazing experience, where I find myself evolving from a pharmacist carrying out the exalted duty of hands on patient care to a pharmacist whose main responsibility is to carve out programmes and policies to better serve a rural community.

My aspirations can be as fickle as the wind. After the end of my first year, I aspired to be a clinical pharmacist with a well-stocked ammunition of complicated drug know-hows . After the end of my second year, it becomes being a managing pharmacist with a well conceptualised plan to transform a backwater pharmacy to be world class.

It is scary how situations and experience can easily change you.

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” had been an oft quoted poem. Two years ago, I held to my blind faith that there exists greater hope in Malaysia then Australia by returning home. No kompangs or heroes welcome was evident as I forged through this less taken road. But I have no regrets. I love what I had been doing so far.

Back to the Chief Minister. He is here today because coincidently, today also marked the first time I am eligible to vote as a Malaysian citizen; and he is the candidate here. But this privilege I had decided to forfeit, for after deep consideration and deliberation, I found myself unable to choose. As I foray closer to the next diverging junction of my career, I fervently hoped that when the time comes, I will know which way to go.

Balingian

2011-03-07T22:35:00.001+11:00

Roughly 60km from Mukah lies a small town that is full of juxtapositions and contradictions that it truly epitomises the spirit of 1Malaysia: no matter rich or poor, we both can live together.

On one hand, there are old wooden kampong houses like this dotting the riverside; this one looks as if it’s on the verge of jumping into the cool inviting river for a swim.

On the other hand, there’s these big factories so modern that it looks like a foreign body being wrongly transplanted here due to someone mistakenly interpreting the Sarawak map wrongly.

Balingian looks and feels like a sleepy hollow, with its row of 1960s wooden cowboy style shop-houses right by the river- an exact carbon copy of other little towns in Sarawak right to the ubiquitous Chinese temple. Occupants were seen lounging on wooden chairs, reading newspapers and bantering with their neighbours.

There’s also a new bazaar, but it bore semblance to a dead town – concrete buildings that had more swallows around it that humans. Most of the shoplots were unoccupied or closed – the one ones open this Sunday morning were a couple of coffee shops.

However be warned, despite its another-village-next-door unassuming facade, Balingian is literally an underdog powerhouse - home to a Metal factory, Aluminium factory and Coal factory. The polluting impacts of these factories on the pristine village are stuffs of urban legend – stories of dying yellowing trees and shrouding smokes that lives up to Balingian’s Chinese translation - 万里烟 (Ten thousand miles of smoke) filled coffeehouses chats in Mukah. Yet to my disappointment, throughout the whole road to Balingian, the only scenery greeting me were green trees and clear air.

Besides these factories, there are also some high class condominiums puncturing the continuous roadside greeneries. But instead of serving as dwellings for humans, these are condos for swallows. Bird nest is a huge business around Mukah. But i did wonder how does the caretakers and builders and villages living in dilapidated wooden houses with attap roofs nearby felt about their high class neighbours living in brick and concrete condos… Such was the difference between the haves and have nots…

This is Balingian’s Health Clinic.

Some patients having hypertension and diabetes follow-ups here had to go all the way to Mukah (to see me) for their medications because they do not have any pharmacy dispensers here. From today onwards I guess I won’t give them any more IOUs after seeing the distance they had to cover and the obvious lack of public transport. I guess this is called going down the field to step into the shoes of patients. =)

Working in a pharmacy: a day’s journal

2011-03-02T22:33:00.000+11:00

7.40am Reached the pharmacy with half cup coffee in hand. Switched on the lights, air conditioner and computer. Glanced through the to-do list today. 10 items. Put a star on the urgent ones. Started to pore through the financial reports from pharmacy store. Found discrepancies. Again. Sigh.

7.55am A staff came in to give an idea on how to reduce the amount of waiting time at Out-patient pharmacy. Quite interesting. Happy that they are really thinking innovatively to solve the persistent problem.

8.15am Reached male ward for ward round prep. Scanned though patient’s medication chart and profiles. Two interesting admissions last night. One was nephrotic syndrome. I adored kidneys. Made a note to clerk it later.

8.45am Met up with a few sectional heads to explain the non-drug expenditure report that HQ requires then to fill. My style: preferred to go through with them thoroughly with real time examples – way better than just throw the instruction paper to them. Reward: they sent it in in the afternoon even though deadline is 3 days away.

9.15am Back to out-patient pharmacy. Started dispensing to patients from out-patients clinic. Today was diabetes day. Quite busy. One patient had high blood glucose level despite on high dose insulin. Suspected non-compliance. Roped in to counsel. Re-teach technique and stressed on the importance of taking the shots on time.

10.30am Out-patient crowd thinned. Back to the ward to catch tail-end of ward round. Queried doctor on plan for some patients. One patient was going home with a newly prescribed MDI Salbutamol. Sat down with patient to do bedside counseling. Went through asthma in layman’s term with him – used the blocked pipe analogy. Demonstrated three times before patient fairly competent.

11.00am Another bad news. The weighing scale is broken! Called HQ. Can’t buy another one at the moment because its too expensive. Oh no….

11.15am Back to office intending to do some paperwork. Doctor rang for drug info – answered the query. Staff came in saying a patient is reluctant to inject IM Provera, due to fact that prior injection resulted in prolonged fever. Went through case notes, found out the previous injection was IM Lucrin. Confirmed correct medication was ordered with doctor, then assured patient while personally escorting her to see the nurse administering the injection.

11.40am Patient newly started on Humapen requiring counselling. No prior experience but very willing to learn. Went through the whole gamut with her: what is diabetes, why need to treat, the goals of treatment, what is insulin, how to prep pen, how to inject, where to inject, what to do on sick days and detection and treatment of hypoglycaemia. Took a full half an hour.

12.15am Returned to office desperately wanting to finish the items on “to-do” list. Called some wards to tell them their Diazepam had expired, better come and exchange. Indented the drug to them. Packed some dangerous drug (DD) tablets that is low on stock. Prepared the specifications output report for admin. Did counselling statistics – 37 patients counselled thus far these 2 months, on the right path to hit the 200 target I set for this year.

1.00pm It’s Lunch time! Went home to have a healthy meal of chicken breast fillet salad with French dressing.

1.50pm Back to office to read up some articles on nephrotic syndrome to make sure patient is managed correctly.Dalat Hospital (a small Hosp nearby) called to borrow Potassium Chloride mixture. Gave them three litres in exchange of loaning their weighing scale. Agreed. Problems solved with mutual benefits.

2.30pm When to pharmacy store to go through the report with the staff there in detail, to find out the source of the discrepancies. All the figures made my head spin.

3.00pm A visit to the inpatient pharmacy. Taught the staff there how to use a min-max thermometer – newly acquired to ensure better management of cold chain item. Collected all February scripts to scan through for prescribing patterns.

3.30pm Afternoon ward round. Went to 3 wards: Male, Female and Paed. Go through new cases in male and all cases in female and paed. Only found a small problem, doctor indenting methyldopa as metformin. But nurses were alert to it anyway.

4.15pm Paperwork, paperwork and never-ending paperwork. Rearranged the mountains of paper on my table. Filed noted items. Printed out notice for the next Continuous Professional Development (CPD) presentation. Aimed to do twice per month so that every staff can collect more than 30 points per year. Its next Monday and I will be presenting. Sigh… need to go home and prepare.

5.00pm Yes! Time to go home. Managed to finish 5 items on the to-do list. 50 percent…not bad. Did a new one for the next day. 5+3 = 8 items =(

My days had been action-packed like this for the last month. Anyone interested to be the only pharmacist in a district hospital? ^^

沐胶点滴2

2011-02-27T03:11:00.001+11:00

沐胶没买珍珠奶茶，只好自创：

看起来不错吧！味道也跟商店卖的平分秋色。

不必鼓掌。

因为珍珠是古晋买的，稍微热水烫10分钟就行；奶茶是3合1。

但这 apple crumble 的确是我做的。 =）

最近工作有点忙。好多零碎的事要解决，新方案要实行。老板娘走后，一人做二人分量的工的确有些措手不及。但真的学到很多新的东西。

一个月前拍的药剂部全家福：

老板娘的感恩晚宴之美味佳肴：

我的最爱- 生鱼片：

药剂部新创意：回收药物箱。

我为他取名 “bujang ubat”. 不知为何砂劳越的鳄鱼都喜欢名为 “bujang xx”.

就这样，2011 年过了六分之一。

Kuching revisited 古晋重游篇

2011-02-21T02:49:00.000+11:00

Going to Annah Rais longhouse is fast becoming an annual ritual.

This was March ‘09:

March ‘10:

“Changyang if you are reading this, where’s the pix? =)”

February ‘11:

But this time we are more adventurous, even attempted successfully to cross this rickety two-planks-wide (narrow would be a better word) bridge.

Perhaps it had to do with the destination at the end: a cool refreshing river, which was too inviting to resist on a hot blustery day.

Or was it false courage from the Tuak?

With a surplus of adrenaline steering our decision-making, (and also clouding the route identification skills of a certain Kuchingnite), we decided to go to this place next:

A beautiful, peaceful place to relax. Look closer and you will see pink lotuses floating serenely.

Look closer still, just beneath you feet and you will see

Yeah, its a real crocodile. And not only one, but thousands of them, because this is Jong’s Crocodile Farm.

Tell all your macho friends, we farm crocodiles here in Sarawak. Aren’t we brave?

Besides these places we also cover all the usual food and drinks and city walks which I think I had written about in previous years.

But we do did something out of the ordinary, thanks to KY’s Padini card. Half price member’s exclusive discounts are too hard to resist, especially if someone has The Card.

We may be at the wrong side of twenty, but we are still young at heart =)

CNY 2011

2011-02-03T01:29:00.001+11:00

New Year card I drew using paint this year. Specially for anyone/everyone who dropped by here. Wishing you all – all the very best!

兔兔高升，兔年行大运！

Mukah news

2011-01-25T01:51:00.001+11:00

You know you had diversified too much when you are a post office and you don’t even know how much it costs to send a snail mail from Mukah to Melbourne.

Post office Mukah very canggih (advanced). There I can settle my sesco (electricity) bill, telekom (telephone) bill, insurance bill, even top-up my Digi (handphone) line. And the fellas there do it efficiently. But then when I asked for stamps to send snail mail from here to Melbourne, the fella who served me go “Errrr…..nanti ar…tunggu sekejap…”(please wait) before hollering “boss!” =.=’’’

Hello! Isn’t the post office supposed to be the expert in posting letters???

Mukah doesn’t have much of a new year mood. I think mainly because there’s no shopping malls where you can pull all the senses and sights of CNY together and showcase them in a contained space.

All you will see here are sparse splotches of red in front of sundry store selling made-in-China cheap wares and the occasional blaring of CNY songs from VCD vendors. Haih..

Anyway still got a couple of shops selling lokam. The bright orange colour exudes so much CNY feelings that I couldn’t resist buying one whole box and share it with the hospital staffs last week. Just to spread a little bit of CNY feel around. Being here, I seriously don’t feel that CNY is just one week away.

A lot of the guy staffs here called me “Boss” (coz my ‘rank’ higher) but most of the female staffs called me “Boy” (coz I look young and adorable?). And officially from last week I am literally the new “Boy Boss” of the pharmacy.

Okay that’s what I called myself anyway. My boss got transferred. So now I am at the helm steadying the ship and avoiding the icebergs while waiting (hopefully) for a new captain to come abroad. Felt so weird being boss to a group of people much much older than me. I went for my first department heads meeting today – and yay I was also the youngest around. Really makes me feel twenty-six is so far away...

以身作则

2011-01-18T23:21:00.000+11:00

放工时分，我饮着一杯冰冷咖啡，满足的迈向家而行。

“哇，你天天叫我别多吃糖，竟然自己喝甜水？”

突然从侧面传来一位老兄的声音。

这老兄蛮友善的，偶尔会在药剂部领药时与我交谈。我记得他因为他不只个子高大 - 血压胆固醇体重血糖也很高。

我也常常劝他，多照顾饮食，多运动，药一定要准时吃。

这次糟了。本人犯法被扑。

我很想对他说，其实糖尿病四大因素为基因压力过胖不运动，并非多喝甜品。但这不是重点。

成为药剂师，不只配药要精灵，也要懂得成为病患者的鼓励资源，学习的好榜样。

要劝人一周运动150分钟多吃菜少吃肉，自己要能做得到才有资格劝。我相信这一点，不然真的可以被称hypocrite了。

最后，还是得笑眯眯的‘认罪’，然后尽快闪开话题，把焦点转移他身上。话谈中发现他血糖最近有改善，乘机多给他称赞鼓励，让他也笑呵呵的离开。

下次喝咖啡要躲在家里喝。

乡下点滴

2011-01-16T17:27:00.001+11:00

好久好久没有静静坐下来收拾心情写写部落阁了。

我在这小镇常常闹纳闷，无聊，叽里咕噜埋怨多多，但不知为何却不善用这多余的时光分享生活点滴心声。可能没心情吧。

这几天，天空好像失恋了，乌云密布，倾盆大雨陆续下了好几天。有云儿逗它笑，也是偶尔的两三个时辰，很快它又转换回阴蒙的心情。可怜的人们得受天的气。

一眨眼，半年了。我也渐渐习惯了木胶的缓慢生活节奏，懂得在宁静中悦赏淡淡的海浪声；在空闲当儿观赏点缀绿田中的鸟儿。我习惯了一个人生活。

一起床给自己一个鼓励，上班时给病人一个笑容。傍晚时分，沿着海岸跑步，陪着散发出温和热光的太阳走下山。晚上互联网成了寂寞者的饮茶室，连续剧是暂时迈进梦想迷幻世界的良伴。我的日程如盖印一般，日日复日日，日日似日日。

但在这期间，我相信我是有成长的。陌生的环境制造了许多新鲜的经验，让我大开眼界。在这乡下所得到的领悟我相信是后日可取的。新的一年，我要学得更多更好。我要掌握药剂界的所有一切，成为一级等的药剂师。不要紧，再熬多两年罢了。。

Trip up north (2)

2011-01-08T19:24:00.000+11:00

As much as I had heard about our friendly neighbour Brunei Darulsalam, I had no conception on how it looked like. Does it resembles Singapore? or Malaysia? or a unique place by itself? Well, at last now I got my answer.

I guess it reads “Welcome to Brunei?”

Bandar Seri Bagawan was a 2 hours car-ride away from Miri. The main reason we went there? To eat the famous Escapade Sushi!

So-so from the outside

But classy inside! And the sushi… is just so scrumptious and fresh.

Other places we visited include this very golden museum. Most of the exhibits here are gold plated and no photos allowed. This is what they call oil rich…

As rich as Brunei is, there are also people living on wooden water villages where their main mode of transport are water taxis aka sampans and speed boats.

A magnificent mosque in downtown Bandar:

A shopping mall

And a six-star high class hotel

My favourite pic of the day: dolphins dropping by the hotel adn swimming towards the horizon. Hope you liked it too.

Trip up north

2011-01-07T18:47:00.000+11:00

The last time i was in Miri, it was a 3-hours space filler enroute from Kuching to Mukah. But this Oil Town impressed me enough to warrant a longer ‘official’ visit.

So after the New Year trip to Sibu, Miri became the destination of my 2nd trip.

This is a bird’s eye view of Miri atop Canada Hill. Miri is quite big and it felt like Kuching away from Kuching. Only that it is hotter.

The colourfully decorated trees along Jalan North Yu Sheng, one of the main streets of Miri.

Miri has a lot of beautiful beaches just a short drive from the city centre, for example this esplanade beach.

And their public parks are much more well maintained compared to those in Kuching. This pic is taken at the Taman Awam park.

This is the Grand Old Lady of Miri, which is a must-visit icon. It is the site of the first on-shore oil well in Miri.

And here is the friendly sea-horse, the mascot of Miri city. Looks similar to Singapore’s Merlion.

Food wise, nothing too spectacular but all the same very nice. They have this nice dish called Lalapan:

And also delicious grilled fish.

And yes, not to forget about dim-sum which will put all the dim-sum joints in Kuching to shame.

Of course a trip to Miri wouldn’t be complete without a trip to their friendly next-door neighbour, Brunei. Since there’s so many photos in this post, Brunei will be up in next =).

Last of all, thanks to all my dear friends in Miri who makes this trip fun and memorable.

New year 2011

2011-01-01T17:56:00.000+11:00

New year 2011 was ushered in in a burst of fireworks under the long shadows of Wisma Sanyan, the tallest building in Sarawak.

For those unfamiliar with Sarawak, Wisma Sanyan is in Sibu, which in turn, is the nearest big town from Mukah.

The fireworks was preceded with a yummy New Year eve dinner, karaoke session and some lovely fruit dessert.

New Year morning 2011 started with a long queue to get a taste of Sibu’s famous Tomyam Hung Ngan.

The source of the 30-minute wait and the need to play waiter in bringing the food to your own table:

Tastes delicious, albeit probably Ajinomoto induced as resulted in half day long polydipsia.

New year dinner in turn consists of a huge plate of pineapple rice, crunchy soft shell crabs and sinful banana pancake.

So yeah theme for the New Year: Food, food and more food. Not a bad way to start a new year =)

How Dalat got its name

2010-11-27T17:04:00.000+11:00

For a lot of modern Semenanjung kids, I’m assuming Dalat is the only place they know in Sarawak besides Kuching, as it was featured in the secondary school’s literature curricular.

It was also because of “How Dalat got its Name” that I was intrigued to go and find out how does the real Dalat looked like.

A little bit of geography - Dalat is located approximately 40 minutes or 50ish KMs by road from Mukah.

The first impression of Dalat was that it was quite modernised.

The market square was full of modern shop houses, market stalls and even a fuel station.

However there do exist little enclaves of time warped images of yesteryears, like this quaint hair-dressing salon neatly juxtaposed by the modern-defining VCD store next door.

This is Dalat’s most famous and sacred landmark – the Jerunei. It is the place where ancient Melanaus put the corpse of a dead king – and together with it a fair maiden was left to starve to death on top to accompany the king into the after-world.

The Jerunei was craved out of a Bellian tree and intricately designed.

Like many small towns in Sarawak, Dalat is situated next to a river, with a jetty filled with plying boats offering to send passengers to the kampungs across river.

There was also the ubiquitous Chinese temple by the riverside. This one looked newly refurbished and somehow reminded me of a koala bear.

And of course, being a Melanau-dominant town, there’s this big Melanau umbrella offering lepaking kids shade from the sun .

So there goes the mystique and allure of Dalat, another place unfortunately torched by fast-paced modernisation. I guess I expected the town to look like Oya, situated between Mukah and Dalat, where the town square consists of a row of colourful wooden shops with flies buzzing around in the lazy afternoon sun.

There was no lingering signs of the kampungs and warriors of the story in Dalat – confined it is, to be a fairytale of a bygone era, forever.

Sibu makan trip

2010-11-07T15:45:00.000+11:00

Early Nov and it was a short trip to Sibu – a 3 1/2 hours worth of bumpy bone massaging trip from Mukah. It was a trip of Kong Pia, Kong Pia and more Kong Pia:

Wet and dry version of oven baked kong pia

Deep fried kong pia (right side)

Someone is bringing bags and bags of raw kong pias back to sell in Saratok.

And with Sibu being a food haven, there was really a lot of makan, makan and more makan:

Dien Bian Hu

Kampua Mee

Foochow Mee

Big fatty pork leg, 1kg of crabs and bidin.

Lucky no one had the kong-pia face at the end of the trip.

There’s also a few nice places to lepak in Sibu:

The new Sibu heritage centre and also Wisma Sanyan at the back.

Bukit Aup Park.

Temple.

Biggest wet market in Malaysia.

Nice relaxing trip.

First ever conference attended as a pharmacist

2010-10-10T15:19:00.000+11:00

Way back in October, I attended my first ever asia-pacific conference as a pharmacist.

It was about diabetes, four days long, held in Borneo Convention Centre back in Kuching, and costs RM800. Lucky the government paid for it.

In the conference we listened to endless lectures, symposiums and throng the various booths selling diabetes-wares.

Plenary Lecture

Symposium with panel of experts

Besides consuming the nice and delicious food.

It was an interesting and insightful experience, albeit some of the topics being boring at times. At least there’s some angmohs lectures. How I missed listening to their English…

Angmoh-talk

Malaysia Day

2010-09-16T22:46:00.001+10:00

In Mukah, there is this cafe called Kafe 1Malaysia.

I had never been inside, but then since today is the first ever Malaysia Day, I thought, why not go and have a look to see whether there’s some celebration going on.

Alas, the whole cafe is empty. Deserted. Only a couple of flies humming around in the lazy afternoon sun. The same applies to the whole Mukah town. Apparently the spirit of Malaysia Day had not caught on. One of my staff is even unsure why we are having this holiday. Okay, maybe here people lives so harmoniously that they don’t need a holiday or some celebration to remind them that we should treasure our independence.

Nevertheless, it is amazing that it took 47 years for those higher ups confined in their plush KL ivory towers to admit the fact that, well maybe, we can’t hide that elephant anymore.

That jumbo being the fact that the true day our nation achieved independence is Sept 16 and not August 31. Even though they called today “Malaysia Day” instead of “Independence Day”, lets just accept it and give them some face. It’s hard to admit a mistake.

And so today was the first ever Malaysia Day holiday. A day where all Malaysians are given the day off, so that they hopefully can search within themselves or online what actually is Malaysia Day all about. Or maybe to attend the various state and national levels govt sanctioned speech and dance combos.

Well, unfortunately I know, this is being optimistic thinking.

In Australia, Anzac day saw masses throng the streets to ponder and remember the sacrifices of their soldiers . The realistic truth is, Malaysia Day will see most people will just use the day to sleep in, play games and jalan-jalan cari makan. We just aren’t a country with first world mentality.

Do we have the spirit of 1Malaysia? Do we use this day to reflect and contemplate? To be thankful that despite being in an imperfect nation, we are still living in relative harmony?

Just wondering, in this Malaysia Day, what had you done?

Whatever, Happy first ever recognised Malaysia day.

Chocolates (Bite 2)

2010-09-10T22:19:00.000+10:00

She is a beautiful young lady, as often complimented by her friends. Svelte and slender, one said. Hazel eyes with long lashes that can melt if you caught her fleeting attention. Long flowing black tresses with a hint of auburn finished with a frontal straight fringe that swayed ever so elegantly in the soft zephyr.

Her suitors are numerous and varied, a cacophony of human morphology. They came like roaring waves or trickled water, depending on the seasons, bearing fruits of their toil. And chocolates of course, because they all knew: oh, how she loves them. Sweet, dark, milky and bitter. Dainty little pieces or rough huge chucks. It is a guaranteed failsafe to her heart. Or so they thought, for every time the tide ebbed and waned, it leaves behind a spotless beach without the tiniest hint of even half a footprint.

She had flipped though their names in her mind like a virtual Rolodex as she stared intently at the macaroon, willing it to blurt out the answer. Alas, this stunt does not match any of their signature moves. When the rocky road also chose to remain silent, she knew she had to do something.

Long before the clock chimed nine on Wednesday, she was already crouched by the window which gave a partly unobstructed view of the door. She felt the adrenaline flowing inside every single cell of her body. The apartment was eerily silent and dark except the soft glow emitted by her laptop.

Just before the luminescent hand of her watch tethered over to twelve, the guy appeared, a thick coat covering most of his body. Her heartbeat picked up as he shuffled nearer. She craned her neck a little for a better look. Alas, the surrounding darkness camouflaged him well, and he wore a hood over his head. She was getting despondent until he stepped onto her doorstep. Oh my god, it’s him! She could hear herself wonder aloud. For as meticulous as the guy was, he forgot to mask the distinct purple laces of his shoes!

She saw him placed the cardboard box carefully in the middle of mat and pressed the doorbell, before beating a hasty retreat. She waited until his footsteps melted into the night before retrieving the gift, her brain a cacophonic mix of thoughts and feelings. The revealed white chocolate praline topped with a glazed strawberry slice with leaf intact looked at her, puzzled at her intense expression. If only it could talk and offer a dime for her thoughts...

Chocolates (Bite one)

2010-09-03T22:22:00.000+10:00

It had been a while since I let loose my vocabularies to have a run in the pen, Mukah being the sort of place where tranquillity (itself a better word than boredom) can lull your brain to sleep.

Actually it had been more than a year.

Luckily, the recent dose of cold Melbourne air had been a blast of freshness, the breathtaking city and beautiful people providing a revitalizing effect.

This short essay is named Chocolates. First part appears as below:

***

The silver ribbon unravelled upon the delicate touch of her dainty fingers. Like a flower bud on the throes of blossoming, the petals of the pearl white cardboard wrapper wavered momentarily, before slowly springing outwards to reveal the sweet gem enclosed within.

It is a rugged piece of chocolate brownie, dusted with an uneven patch of cocoa powder and with dark chocolate rivers oozing deliciously from the seams at the side. She can discern a faint smudge of a fingerprint on the wrapper, peaking from underneath a corner of the cake. It jumps up like a playful taunt, a suggestive allure from the mystery cake deliverer. Now you got my fingerprint, find the police and search for me! She feels a tingle of excitement running down her spine.

Tonight is the sixth night in a row the chocolate themed treat appeared right on her doorstep. The first time it happened was on a slow dreary Monday night. She was immersed in the dreamy world of Grey’s Anatomy on her pink laptop when the ding-dong of the doorbell suddenly chimed, echoing the ninth and last mellifluous note of her Made-In-Japan angular analog clock.

She rose and went to open the door of the apartment, curious to know the identity of this unexpected late night guest. She was greeted by a blast of cold empty air, and the blackness of the wintery night stared back at her. She was flummoxed for a moment, before she glanced down and saw it. There it was, as it had appeared today, an exquisite whitish square positioned grandly right in the middle of her oval rattan woven mat, exuding a classy glow under the fluorescent porch light shining on it, taking in all her attention like a film star on stage.

She had picked it up tentatively, eyeing it with suspicion. She scrutinized the four sides slowly for clues and found that it was blemish-free. She opened the box with trepidation, her heart picking up pace, unsure of what she will find inside. She caught the aroma of the warm cocoa smell before she saw the perfectly round chocolate macaroon inside. A yellow stick-it note adorned one side of the interior wall. It contained her name and the neatly written Especially for you. It was unsigned.

With clockwork precision, the parcel reappeared on Tuesday. The only difference was that it was a chocolate rocky road, with fluffy pink marshmallows, crunchy hazelnuts and fine flakes of desiccated coconut sandwiched between the generous layers of chocolate. These sudden surprises filled her with apprehension, yet she found her insatiable curiosity piqued. Who is this cake delivery man, shrouded in mystery?

Home improvement series

2010-08-29T14:27:00.001+10:00

Using my lousy webcam to snap these pictures as I’m lazy. I had developed a few nice photos while in Kuching, and they now hang proudly in my new home.

Some of the masterpieces adorning my bedroom:

And thank goodness its going to be Raya soon. Raya sale had been good, been able to get the throw pillows, flowers, vase and hanging picture for cheap. Those little things above the sofa are actually photos.

I am actually quite happy with the flowers I arranged together; tulips of three different colours mixed with two green long somethings. And it is next to my flower motif cushion and throw pillows.

Right on top is this picture of a tulip farm, giving the illusion that the tulips in the vase below is plucked fresh from there. =)

I had also bought a comforter set in Kuching for my bedroom. To welcome my use of the comforter set, Mukah gave me two of the hottest night I had ever experienced here.

Well, I think Mukah heard me complaining, so the next day she sent a wind so strong that the papaya tree on the back of my house snapped cleanly into two.

Now am thinking of my next home improvement step. Maybe its time to start hunting for furniture…

Back through the looking glass

2010-08-25T22:04:00.000+10:00

For a place revisited, there existed less excitement for the need to brandish out a camera and snap the moment for cold storage.

Yet, there are some places in Melbourne where somehow, in the long four years I was there, I never step foot into.

Embarrassingly near home is the National Gallery of Victoria, home to drawings and artefacts by mostly dead people. It was a nice place, a visit there made me feel very cultured.

Not very far away is the Weribee mansion and the associated rose garden. The splendour of the house transported me back to the world of grand yesteryears with grand balls and attending butler. Unfortunately, the rose garden is more of imagine what colour will the rose growing on this barren stalk be.

Further down the coast, a 3 hours drive away is Wilson’s Prom, home to this beach which squeaked, as well as freely wandering kangaroos and wombats.

Yes, I managed to squeeze all those in my short 1 week holiday. Not to mention the twice visited newly minted South Wharf Direct factory Outlet (DFO).

For nostalgia sake, I visited my old rental places, and stepped into the buildings where I earned my degree. In truth, 20 months is too short for big changes. 88 Palmerston street was still there, the only difference being a line of graffiti stencilled on the wall. The cafe in College Square had changed to a Chinese looking eatery. And Uni? the poster I did for PISA 2 years+ ago is still on the notice board. What the heck…

That’s all about these empty space fillers, the colourful background of the nice long collage that’s my short holiday to Melbourne. =)

Mukah tales

2010-08-08T22:31:00.000+10:00

It had been an eventful week in Mukah.

A YB came to visit. Even though I never heard of him before, he is quite a bigwig, being a political secretary to the CM and all that. So on a fine Thursday morning off we went congregating in the multi purpose meeting room and hear him speak. Not bad. Politicians can really speak well. Of course there’s food afterwards. Everything here got food afterwards. =)

And Saturday was Mukah Hospital family day. There’s carnival sports in the morning, BBQ in the evening and karaoke all night long. Its quite fun, seeing the staffs dancing and cute kids playing. Mukah people really loves to shake their bodies. Once they hear music, they break into spontaneous jigs. Perhaps its a reflection of the stress free life in Mukah, or a cultural thing.

The ever-present kids blow balloon event.

The couple tango dancing session. The whole hospital is really one big happy family made of interlinked nucleus families. Mukah is that small.

Work? Nothing much different. Same old, same old. Current project is documenting amount of scripts received with errors in it. Pharmacists are evidenced based after all. Hot topic of the week? Leptospirosis and preventative medicines for diabetes.

Home? I did some DIY home improvements. Now my house looks a little bit more like home. Step by step..

Curtains reborn: Previously adorned my room in Kuching, now adorning my room in Mukah. I put the railings up myself. Super proud haha.

Pictures reborn: Previously adorning my room in Melbourne, now refreshed and recycled and used in Mukah. =)

Speaking about Melbourne, I am super excited. Because by the end of the week, I will be there.

Melbourne, here i come!

20 months

2010-07-31T23:52:00.001+10:00

Is 20 months a long time?

Depends on the context… maybe.

Memories do fade…. exponentially.

Tinkering of the brain… sometimes failed to bring out the keys to the past.

Lucky there are photos to bring some of them back. Bits of memories.. to be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle.

I do still somehow miss that place. And the people that dotted it.

It’s really time to take another dip into the pond.

But somehow, its hard to take the first step.

Sunset by the sea

2010-07-23T23:03:00.001+10:00

Just a series of photos of Kuala Dana beach, which is within walking distance of my place of work cum residence. If I have the will, I can watch sunset by the sea every single evening. Now this is actually quite a plus point of Mukah. Anyone want to join me here? ^^

And yes, I’m now back in Kuching for a whole week =).

Anatomy of a kampung

2010-07-22T22:19:00.000+10:00

Of coconut trees, chickens and stilted houses.

That’s how we picture them, and also how we drew them in our younger days. And in actual life, they do look like that. Of course nowadays, these houses are dotted with the ubiquitous Astro dish, as well as the scenery scarring electric poles.

For city dwellers like me, kampung life is the epitome of serenity and relaxation, characterised by the fresh morning air, lazy afternoon heat and the calling of the azan at dusk.

But of course Mukah is far from one dimensional. There’s a hint of New Zealand there - flat green grass and low lying shrubs spanning as far as the eyes can see.

There’s also a whiff of Australia - deserted straight roads flanked by courtesy-ing trees.

It’s sort of a place where you expect to see cows appears from around the corner, calming ruminating the grass while training an watchful eye on you. And actually that was the case the other day.

And then there is THE BEACH

which was so mesmerising during sunset that it warrants a whole post by itself. Real soon.

Welcome to Mukah =)

One month anniversary

2010-07-15T22:50:00.000+10:00

And so I was here for one month already. I felt that it had passed by quite fast, so it must be a good thing.

One month since I took the miniscule droning machine to this place, although I must say the view from that low flying plane is spectacular.

I had sort of settled down to a daily routine. 7am wake up. Facebook, brush teeth, wash face, bath, prepare and eat breakfast. Dressed up. Out of the door 755am. Reached office 7.56am.

Out of office 12.50pm-ish, back to cook, read news online, eat lunch, 10 mins power-nap. Office bound by 2.00pm.

5.10pm reached home, go for a jog, cook and have dinner at 7pm. After that, its either chatting, reading or watching drama. Sleep at 11pm-ish.

Welcome to district life, when you have only yourself for company. Most of the time, that is. Luckily I had cooking as a solace. Been trying to lead a healthier lifestyle, hence most dishes I eat now are vege-themed. New dish I had invented: Umai salad topped with belachan cecah. Western dish with a local twist. Not bad tasting.

Pharmacy-wise, it had been quite okay. Trying to set up a few things. Organising the pharmacy to make it orderly as possible, and adding a few distinct personal touches.

Discovered that actually educating people is on the top of my priority as a pharmacist. Didn’t really realise that. First thing I did was to do a series of colourful brochures teaching patients how to take their medications correctly. The brochures was located outside the pharmacy dispensary, and the response had been great.

Another thing I started was an initiative to keep my staffs updated with the latest news with this “berita terkini perubatan” notice. The latest posts are on the current FDA deliberations on rosiglitazone and also the new drug dapoxetine which should hit our shores soon.

And of course I need to help update the 5s.

All my staffs are old-hands and are well-versed on the job. They are friendly, hardworking and helpful . My boss is good too. Just yesterday we had a new young penolong pegawai farmasi (pharmacy assistant). And it is a Chinese girl from Penang. Mukah is a lucky place. Only 3/45 of this current batch are Chinese and one is posted here.

The patients are nice too, they tried to be helpful and assist me translate instructions to patients who can’t understand me. Most of them wait patiently, and they smile. Especially the old ones. And Melanau babies are cute. They have real big eyes.

Well the conclusion is, even though it is a bit boring at times, I shouldn’t be complaining. I have been luckier than most of my peers. Mukah is a good place, and to think I got here all thanks to a mistake.

Some Sights of Mukah

2010-06-28T22:24:00.000+10:00

During a not-too-hot looks-like-its-going-to-rain-in-the-evening type of afternoon, I embarked on another 25 mins walking journey to the heart of Mukah town. Mukah town is divided into two main part: the old town and the new town.

Here is a Chinese temple in the old town. It faced the river, hence must have quite good fengshui. Alas, no mountain nearby.

A chimney, the remnants of a sago factory, an artefact of a once flourishing sago trade. Now it is just a part of history and a place for parasitic plants to grow.

A fishy symbol to tell everyone that the seafood in Mukah is a must-try. The ‘batang Mukah’ or Mukah river is just behind the petrol station. You can imagine how fresh the fishes are…

Hmm, maybe the colour of the river will make you think twice. But I’m pretty sure they caught the fish in the south china sea not very far away.

Part of old Mukah. Well manicure shrubs, clean roads and colourful buildings.

Of course then there is the kampungs also. Just a reminder that Mukah is just being developed…

This is the boulevard that sort of separates Old from New.

The I believed ‘was once beautiful’ garden parallel with the boulevard. Like many things in Malaysia, it was a victim of poor maintenance and left to flounder at the mercy of an unrelenting Mother Nature.

A quite big sized mosque with the hat-like top. A lot of buildings in Mukah have this kind of top. Most probably a symbol of this town.

A minaret/tower in the middle of a roundabout in front of the mosque. Mukah does not have a traffic light and no rush hour traffic.

But they do have a big KFC and also a Sugarbun.

That’s all for an overview of the place I am going to stay for at least 2 years…

Umai

2010-06-20T16:00:00.001+10:00

There is this saying, “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Assimilation is by no means easy, especially when I am now at a place where the people are predominantly Melanau. To my untrained ears, Melanau might as well just be an exotic foreign language. Ironic, to think in Sarawak we can find Japanese classes and not the Mother tongue of our local brethrens.

Today I made my first foray into the wet market in search of local delicacies. Tasting what they eat, I felt, is a good first step of understanding their culture. The market was situated next to the river, coloured a muddy yellow and dotted by wooden boats of various shapes and shades. Here fresh fish were found aplenty; once hauled abroad dry land they were deftly dealt with skilled knives and packed into transparent square containers. This is the famous local sashimi, fondly known as umai.

A teary old man stood nearby, chopping onions into uniformed shreds. A younger one packed them into small plastic bags with a few slices of chilli, and tied it together with another plastic containing limes. This, together with a small jar of belacan, is a DIY umai kit. Not cheap too, the whole set costs me RM18.

Back home, I prepared the umai as instructed by the fish monger. This is the result:

Fish sashimi with belacan enjoyed with my bittergourd fried rice.

The taste? Heavenly. Succulent and chewy, with the natural taste of the sea. Comparable with the fresh salmon I had in Australia. Wonder why we all still go to sushi kings eating defrosted salmon rather than indulging in fresh fish available from our own backyard. Surely there exists tremendous market potential for this?

Anyway just to show you all where the pharmacy is relative to my house:

The pharmacy as seen from the doorstep of my house. Literally just a stone throw away.

Vice versa, my house as seen form the front of the pharmacy. I lived in the top left hand corner of a quartered bungalow.

The out-patient pharmacy

My shared office.

Looking forward to my second week in Mukah. Next step, learn the language. No, I’m not leaving here as the same whole pebble thrown into the stream as I’m now. By the time I leave, I vow, there will be ridges and crevices to hold the rich memories of the place.

Home in progress

2010-06-17T23:57:00.001+10:00

And so I moved from the relative luxury of Kingwood Hotel

to this:

Moved into my quarters at last. Been busy the last few days buying things to make it liveable and also cleaning it.

Still only half done but here’s a few pictures of my new abode. Even though not as nice as Kingwood, it is not bad for RM125 per month with free internet. =p

Living room where cleaning is still in progress

Kitchen with the sink and stove

Food cabinet and fridge

Toilet

Another bedroom. I got it all for myself =)

And here’s my first ever self cooker dinner here. Life is not bad in Mukah… what’s left to deal is TV, Astro, aircond and a car..

A day at walk (Part II: Mukah)

2010-06-15T21:23:00.000+10:00

Here’s some mukah pics. Just a sneak peak. More specific and in-depth posts in the two ensuing long years.

Mukah airport:

Kingwood Hotel, where I’m currently living comfortably in:

Modern concrete shop houses

Juxtaposed with quaint kampung houses: one for the human;

One for the sparrows.

My place of work,

and the facade of the 1 divided into 4 bungalow where I will be staying soon.

Mukah is, better than expected.

A day at walk (Part 1: Miri)

2010-06-14T21:12:00.000+10:00

Today is not my ‘working day’ because it was considered as my ‘travelling day’ – a day given for me to get from where I was to where I am going to. It transpired to be a ‘walking day’ instead and indeed I do really ‘travel’.

The day started off with a plane trip to Miri. Reached there 8am. As the connecting plane to Mukah only flying off 1pm, I hopped into a taxi to have a quick tour of this oil rich city.

First stop: Miri City Fan. Beautiful scenery.

Walked pass Imperial Mall

and stopped for breakfast at a place called Hai-Ou cafe which was filled with lots of old people.

Some pictures of Miri Town

Me walking aptly in the middle of the road like a Teo Chew along Jalan Teo Chew,

Before I ended up shopping in Bintang Mall.

Around 1130am its back to the airport at last, where I enjoyed a last cup of modern sophistication

before going into this miniature plane.

What happened after that is another story altogether.

Oh by the way, the area enclosed in red is roughly Miri as I travelled it in 3 short hours of taking bus number 11.

I am impressed with myself ^^

Who is in the wrong? The other side of the coin

2010-06-04T20:10:00.000+10:00

The most viewed story in The Star today is about the apathy of two petrol kiosk attendants, resulting in the indirect death of an accident victim. Read the whole story here.

To summarise, the kiosk attendants refused to lend out their fire extinguishers to a good Samaritan who desperately need it to rescue a girl trapped in a burning vehicle. Due to their actions, the girl was subsequently burnt to death.

It is not hard to predict some minister will speak up and condemn the attitude of the two attendants tomorrow and announce some form of retributions. In fact, netizens are already condemning them online. They are, without doubt, the villains in the news.

But will they actually analyse what is actually the root of the problem? Are the petrol kiosk attendants solely to blame? Or the kiosk owner who set the instructions “not to open the door after hours”? Or the thieves who frequently target these petrol stations, making the attendants suspicious to any claims or pleads?

My two cent’s worth on this is that this incident can be primarily attributed to a failure of communication – and with that, a failure to understand human nature on the part of the good Samaritan. It may sound nasty to be condemning a person trying to do the right thing, but we need to be level-headed here.

These are excerpts from his personal note about the incident, being posted on Facebook. You can feel his anger in the first line: FUCK BHP!!!!! FUCK BHP!!!

“then i shout at him, i need it! i want it! someone is pinned inside the car and its started to burn!”

“then i started to amuk kicking the kiosk and punching the glass of the kiosk.”

“Then i start shouting and yelling at them with bad words saying dat if the girl dies you two are the murderer.”

Predictably, “then the 2nd BHP attendant shout back at me.”

As pharmacists, we know that the first rule in dealing with an angry customer is don’t lose your cool at him. Getting angry with him would only make the situation worse. No one will cooperate and nothing will be done if both sides are angry and involve in a shouting match. I know the situation was desperate, but being angry will make it worse. Anger is a primitive action that will throw all reasons and rhymes out of the window. Our mind shut down. We are focused solely on who can shout louder and not on how we can reach a solution.

The good Samaritan also failed to see things from the viewpoint of the kiosk attendants. Remember the “boy who cried wolf?” They may have previous experiences where similar request resulted in their kiosk being robbed. They may have a boss who is fierce and lack understanding. Those who worked the midnight shift usually are sole breadwinners of their house and have hungry mouths to feed. They won’t risk a sacking for a tale they can’t verify as true when their family’s survival depends on them. He didn’t search for the primary reason for their refusal.

What the Good Samaritan should had done is to calmly reason with the attendant. He should had tried address their need, to allay their fears. It was also reported that “the attendant cannot see the fire.” As seeing is believing, he should have led the attendants to a vantage where the accident can be seen. They will surely be more willing to help if they themselves can see the incident.

Perhaps this can be a lesson on human behaviour for the good Samaritan and all of us. A lot of people will scoffed that this is an emergency and that we have no time to think straight in one. However, understanding human nature and learning how to adapt and response to reach a favourable conclusion is what we should had practiced everyday. By the time an emergency happens, it should had been a second nature.

The Good Samaritan should be commended for doing the right thing. The only regret is that if only he had done it the right way, the outcome just might had been different.

A pause and a write

2010-06-02T02:49:00.001+10:00

The scarcity and paucity of my writings can sole be attributed to one single demon: work.

Not that I don’t like work. In fact that is an understatement. Actually I loved my job – the adrenaline rush, the calamitous din, the smile at the end of the day – but like the sloughy tar tasty food can leave on your blood vessel – work clogged up whatever impetus and sapped up whatever energy I had left at the end of the day to write. Hence the silence of the pen.

I am writing something now because I am in the middle of my 10 day holiday break. In fact by looking at my blogging trend, you can safely bet that if I had written something, I am having the day off and you can ask me out for coffee. I am currently recharging my battery for a longer journey into the wilderness of Sarawak, while constantly battering and smouldering the urge to go out for another yumcha session.

Going out with friends is fast becoming an addiction. The laughter, the gossips, the coffee till the night is old fueled the craving for more . They are dangerous because like an addict who ran out of more meth, they amplify the silence when you have none. Being alone becomes a torture, staying at home becomes a punishment. But what should we do then, about the saying “enjoy it while it lasts?” Another silly paradox of life.

Can fate be changed twice? But before that, the question asked should be, is the fate you think is you fate is really your fate? Not long ago I was getting ready to go to NZ for further studies, but a sudden afternoon heat and a telephone call later, I ended up in Australia. This time I had a premonition that I will be going to Daro before it became true, but a morning breeze and a brief chat later, I was switched to Mukah. I survived Australia and enjoyed it thoroughly, and would that be the same with Mukah? And of course I will have to live with the constant niggling thought, would I had enjoy NZ even further? Ditto Daro? Really, the path not taken all over again.

Yesterday, I turned a quarter of a century old. For those who have taken the pain to organise and turn out for my birthday dinner, I say a big ‘Thank You’. Thank you all also for rummaging through your whole wardrobe for that piece of pink to wear. Pink is really really a nice colour and you are all really really nice people. =)

Ah, the plain pleasure of seeing English flowing beautifully from pen to paper, figuratively speaking; or from keyboard to computer screen, literally speaking. If only English is a maiden, she will be the most beautiful lady I had even known in the whole wide world.

用华文谈心声

2010-06-01T20:57:00.000+10:00

好久没用华文书写了。忙碌无休的工作使我早已忽略了的汉字的美妙，忘了笔画的拿捏。不知为何今日心血来潮，拿起了钢笔，抄写了一篇描述文，从新找回那些埋藏在脑海已久的回忆。写完后甚至有种津津自喜的感觉。

想当年，我是多热爱华文，虽然它始终都以冷酷的肩膀回应我。我就是喜欢在它很艰难，很有挑战性，很不容易征服。那时那种意志力好久没再露出它的头额了。。。

我正寻找着下一个值得我付出这种奋斗不休精神的计划。有了那种热情，燃烧了那把火，我的生命才会精彩。

Whew, at last managed a decent three paragraph worth of Chinese characters. Not sure whether they make sense though. Nevertheless, am proud that I still can construct some sentences in Chinese. Happy. =)

FRP and off i go

2010-05-09T18:17:00.000+10:00

Effective 16th April, I’m officially a Fully Registered Pharmacist (FRP) in Malaysia. Meaning that, well, instead of being ordered to do work, I can now order people to do work. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have much chance to do that.

In Malaysia, newly graduated FRP needs to do 3 years of “national service” for the country before you can go off and open your own shop or whatever. And this “national service” are more often or not in a place that is not your hometown.

Of course, if you are really unlucky (or lucky, depends on how you see it) you will get thrown into some obscure places like Daro.

It’s so rural that wikipedia only has a single paragraph description of it:

Daro is a district and small town in Mukah Division, Sarawak, east Malaysia. The nearest town to Daro is Matu. Daro is under the Majlis Daerah Matu-Daro (Matu-Daro District Council) which share the same council together with Matu. The population in Daro is estimated around 25,000, with Melanau making up the majority. There were ferries from Sibu to here, taking around two hours by using the channel of Rejang River.

and yeah, a boat is needed to get there. And there’s only one doctor in that whole place, there’s no 3G network (bye-bye iPhone) and I’ve never heard about the place in my entire life as a Sarawakian till now.

This will be a brand new exciting adventure. Perhaps fishing, farming and riding a bike will be my new hobbies soon.

Where is the heart…

2010-04-14T01:15:00.001+10:00

The double door of the ward swings open. In comes the guy in the green overalls, pushing a 6 feet long cart in front of him. On top of the cart lies a scaffold that was shaped like a house, covered by a green canvas. In fact, it is a house for the dead.

The guy strides across the linoleum with brisk purposeful steps, pairs of curious eyes followed his every move, necks craned to see where he will stop. Once he reaches his destination, he takes up a piece of white linen, swiftly and efficiently wraps the now lifeless body from head to toe, and transfers it into his cart. Then off he goes to where he came from. Just a chore he needs to do daily. The frequency may change, but the job is the same.

People die in the hospital wards all the time. When they do, the ones they left behind weep. Some wail. Some silent with shock. Some stand passively like a stone. People do react to death differently.

Death is a norm in a big hospital. It is normal to to find out that someone whom I had spoken to a few days ago were now a piece of lifeless flesh and bones. Someone who was happily telling me that he will go home soon really did go home, just that it is in a coffin.

It is hard not to be affected by death; but then after so many deaths, somehow I became desensitised. When people die, no emotion flows through me. No tinge of sadness. No guilt of what could’ve I done better to save him. I feel nothing.

I am fast becoming like the man pushing the cart, viewing death as just a part of the job. I am scared I am fast losing my heart, fast becoming a cold and soulless person, but I can’t help it…

Sometimes life is just unfair

2010-04-12T15:57:00.002+10:00

The impetus to write is just not there. Along the way, work and other perceived more important stuffs took central stage, devouring the time that should be spent writing, cooking and doing something I like.

Sometimes I wonder is work the central theme of my life?

Today I got some time to sit down and reflect. A virus had finally got to me, and for the 2nd time in the entire year, I was forced to take a leave.

This week will be the final week of my provisionally registered pharmacist year. Come Friday, I will have officially finished one whole year of tutelage and be primed and ready to face the challenge of being a fully fledged pharmacist, most likely in the district area.

Come what may, a few people had wondered why I was reluctant to appeal and try anything whatsoever to stay in Sarawak General Hospital, or somewhere else in Kuching. Wouldn’t it be easy and convenient?

It may sounds stupid and crazy, but I staunchly believed that it was people like me, sponsored by the tax-payer’s money who should be the first to raise a hand and say “I will go”. It should be a honour to go to the rural district, serving the people there who needs our help most.

People who where sponsored solely by their parents, especially those overseas who were forced by the rules to work in compulsory service for four years, are those whom I think should be given the choice of cities they want to serve in. Forcing them to serve the government is already an encroachment of their freedom, and further forcing them to serve in the district? Standing from their shoes, it is hard not to see how unfair the whole situation is. Their parents paid the most taxes, used up half a million ringgit to finance their education, and instead of being cash cows, they were forced to spend the prime of their lives in district hospitals. I felt sorry for them.

A lot of fellow provisionally registered pharmacists are also thinking of ways to go back to their hometown or at least be given a place in a hospital where there are easier flights to get home. Of course I agree that home is where the heart is. But well, we are in the health profession. We are supposed to be compassionate, to be self sacrifying, to reach out to those who needed us most. Well maybe we all have different motives...

Life is so unfair. And to make it worse, we have too many people who only thinks about their own benefits.

My two cents worth.

Throw of a dice

2010-02-07T22:58:00.000+11:00

Been looking at the map of Sarawak recently. As you know, Sarawak is a very big state and there’s a lot of small towns that I know roughly where it is but not exactly where it is.

For example places like Simunjan, Betong and Long Lama exists in Sarawak. Heard about it before? Hell, its not even in the map above.

Why the sudden interest? Well in 3 months time I will be randomly assigned to any of the places on the map to work there for at least two years. We don’t have the luxury to choose, as this is what the govt termed as ‘Khidmat Negara’ or ‘Service to the Nation’ postings. My next 2 birthdays will probably be celebrated in some jungle or longhouse or next to a river.

In two months time someone high up will throw a dice..

and this will be how the Sarawak map look like for me.

Wonders how will lady luck treat me..

There’s just 10 more weeks to go before I finish my PRP training. Going to be fully registered and sent away soon. Starting my 4 week round in Nephro tomorrow. Damn time flies..

Cat cookies

2010-01-19T01:26:00.001+11:00

Since it’s the year of the Tiger next year… I decided to do some cat cookies, since they are the Tiger’s nearest relative and are more pleasant to look at (Not to mention easier to draw).

Also did some rock cookies, which are actually chocolate oat cookies.

And here’s my kittens resting on the rock cookies.

Another pic of cats on rocks.

Hope they can last till the new year ^^.

Monday morning

2010-01-18T16:41:00.001+11:00

It’s such a luxury to be able to turn off the alarm and go back to warmth of the bed. Especially on a Monday morning when its raining cats and dogs outside. And knowing the rest of your colleagues need to wake up and go to work. Pretty evil thought.

Woke up nine something with the sun still refusing to rise and the rain still drizzling down. At last having some contented sleep after working for 7 straight days! Been working over the weekend 730am – 430pm doling out pills for the sick. Busy but contented and for the first time saw a pretty sick girl! Okay that sounds very wrong. Should be a pretty girl who is sick =p Hell, I started to think pretty girls don’t get sick.

Went all the way in the rain over to the Post Office in Pending to collect a parcel. Tada I have a Christmas present!

So anyway its the afternoon now and the day is still dark. What to do, monsoon season. Intends to spend the rest of the day deciding what cookies to make for CNY. All thanks to this book with all its deliciously beautiful pictures:

Should I do this for CNY?

Going out later to buy all the ingredients ^^. In the meantime I will enjoy the sights of the stunning Kim TaeHee in the Korean drama IRIS. Over a cup of steaming hot coffee. Okay now I start to feel guilty over all these lazing around. I will try to read about renal stuffs soon. Going to the nephro ward in Feb. And yes about writing out my new year resolution…

Late Christmas Post

2010-01-02T00:25:00.000+11:00

Nice way to start a new year posting about something that happened last year.

Nothing much, just some photos on castles and igloos and Christmas trees

The igloos and ice castle is the Spring.

Santa’s little helper wishing everyone a joyful Christmas

First time Christmas with a decorated trees and real presents under the tree

My Christmas dish: Macaroni cheese bake with grilled lamb, aubergine, tomatoes and button mushroom.

Anyway have a happy new year! May it bring you lots of joy and laughter. Damn I haven’t even think about my new year resolutions…

2009: Year-ender

2009-12-27T22:57:00.000+11:00

Its the time to write another year-ender, however, this year I’m devoid of any interesting thing to write. 2009 just pales in comparison to the thrill of last year. If last year was a da Vinci, then this year is a black and white abstract.

The highlight of 2009 is work, work and more work. Not that I find work tedious - conversely, I found it fun – but nonetheless there’s this monotony to it. 2/3 of this year was spent working and hopefully it is not be like this the rest of my life.

So its nearly a year since I came back form Melbourne. Overseas education – what does it translate? Are we better off compared to the locals? Well not really. But perhaps we do have a different attitude when it comes to asking questions, following orders and ways looking at things. Knowledge wise, we are more or less the same.

The beginning of the year – what distant memories it is now, was filled with the joy of doing nothing. It was a blissful period of indulging in my favourite pastime of reading and writing, knowing full well that it was likely to be the last of long holidays in my younger years. It was punctured by a short and sweet trip to Singapore – the only time I flew this year.

Then in mid-April work began and never stops. Throughout the year I had been to many places in the pharmacy department of SGH and meet all sorts of characters. It augurs well that I had the foresight to reread Dale Carnegie the week before work starts – the peculiarity and complexity of human behaviour proves to be the main trappings at work.

My main obsession this year was to deliver the perfect presentation. It had something to do with my perfectionist streak I fear, as well as a penchant for show-boating. Public speaking serves as a good output for both. I had also joined Toastmasters for good measure, hopefully to hasten my ambition in reaching the proverbial holy grail, whatever that might be. Still got a long way to go this one..

When it comes to girls… I still wonder what I look for in the perfect one. Choosy sounds a bit harsh but well, it may be spot on.

Hopes and resolutions for the new year? Am still figuring it out when I had the time. Time is a premium currently, and it had been a tight balance between work and play. But of course there was still time for a good book… and in case you are wondering why my English sounds so English, it probably rubbed off Jeffery Archer’s latest paperback. I had spent the last three days sinfully polishing off the 500+ odd pages…

Anyway, hope you all had a swell 2009 and may 2010 prove to be a better year.

Mirage – Part 2

2009-12-12T13:06:00.001+11:00

“Wouldn’t a trip here give them inspiration to work hard and earn enough spending money in the future? It can provide motivation to make their dreams come true,” I try to counter his words.

“Dreams? Bah! Dreams seldom come true. See that couple there?” He points to a couple whose backs are facing us. The woman had tilted her head to rest on the shoulder of her husband, while the guy had his hand encircling the waist of his wife. They are strolling towards the escalator that will bring them up to the first floor.

“They are probably here to live their dream. This is their dreamland. They are here dreaming about all the things they can’t have and the life that they can’t afford. He will go to the computer shop upstairs, caressing the sleek edges of the MacBook Air notebook he knows he can’t have. He will type a few sentences on the keyboard and wish he can do it forever. His wife will probably go to VINCCI, trying on a pair of Manolo high heels she saw on Sex and the City. She will feel that she is on the catwalk, sashaying about like a model. Then they will stand in front of a 42 inch plasma TV, marveling at the high definition images, trying to transpose it into their living room. Then the spell will be broken.”

His face is a little red now, as if all the blood had left his body to congregate there. I could detect wheezing undertones beneath his labored breathing. Probably early stage of emphysema due to chronic smoking, I diagnose. Pink puffers, they are called. He pauses momentarily to catch his breath.

“They will realise their living room is too small, and their car is also too small to put the TV into. Then they will be reminded that they haven’t finished paying their home as well as car loans. The ticket to realising their dreams rests solely on the shoulders of their son. They are now investing their money on him, sending him to tuitions, with the hope that he will find a good job and command a high salaried job one day. He is probably in one now. To kill time while waiting to pick him up, they are here to escape the harsh reality of their life. But looking at those things they can’t have…” he shakes his head sadly.

“Can’t even guarantee the son will give them the money.” he mutters.

The couple has disappeared from view. The old man’s words bring images of hamsters I used to have, running hard in the round exercise wheel but ended up getting nowhere, into my thoughts. A wave of pity washes through me. How long will they stay trapped in the rat race? But at least they have each other. That will alleviate the pain.

I follow his eyes which have wandered back to the four teenagers, who are ambling out from the ESPRIT store. They are walking towards the direction of the food court. It may be a fraction of my imagination, but they are more subdued compared to the time before they ventured in. The gaiety has been diluted from their face. Maybe, like the old man had said, they suddenly realise that they don’t belong.

“Poor kids, this venture into a rich men’s mansion will scar them for live. When they reach the food bazaar, they will be pawing into the deep reaches of their pockets, hoping to discover another crumpled ringgit inside to add to those few blue notes in their hands. They will travel from stall to stall, looking for food they can afford. Probably ended up sharing a plate of Nasi Lemak bought with a price where they can get two plates each at the village warung.”

The old man’s eyes dart around the mall again, like the searchlight from a light house, searching for a new target to harp on. Like a bald-head eagle finding his prey, he swoops down lithely on a young couple emerging from a corner of the mall. They are probably only around seventeen. They look sweet together, holding hands and sharing a single scoop ice-cream.

A throw of dice?

2009-12-09T23:48:00.000+11:00

The two groups of children are roughly the same age: cute, big eyed, cherubic cheeks with just a hint of baby fat. Just like an unfinished masterpiece. They exude a sense of purity, of vulnerability that will melt the heart of whoever set sight on them.

Yet they couldn’t be more different.

For those on the left were an award-winning choir members flown in from KL; those on the right, children suffering from cancer.

Those on the left were resplendent in their Santa hats and smart red-and-black vests; standing upright rendering Christmas cheers in heavenly voices. Those on the right were dressed in shapeless green smocks, their head shiny domes, listening passively.

Those on the left are here to give, those on the right, receive.

What makes them different? What makes them the anointed one to give; and conversely, one to receive, when in theory all children were born equal?

Surely not more than a throw of dice. Fate dealt a hand, and one find him/herself on one side, the other find him/herself on the other side of the divide.

And just by that, the rest of their lives are different.

Life is unfair. But surely, mentally and spiritually, both sides gained something from this visit, because even me as a bystander, learnt something new.

Update by short sentences

2009-12-06T14:09:00.001+11:00

Seems an eternity since I last updated my blog.

Been busy doing this and that. Caught up in things.

A little bit burnt out. Going here and there.

This weekend been nice. Been sleeping a lot. Readying myself for on-call next week.

Best feeling is when curled up in bed reading a novel. Peeking into the magical lives of others.

Clinical pharmacy is okay. But is every single life worth saving?

In the meantime, going to post up a short story to fill the impending void.

Mirage it was called. Wrote this in March 2009. Since then have ideas on how to improve it but lazy to do it. Oh well, just enjoy the original version.

Going to try making apple crumble cheesecake later. Anyone interested?

Mirage – Part 1

2009-12-06T14:00:00.001+11:00

“Good weather today, isn’t it?”

It seems funny that the man should comment about the weather, as both of us are located deep in the labyrinth of the colossal shopping complex, where rain or shine, the temperature is kept at a cool 18 degrees, and the lights bathing the place are from artificial sources. But he looks friendly enough, offering a smile which exposes two missing front teeth, a feature that stands out amidst the surrounding salt and pepper stubble on his face.

“Yes it is,” I reply, out of respect for his seniority.

“Interesting place here huh? Never thought I will see a shopping complex this big in my life,” he continues.

I nod mechanically, not really interested to be mired in a conversation with this wizened old man. His sallow face is lined by wrinkles and he stands with a stoop. His fingernails are yellow and dirty, probably due to years of smoking. The outline of a pack of cigarette is jutting out of the front pocket of his blue T-shirt.

“My son said this shopping complex is smaller than those in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. But what do I know? I never took a plane before in my whole life. For me, this is big enough. Maybe too big for this place…”

What do you know, old man, I want to smirk with disdain. You are like a frog living in a well. How can the country progress if all people think like you? But I keep quiet.

Just then, a group of four dark-skinned teenagers walk by, their loud chatter diverts our attention to them. Two gangly guys; one in a chequered shirt faded with too many washings and jeans torn at the knees, the other in a bright yellow T-shirt and gray slacks, which I suspect used to be white. Two skinny girls; one in short sleeved V-neck tee and shorts above the knees, the other in a flowery baju kurung. They are chatting in a language that sounds familiar yet foreign, a hodge-podge of Malay mixed with some other dialects. Bahasa Sarawak, I suddenly realise.

Oblivious to the newly wiped floor, they trudge across, leaving numerous grayish imprints of their sandals on the otherwise spotless marble slabs. The old man shakes his head disapprovingly.

“These kampong kids are probably wearing the best T-shirt and trousers in their limited collection. The lipsticks on the girls’ lips are probably their mum’s, stealthily removed from scant make-up boxes and applied, then stealthily put back. The boys talk loudly and walk with a swagger to hide their insecurities. They need to be macho, even though deep down they are afraid of this foreign place. This is probably their first trip here, via the old steel mass called a bus.” The old man’s voice is suddenly animated.

My eyes linger on them. They are standing in front of the ESPRIT store, their mouths agape upon seeing the huge poster of a European female model on the display window. The spacious brightly lit store beckons, yet they seem afraid to go in. Perhaps they are overawed by the futuristic space-age façade of the store, so accustomed they are to the congested, packed-to-the-brim kedai runcit in their kampong. Tentatively, one of the boys steps across the line into the store, and like goslings following their mum, the rest join him.

“Their eyes will widen, big as saucers when they see the price tag of the clothes. Probably a piece cost as much as their parents’ monthly combined salary. The shop girls will watch them like hawks, afraid that their dirty hands will smudge those expensive wears. If they are intelligent, they will see their own reflection off the mirrors or these marble floors and get out of there quick. It is not their place to be here.”

The venom in his voice surprises me. He seems such a genial man, a dotting grandfather.

Clinical Pharmacist

2009-11-22T23:08:00.000+11:00

I always thought I wanted to be a clinical pharmacist. I don’t know why, perhaps I had the perception that being a clinical pharmacist is the epitome of being a pharmacist – walking in the midst of patients, sorting through their meds and data readings, solving their problems.

Besides, being a clinical pharmacist is sort of the ‘glamour job’ in pharmacy here. There is this perception that only the best and brightest can be clinical pharmacist. There is this allure and veneration of white coated people strutting about confidently in wards. They are the one standing there thinking on their feet, standing toes to toes with doctors discussing about the care of patients.

When I was interviewed back in February, the question asked was “Do you want to be a clinical pharmacist?”. When I reported for duty in April, the same question was asked. What about in-patient supply? total parenteral nutrition? cytotoxic drug reconstitution? No one asked.

Well, I guess I would know whether I would really like being a clinical pharmacist or not tomorrow. I will be starting a four-week rotation in the cardio-thoracic ward. Armed with 4 years of knowledge and 7 months of experience, I am going to march right into the baptism of fire.

Anyway, some more pictures straight from Thirteen’s Cookbook. Enjoy!

Very healthy apple crumble made with oat crumbs!

Just eat it with ice cream. It tasted heavenly.

Self-made profiteroles filled with sinful cream and dusted with caster sugar.

Don’t you wish you are here?

And this was for dinner! 70% cooked Rib-eye steak with self-mashed potatoes and self-made creamy mushroom soup.

Damn I am getting fat.

Sunday Cookbook

2009-11-16T21:56:00.001+11:00

Another page of my cooking adventure:

Take some sticky honeyed dates,

Add in the usual suspects in baking: butter, flour, eggs and sugar, and beat them up..

This don’t look very promising..

But hey, my sticky date pudding came out just nice! Warm and fluffy in the inside, caramel and sticky on the outside.

Blissfully sweet. But tasted quite sinful too, to think I did it after writing about diabetes and a sweet death.

But then, something are worth dying for.

Anyone want a try? ^^

Dying a sweet death

2009-11-15T15:52:00.000+11:00

Today is World Diabetes Day.

15% of Malaysian aged 30 and above have diabetes.

Worse, 1/3 of them was unaware they have it.

You see, diabetes encroaches upon you silently.

Slowly and surely, it lets you drown in sweetness before you are even aware of it.

To put it simply, diabetes is a condition where there is too much sugar in your blood vessels.

Too much of a sweet thing is not a good thing, as it slowly clogged up the blood vessel, impeding the transport of oxygen and nutrients to your body. All these leads to severe consequences with death as the end point.

Amongst the complications caused by diabetes include

As pharmacists, I believe we have a huge role to play in educating patients about diabetes.

Hence a few of us are embarking on a research project to educate and enlighten them about this disease.

We are going to make them aware of the disease, the consequences, and how to reduce the progression of the disease via a PowerPoint and video presentation.

Hopefully, it will make a difference in their lives.

This is our call of duty. Who cares the idiotic government is mulling to cut down our allowance by RM650 per month. Even if they have every intention to screw us and the patients, we still have a responsibility to make sure patients don’t suffer as a consequence .

Cut down your sugar. Order kurang manis. Take care of your health. Exercise 150 minutes per week. Check your blood sugar level yearly. Diabetes is no sweet way to die.

i injected myself with an insulin pen

2009-11-08T18:14:00.000+11:00

The pharmacist reached the anticipated end of him long-winded speech. Hands were already in the ready-to-clap position, eager to bring the curtains down on a long day.

But he still had one final twist to the tale on his sleeves, one final rabbit to be pulled out from his hat.

“Now I’m going to give each and everyone of you an insulin pen. You will then proceed to inject yourself to see how it feels for the patient.”

Commotion broke out. The hall was abuzz with nervous and incredulous chatter. What? Poking a needle (albeit a 5mm one) into ourselves?

Pens were passed around. In our little group we were fiddling with the pen nervously.

Since I was the most senior PRP in my group, I wasn’t surprised when the group facilitator pointed a finger at me and intoned “You go first.”

Putting a mask of nonchalant bravado, I put on the needle on the insulin pen and with one swift push poked the pen into my ample subcutaneous layer. All I felt was a tingling sensation not unlike a red ant’s sting.

“It’s not painful at all,” I declared with a smile. And to prove my point, I proceeded to poke myself a few more times. “See? It’s okay.”

Until I realised blood were tricking out of my tummy. “Eeek... blood.”

I rolled up my eyes and fainted.

Injecting insulin. Been there, tried it. Really, it is not painful.

That would be an appropriate and sensational ending. But alas, in a disappointing and normal end to the story, I just proceed to wipe out the blood and continue teaching the new PRPs how to use the pen.

Anyway that’s what we do as pharmacists. We don’t just give out medicines to you like mindless robots. Nor are we there to just pick out the careless mistakes of doctors. That will be demeaning to say the least. No, we are the crazy ones poking ourselves with insulin pen to experience how you feel poking yourselves everyday; munching through tablets to see how bitter it is, tasting the syrup to see how sweet it can be.

While we were dispensing, we think of ways to make it easier for you to remember taking the bagful of medicines, coaxing you and praising you so that you feel taking the medicines are worthwhile, exaggerating our actions like clowns while demonstrating to you how to use your inhalers so that you will remember better.

Really, we do try our best to step into your shoes.

I understand this is how you see me if you have glaucoma.

We are here to make your live living with a disease better and more comfortable. As long as you can get better, we will feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Exam

2009-10-29T02:56:00.001+11:00

Taking an exam is just like playing the roulette. You spend as much as you can afford on as many numbers as possible and fervently hope upon your lucky stars that the silver ball rest upon a number you choose.

An element of luck is needed together with all the hard work you chipped into it, especially in assembling the money.

For those caught in the feverish exam mood, I wish you best of luck. May the exam gods smile on you, and you in turn, walks out of the exam hall with a foolish grin on your face and be promptly spanked.

If your luck is in the dumps, oh well, go find a four leaf clover to put under your bed and have a nice dream. You won’t fail. The Uni loves to boast having a 99.9% passing rate.

Anyway, just good luck and all the best!

Six months

2009-10-22T14:07:00.001+11:00

October sixteenth was the day where I passed my sixth month mark of my year as a provisionally registered pharmacist (PRP).

Half of the road travelled and am I none the wiser?

Come to think of it, this half a year had been an enriching experience, in terms of pharmacy knowledge, human relationship, work politics and keeping a right frame of mind for the job.

I remembered starting my work in the Out-patient pharmacy (OPD) a picture of blur-ness, not helped by the marketplace like scene. OPD was madness then, the baskets of prescriptions piling high, the pharmacy people having harassed look, patients, frowns of impatience.

That’s what happens behind the scene in OPD the middle of the night…

Six months down the road, I found myself in OPD again, this time seeing mirror images of myself writing down notes on things to learn tonight, flipping through books, asking questions. Ah new PRPs…they never cease to amaze. Me? well, I am a little bored now, feeling mechanical dispensing yet another paracetamol or benadryl. Just trying my best to keep the smile on my face going. Knowledge had improved leaps and bounds – its all about experience. But of course, it is still a process of continuous learning.

Office politics is all dirty, with half-baked rumours of back stabbing and two-faced people constantly flying in the air. Everything you did is tagged with an evil motive by green eyed monsters. Being neutral is hard – genuine friend or spy from the other camp? Guess just need to survive as best as I can. Diseases of the human mind are more complicated than the sum of the diseases caused by all those little bacteria and viruses. Why can’t everyone just be friends…

Pills are now my best friends…

Me? Just going to work everyday in a cheery mood. I need to go work anyway, why choose to be in a bad mood? Amidst all this hocus-pocus I still find work fun. It feels great to be able to help people managing their medications and life better everyday. In the end, this is what pharmacists are trained to do – making a difference in the lives of the sick. Okay politically correctly, the medically deranged.

So my views or wishes or outlook for the other half of the journey? Bring it on!

Salmon galore

2009-10-18T14:05:00.001+11:00

Rich succulent raw salmon

Plus a prehistoric carnivore who loves raw salmon

Equals to salmon sushi!

Proof that I made them:

Sushi master at work. I just adored raw salmon. Their texture is just heavenly. Yum..

Night Shift

2009-10-08T23:06:00.000+11:00

It had been over for a while but I guessed I should’ve blogged about my night shift. It was a week ago to be exact.

Anyway as the hospital is open for 24 hours, someone gotta be out there to man the counter at night. I was the designated one last week – to work from 10pm to 730am.

The main reason we were required to work is to cater for those people being sent to the Accident and Emergency department. The amount of human traffic was very random, from one solitary person every hour to a sudden bunch of ten in a few minutes. As they say, accident happens anytime.

It was actually quite a boring shift. The medications dispensed were similar every time: either the asthma meds, the upper respiratory tract infection meds, the gastric meds, or the painkiller meds.

And time passed real slow. Most of the time the waiting area was empty.

And I spent the time there munching tit-bits, drinking caffeinated drinks and watching dramas.

The only eventful thing was that there was a drunk guy on my third night of shift. He was complaining how the doctor sort of looked down on him. He rambled on and on for like 40 minutes. It required quite a lot of patience just to keep myself from shouting “wake up” to him.

Once in a while you get these kind of patients who think the doctors are useless coz they didn’t get better or didn’t treat them as they expect to be treated. They expects us to hear them out and to ring and complain to the doctors. Yesterday a lady was complaining for half an hour that the doctors incompetency got her surgical wound to be infected. She had been bitter about it for 3 years. I actually was quite tempted to refer her to a psychiatrist to get rid of her victim mentality. No quality of life at all if you are unhappy all the time.

Overall, working nights was not too bad. Just that it causes reactivation of dormant pimples and probably some weight gain due to overconsumption of junk food. But a novel experience. I didn’t realise I can cope with an all-nighter that well.

Lanterns.Cameras.Food for thought

2009-10-04T23:46:00.000+11:00

The moment I stepped into the park, I can feel the first prangs of regret.

For even at the ungodly time of 11pm, The Malaysia-Chinese Friendship Park was filled to the brim with colourful lanterns and people.

Imagine this, beautifully sculptured red Chinese gazebo next to green bamboo trees that were dotted with lanterns of myriad colours; people of all shapes sitting, strolling, laughing and chatting all around and soft smoke billowing in the background. All this bathed by the big round moon in all its shining glory.

The ultimate scenery for a good snap. And I didn’t bring my camera.

But obviously a lot of people didn’t forget theirs. Shutterbugs in droves paraded their toys, one bigger than the other. Snap snap snap, busy fingers trying to capture the moment in bytes and bits, to be stored and reminisced sometime in the future.

A bunch of sour-grapes I am not, but are we not better be living in the present rather than saving the present for the future? In our fascination of taking photos, are we not living the moment in real life but rather behind lens and apertures and lightings? How can one drink in the whole scene, with all five senses behind the bulky frame of a camera?

Sans a camera, I did my best to store the whole picturesque scene into my memory. I see the lantern swaying gently in the soft breeze, feel the cosy heat from the candles, hear the carefree laughter of kids. It enriched my experience. I feel contented. Happy to have witnessed such amazing random arrangement of things and people that create this smorgasbord of senses.

But yet, I couldn’t channel and share it wholly with you. Even I wrote the whole scene in a thousand words, using the most beautiful words, picturing it will still be akin a puzzle in the process of being pieced together, broken and incomplete. Only a camera taken picture can ensure a grasp comes out from your mouth, a breathtaking ‘wow’, a murmur of praise for the beauty of the night, a yearning wish that you were here in the matter of seconds.

Perhaps taking a photo then is really an ultimate case of selfless sharing, an action of forsaking the fulfilment of your five senses at that time for the enrichment of others not there. How noble is that!

Nevertheless, perhaps it is good sometimes to take in the world not from behind the camera lens. =)

This mooncake festival was also the first time in 6 years that I spent it with my family. We had a feast with lanterns as the backdrop.

The only dish that I cooked was the pork with salted fish. My and my housemates in Melbourne used to eat this a lot as it was LamTK’s signature dish.

Ahh.. brings out the memories. The good old days.. How I miss them!

Anyway, Happy Mid-Autumn festival.

Hari Raya

2009-09-20T21:48:00.001+10:00

It is Hari Raya today, where our Muslim friends celebrate their equivalent of Chinese New Year.

Hari Raya is synonymous with visiting relatives and friends living in quaint wooden houses on stilts,

enjoying beautifully and lovingly made colourful layered cakes,

eating tasty, gravy laden meat with sticky rice cooked in bamboo accompanied by red sugary rose-tinted syrup,

and see people visiting rempit-style.

But of cause food is the most gravitating pull of Hari Raya.

Simply mouth-wateringly delicious!

Wishing everyone Selamat Hari Raya. Have a great one. May this new year be one of increased mutual understanding and goodwill.

Saturday @ Starbucks

2009-09-19T19:01:00.001+10:00

Its yet another Saturday and I was yet at another Starbucks sipping yet another kind of frappucino and writing yet another blog post.The rain was crashing down in droves outside and its was chillingly cold inside.

It had been quite a hectic but enjoyable week. I pretty much like life in Outpatient Pharmacy, with its fast-paced quick fire mood and motley mix of interesting customers. I found out that after having 5 months working experience under my sleeves, I am way more confident this time round and can easily converse and mix with the staffs and customers.

What appalled me was the lack of customer service shown by a few of the pharmacists. They are too robot-like and focusing too much on the medicines rather than the patients themselves. No smile on the face. No look into the eyes. Perhaps this thing should be really taught well in Uni. I think there is nothing more satisfying than seeing a grateful patient and having them praise you for your attitude.

To pharmacists to be out there, please remember, people who are sick needs a bit of reassurance, they want someone to show they care. A little praise here and there to keep them going. There is no harm done asking how they are coping, whether they are getting better, whether they have any concern with their meds. A little smile and care goes a long way. That’s what I believe.

Oh yeah by the way, i just cut my hair ^^

This is going to be relaxing long weekend, if not for the diabetes research. At last I will have the chance to go visiting and eat rendang and ketumpat again for Hari Raya! Missing this very Malaysian tradition in Melbourne.

Cinema experience

2009-09-12T22:40:00.001+10:00

The movie was at its climax. The protagonist had his fists out, ready to deal the killing blow.And like a helicopter which rotor had suddenly stopped in mid air, the screen chopped out in perfect rectangle pieces, fragmented like shreds of broken glass and went blank. Not even a lingering flicker remain, The side-lights went on. Groan mingles with sarcastic laughter.

Camera lit up the cinema as people started to take photos to record this interesting episode. Handphones sounded. I bet a few were twittering. Some were heard telling friends about the experience. Heck when the worker came and explain the situation, someone even recorded the whole conversation with a camera phone. Surreal. Welcome to the new technology advanced world. Did I mention the movie we were watching? It was none other than Gamer.

A very unique experience at the new MBO cineplex in The Spring. And I’m reporting it now live haha.

Anyway the projector was dead and un-revive-able. We were upgraded to a first-class cineplex to finish the last 3 minutes of the movie. The seats there feels like massage chairs. But the seats at the normal cineplex was not bad too.Similar to Australia’s. Can pull the arm-rest up and rest my legs over the next few seats which were vacant.

Interesting experience. Anyway I wrote this whole piece in the free wifi zone.

This whole thing about being able to blog live got me excited like a little kid. Another that got me excited was this:

K-Box is opening soon! ^^

Online-ing @ starbucks

2009-09-12T18:44:00.001+10:00

Now that I have a cute and good-looking laptop, I can bring it out and flaunt it at the numerous uber-cool cafes around town.

Here I am now, at Starbucks The Spring, using the free wifi to online and the imbedded webcam to take photos.

My dark mocha frappucino with SeeHua’s sleek Apple Mac and four Japanese girls as background.

This is SeeHua, the German speaking to-be-engineer. He is the reason we are here today. He is currently downloading lots of free stuffs.

Me drinking my coffee. Didn’t take the whole photo coz don’t like my hairstyle for the day. It badly need a trim but I’m just too lazy to do it.

Anyway a little bit of update. Had been busy manning the Dangerous Drug Pharmacy for the past two weeks– with the time spent meticulously counting, packing and distributing drugs that are dangerous if being abused, for example midazolam and diazepam, which coincidently contributed to a dead Michael Jackson.

There were 11 new provisionally registered pharmacists reporting to the hospital in the last few days. At last I am not the ‘youngest’ one there and there will be someone to bully! Come to think of it, I had worked for nearly five months now.

My next station will be the dreaded Outpatient pharmacy. It is projected to be a very busy time as it is near Hari Raya – everyone wants to be alive and well during the festive season. So I’m likely to have lots of exercise soon.

I guess that’s all for now. Time to focus back on my diabetes research. It had been dragging the ground for far too long.. and I am going to watch a movie at the new Spring Cinema in 2 hours!.

Sunday is baking day

2009-09-06T17:08:00.001+10:00

Oh well, supposed to carry on with my diabetes research proposal today, but mum kept on insisting me cook something nice. So the whole morning went to doing these:

Shanghai Wo Tie.

Quite yummy besides the fact my brother made the dough a bit too thick, so the water didn’t penetrate in quite well.. that was not enough juice squirting into my mouth when i ate it.

Baked an Oreo cheese cake for my mum to bring to school and boast. Besides Oreo selling at the unbelievable price of RM2.19 in Ta Kiong, The Spring now. Usual retail price RM3.10. This time I baked it using a water-bath, so the colour looks nicer.

And here’s something I did for my own satisfaction coz dad been complaining no one was eating the apples.

An apple pie with cinnamon and lemon flavour.

Tasted just heavenly. Can’t believe it is this tasty. For the first time I liked the crust that I made.

For those who liked a bite, wish you were here. =P

Food food food!

2009-08-30T12:42:00.001+10:00

A certain friend remarked that I should put more photos in my blog to make it more appealing. Besides, she argued, a picture equals to a thousand words. Good point. I guess I should write less and put more photos into my blog.

Around 10 days ago a certain owl flew into Kuching to attend his sister’s graduation. Off we go to sample some Kuching delicacies in TopSpot. Despite it being a weekday and the H1N1 threat, the place was teeming with people.

We had bidin fried with belacan as well as bamboo clams with curry paste, which are both local delicacies.

Then there were this sour-spicy barbecued in leaves sting-ray as well as a humongous oyster pancake.

Yummy.

I had been increasingly turning to producing food as a therapeutic way to de-stress after a hard day at work. Even so satisfying to eat something you had DIY and also see other people savouring it.

This was my venture in replicating the thin crust pizza of Melbourne which I missed so much.

And also some delicious vegetable pau..

The balls of pau dough..

The delicious and healthy vegetable fillings.

Putting the fillings on rolled-up dough and wrapping it up.

Pau before steaming.

The finished product. It is as tasty as it looks. =)

TPN Pharmacy

2009-08-30T00:13:00.000+10:00

They were the cutest thing on earth – their small fingers grasping at thin air, their little legs kicking energetically against pampers that looked bigger than their bodies. They lived in transparent egg-shaped incubators and had so many lines wired to them that they looked like some futuristic androids. They were the premmies – or babies being born premature. The smallest of them weigh 750 grams, smaller than a pack of sugar.

For the last two weeks, I had been starting my day by visiting the nursery. It was part of the routine in the TPN pharmacy rotation.

TPN stands for Total Parenteral Nutrition. As the name suggests, it is basically nutrition - a liquid form of glucose, amino acid and fats being delivered directly into the body via a vein. It needs to be sent this way as some babies cannot eat or digest the normal food we eat for some reason or other, for example, a blocked intestine.

And yes, it is a pharmacist’s job to make up these nutrition in a bag for the babies. Believe it or not. And it’s hard work.

After visiting the babies, we usually went back to the office and did some maths homework. This is the time where all those mmols and mLs and all the pharmacy calculations we tediously pore through in Uni came into practice. We need to calculate that the amount of food the doctors prescribed for the babies are correct. It had to be a balanced diet. Something wrong and you might just send the frail baby to heaven.

After the calculations its often time for an early lunch and then change into spacesuits.

This is because as the nutrition will go directly into the body, we cannot afford to have any bacteria at all or else the baby will likely to suffer an infection. Everything had to be sterile. We gowned up and scrubbed in like surgeons wanting to perform delicate operations. Even washing hands took around 5 minutes. The end result looks like this:

It was then off to the clean room when there are no excuses to escape before the work is done – be it a bursting bladder, dry lips or growling stomach. This is because the space suits are damn expensive and its a big hassle to scrub in again anyway. The longest stretch I had in there was 8 hours. Yesterday I clocked out at the unholy time of 9pm.

In the clean room we inserted all the individual components of the nutrition into a bag. That’s the easy part. The difficult part was to get all the bubbles out of the bags. It was akin to herding hundreds of naughty lambs back into the barn at sunset. Doing a bag usually takes around 30 minutes. By the time I did the last bag of the day, my arms were so tired that I don’t even have the energy to break off an ampoule.

The next day, its back to the ward again, looking at the TPN bag with your handwriting on it being put up on a stand next to a baby and seeing the yellowish solution dripping slowly into their tiny body, giving them strength to fight for another day.

And sometimes, if you are lucky, they opened their eyes and smiled at you. I swear one did that other day.

And this little gesture is enough to make all the hard work worthwhile.

As we grow older..

2009-08-18T23:24:00.000+10:00

“Remember students, please read about page 34 and 35 before coming to class tomorrow, okay?” the teacher sweetly coaxed her students in the saccharine voice of hers.

30 cute doting students nodded their head eagerly before exiting the class. They all pore through the pages at home except one who forgot. He came to school crying because he felt left out.

“I expect you to have a clear understanding of what we are going to do before venturing into the lab tomorrow. Chapter 6 has a good account of the topic. Please read.”

“Yes sir!” Twenty voices chorused in unison. Snorting grumble were heard in the other ten. They eventually managed the next day by paraphrasing the work of their friends and vowed not to do it again.

“It is impossible to pass this unit by just coming to these lectures. These two books - ” the professor paused for effect, his hands gesticulating towards the direction of two thick leather-bound tome - “will be essential to guide you through the whole semester. Study hard guys.”

Only ten pore into the books diligently in the first week. The other twenty laze under the sun in the afternoons. “Relax, there’s still time,” they drawled, before cramping it all in in the last minute, with the help of caffeine and ginseng. They survived, barely.

“The group of you, you will be sent to the marketing department next week for a two weeks attachment. Hope you can learn as much as you can over there,” the manager said to the bunch of immaculately dressed new recruits.

Twenty nine of them went to party the night before the attachment. And they bitched and bitched and bitched about the single alien who opted to stay home to study and prepare for the stint.

“Abnormal crazy lonely no-life guy that one,” one said. All other nodded in agreement, glad that they are normal and know how to have fun. “He is such a boot licker,” said one. "I’m sure he did that just to make us look bad. Damn him,” quipped another. Everyone avoided being seen with him. Nobody wants to be seen to be friends with an outcast. From that day onwards, the alien did his best to fit in.

“Okay guys, we must win this award. Do whatever it takes – overtime, take work home – to bring glory to our company. Your sacrifice will be worth it!” the boss tried to fire his staff up. All the thirty employees in the meeting nodded and clapped.

“Five o’clock!” someone said just as they settled back in the office. They all looked up to the clock, hastily packed their briefcases and in two minutes, the office was empty. No one stayed or brought work home.

A little of this and that

2009-08-16T23:08:00.000+10:00

I did my first ever Continuous Professional Development (CPD) presentation in hospital with my group mates last Wednesday, presenting on the topic Hormone Replacement Therapy. We chose the topic because it was an area that we are a bit hazy about ourselves!

My group mates and me before presentation.

Presentation wise, it went without a hitch (except the fact that the projector colour was faulty). I don’t feel nervous at all, just a bit irritated how I always realised my grammatical mistakes only after the words had already leapt out of my mouth. Something to improve on.

So anyway a little about the topic. Hormone Replacement Therapy are medications used in menopausal woman to alleviate symptoms associated with a decrease in estrogen level, such as hot flushes and vaginal dryness. The take home note is that these medications should only be used for a short period of time (3-5 years) and not more than that as it will increase the risk of breast cancer and cardiovascular complications.

I took this pic in the hosp..one of the drugs for HRT

I spent an insane amount of time preparing the slides and going through the net to find interesting tit-bits that can be used to enhance my presentation. I think I am crazy nowadays because I loved presentation. Getting more and more of a attention whore.

This was one of my slides…

2 weeks spent in Drug Info was indeed very carefree and fun. It was nice and lucky being cloistered and comfy in the office while most of the pharmacists were constantly exposed to potential H1N1 carriers. Starting from tomorrow I will be going into the clean room to commence my two weeks stint doing Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN). Heard it is a stint that will make you hate bubbles. Oh well, I will report about it later.

And now I would like to use this space to wish a very happy birthday to a dear friend of mine who is currently far away in Melbourne. We met in a badminton game and played a game of chess without knowing each other while in 2nd year of Uni. After that we became good friends and played basketball, badminton, eat out and even went to Adelaide and far-away excursions together. He is a good guy, thoughtful and considerate (too bad already not available) and I wish him all the best in his endeavours. He will be a top-notch pharmacist in the future. Happy Birthday WP. Hope you had a great day there! =)

August

2009-08-09T18:58:00.001+10:00

The sun glances down and embraces us in a glow of brilliant red nowadays, shrouded occasionally by thick fogs of pungent oppressive smog. The heat is overbearing, the rain scarce. The haze is back.

Masked personnel hustled around the wards, speaking in muffled tones and with bleary eyes. Deaths are aplenty, Tamiflu prescribed in bulk. H1N1 clamoured for attention, spiralling out of control.

Kuching doesn’t seem to be a good place to live for the time being. But life goes on.

Busy is the tone of the month, with the pursuit of obscure information the mainstay of my job. Drug Info Services at your service, for every clueless caller I proffer my genuine help. Internet, books, leaflets I pore over, in search of solutions to their woes.

12 August on stage I will stand, a discourse on HRT I will present. Preparations had been long and winded, good luck now I hope. Research on diabetes now lead-footed in progress, more oil needs to be added to it.

It will yet be another hectic week ahead. And I will be on lunch duty =(.

End of Month report

2009-08-01T00:49:00.001+10:00

Just realised I only published a single post this month. This can’t be happening! I didn’t realise that I was that busy.

Anyway, I had just finished my first two-weeks rotation in the In-patient Pharmacy Department (IPD) today. It is the main pharmacy in the hospital dealing with the bulk of patients staying in the hospital.

It was a busy station, and the job criteria includes filling up the ward stocks, checking prescriptions and filling drugs for inpatients, counsel discharged patients, answering queries from doctors as well as querying them about their mistakes.

I was also on lunch duty this week, which means that I can’t have lunch during lunch time. Instead I was at the pharmacy dealing with the discharge patients and handling queries from hard-working doctors working during that time.

The most interesting thing that happened the last fortnight was that I bought a new laptop.

And its pink.

Now I’m officially a trend-setter. Pink is really the new black. Just wait for it to happen and see the “I tell you so” smirk on my face in the not too distance future.

In the meantime, I will just live with all the deriding laughter.

Oh I also successfully made some cream puff pastry.

And not to mention that I watched a movie in Malaysia for the first time in 3 years. Can’t even remember what movie was the last I watched at Star Cineplex prior to Harry Potter last weekend. But the cinema still looks the same.

My first CPD presentation is in 12 days time. Can’t wait for that day. Very excited. It’s about Hormone Replacement Therapy.

By the way, I typed this using my new laptop.

Mid July

2009-07-14T23:44:00.000+10:00

In the blink of an eye and it’s mid July. That means I had been working for 3 months. Ouch that’s fast. It feels fast too. At this rate I think I can stay in government forever and it will feel just like a couple of years. Not that it is a bad thing to consider. Easy job relatively good pay.

One of the pharmacists calculated for me that I was being paid like RM25 per hour. Not bad considered that I spent half the morning and whole afternoon playing Sudoku at work today. Not that I wanted to do that, but there’s nothing else to do. And everyone is playing Sudoku.

By the way, I am now at the analysis lab at Pending for the week, which is quite a distance away from the hospital (more than 10km). Basically what they do here is just to wait for someone to send some non-registered drug samples in. No samples equal to no work equals to Sudoku.

In the event that there’s some drugs to be analysed, like today, the pharmacy assistants will prepare the samples and then run some tests on it using some used-to-be high tech machines. Yeah its the GC-MS and HPLC machines that we oft deride in MedChem lectures as being useless stuffs that we will not encounter in our work.

How untrue it was! So here I am this week, trying to figure out what the heck does those initials stand for and how in heaven do there measure stuffs and how to read the graphs that the printer cough out. Luckily there’s no need for me to learn how to deal with them, I just need to know such things and such career path exists. Apparently the pharmacy assistants went for a 3-months long course just to learn how to utilise those machines.

So it will be like a honeymoon week this week. Next week I will be back to the hospital, working in the in-patient pharmacy. At least playing Sudoku is getting my brain working again, after spending the past month doing minimal brain utilising work.

A restaurant trip

2009-06-30T23:44:00.000+10:00

Seems it was a long time since I put some photo in my blog. So here goes: a blog post with lots of photos.

A couple of months ago, I won 3rd prize in a slogan-writing contest and made it to the local daily.

The prize was a voucher for a complimentary dinner-for-ten;

at this high-class looking restaurant of a high-class looking hotel.

We were given a private room,

that had a huge table, so huge that it creaked and groaned whenever you put your arms on it.

Even the chairs were huge, as demonstrated by my sister.

It was a nine course dinner. The servings were large, as seen in the Cold Appetizer below:

Pan-fried beef with celery, sweet and sour prawns and tofu.

Mixed vegetables, honeydew chicken, mango fish.

The food was not bad. They came in quick succession, one after the after. Too quick, in fact. As if there’s no one else in the restaurant to serve.

Which turned out to be the case.

No other single soul was in the restaurant the entire night except us and the four waitresses serving us.

Didn’t realised that they were giving us the VVIP treatment. I thought only the filthy rich can reserve the whole restaurant. I can’t help imagining the cooks being there just to cook for us.

Now that’s exactly how you should treat a contest winner.

Okay enough of the photos. If you are interested in some of my pharmacy adventures, read the post below.

Enforcement pharmacy

2009-06-30T21:26:00.000+10:00

I had been spending the past two days in the enforcement pharmacy. It was one of the departments where there is a possibility for me to be sent to serve my three years compulsory service. As I detest paper-works and enforcement is full of them, I decided to act dumb so that I won’t make a good impression and the boss won’t pick me to join the team next year.

Enforcement was also a two-weeks placement. I followed the enforcement officers to the port where we go through the custom declaration forms of pharmaceutical shipments. If we see something suspicious, I need to call the forwarding agent up and demand for an itemized invoice or do a physical check on the shipment.

Today I went to court to hear them mention cases. They were trying to prosecute someone who had sold some unregistered meds. Apparently pharmacists chosen to be enforcement officers can be the police, detective and lawyer 3-in-1. They can raid premises, investigate people and prosecute them if necessary. That’s the cool part of the work.

So anyway it was kind of fun and interesting to device ways of not looking too efficient. For example, instead of showing initiative, I loitered around until the officer found things for me to do. Usually it’s mundane stuffs (and actually their job). And when they did, I only did some of them, the excuse being “so the next pharmacist attached to the station after me got something to do’”. I also acted blur, constantly looked as if I forgot to do what they asked for. And asked dumb questions while looking innocent like “what do we go to court for?” Hopefully it works!

To summarised about compounding, it was actually quite a good placement. It’s like a big kitchen. In fact, the hospital is like a big restaurant: the patients being the customers, the doctors being the waiters and the pharmacists being the chefs. Played with the pre-packing machine, made lots of cream, eye drops, suspensions and syrups. Was trying constantly to improve my syringing skills. Now I think quite pro already. One thing compounding taught me was to appreciate how difficult it was to make some of the stuffs that we dispense to the patients. So next time should be more stingy and give less. ^^

Also went for a full day Continuous Professional Development (CPD) workshop last Saturday, They flew in a vastly experienced Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN) pharmacist from KL to give a talk. It was very insightful and certainly gave me a brand new perspective on that area. There were also a talk on Oncology which was a very good revision of the stuffs I learnt while attached in the radiotherapy unit.

I guess that’s long enough for now. Probably will update again in a week time. Cheers.

On opposite sides 3

2009-06-24T23:18:00.001+10:00

The muffed sound of the alarm clock rung incessantly under the thick pillow. A silent groan escaped her mouth. Her body was still stiff, remnants from yesterday’s hard work.

She rubbed her heavy eyes that had seen too little sleep. She swung her legs onto the floor, the cold morning blast hitting her as the blanket slipped from her body.

She lumbered into the kitchen, and opened the fridge, the orange glow within piercing through the darkness of the house. Her hands reached inside, searching for ingredients to be transformed into the family’s three meals.

For the next ninety minutes she busied in the kitchen washing, chopping, slicing, boiling and frying, while seizing every available snatches of free seconds in between to brush her teeth, change into the day’s cloths and comb her hair.

When she heard her husband’s footsteps echoing through the house, she knew it was soon time to go. She put all the newly cooked food into the cupboard before tiptoeing into the room next to hers. She gazed fondly at the sweet innocent face of her nine month old son, her fingers gently wiping away a tiny pool of saliva that had drooled down from his agape mouth.

“Lets go,” said her husband, who was leaning against the doorway studying mother and child. She cast a final lingering look at her soundly sleeping son before following her husband footsteps out of the house.

He pushed the motorcycle around 20 meters from their compound because starting the engine. She climbed on behind him, hugging him tightly. It was the only time of the day they can afford to have physically contact this close.

The first cock had only started to crow when they reached the end of the bumpy un-tarred road. She alighted and joined the short line of people standing next to a stick stuck into the muddy yellow ground. She heaved a sign of relief when around ten minutes later, a van spewing thick clouds of exhaust duly rumbled to a stop in front of them. Yesterday they had to wait for twenty minutes. They all squeezed in; men, women, young, old, fat, skinny. She closed her eyes. It will be another two hours before she reach her workplace.

While she was catching forty winks in the van, her young boss was sipping coffee and eating toast that his mother had just prepared for him. He had a piece of report in his hand which caused a frown to creep onto his face. “This Sally again!” he muttered. She had been late for the past three days and missed the last two weekends’ meeting. He had a good mind to admonish her later in the morning. Such unprofessional attitude. What a tardy and lazy good for nothing woman.

“Pa, I am ready to go!” he hollered. It was already 7.30a.m. His father started the car as he climbed in. He was driven to the office, where he promptly put both legs on the table and waited for Sally to arrive. He can never comprehend why she was always late. It only took him one hour from waking up to reaching the office. Surely she can just wake up earlier if she needed more time for make-ups!

Pharmacy Updates Again

2009-06-17T22:22:00.002+10:00

Something is wrong with this world. Yesterday five of us took a short walk (around 200m) under the sun for lunch. Four gals and me. And I’m the only one bringing an umbrella. Doesn’t they know about sunlight and skin cancer??

Anyway been busy the past two weeks studying for my pharmacy law exam. The exam was like a blind date, coz I have no idea how it is structured and how difficult it is. Turned out the examiners didn’t know also. We assumed it was open book till they told us 1 hour before the exam it will be a closed book. It wasn’t until we read the exam paper cover then we discovered it is open book after all. So fun..

Now I am placed at the compounding pharmacy. Did a few eye-drops using aseptic technique on Monday and mixed up some Chloral Hydrate this morning. Tasted a few drops of my product coz I wanted to know how it taste like. Maybe that’s why I became so sleepy for the whole day?

Satellite Pharmacy was fun. There’s always a lot of things to eat there, which is nice. The workload was just ideal, so was the room temperature. But didn’t see much patients, mostly dispense to the wards. Did three bedside counselling on how to use an insulin pen. Very funny coz the senior pharmacist I was following around actually marked out the injection spots on the patient’s stomach itself.

Hmm.. I haven’t cooked up a story to write after my experience in Satellite Pharmacy. Maybe I will get some inspiration soon. But still busy these few days as we are finalising a research proposal. Malaysia very advanced. Even intern pharmacists need to do real research with real patients.

Okie I should get busy.. so long then.

The attractive theory

2009-06-07T22:38:00.000+10:00

A lady named Abby Wong wrote a beautiful article in The Star that had became the talk of the paper. The piece first appeared on 24th May and till today, someone was still commenting on it.

What was it about? Well… drum roll…. she seems to think that guys reading in public are attractive. Wow. Why didn’t she write it earlier? Damn, with that insight I would have read all my novels in shopping centres and bus stops instead of while curling in my bed. Oh, now I can’t bear to count the number of lost opportunities…

Being educated in the scientific method, I decided to put the theory into practice. From that week, I strolled across the corridors of the hospital appearing to be deeply absorbed in the pieces of paper I was carrying. When I had free time in the pharmacy,I read a book.

Alas, I can’t spy any adoring glances, nor hear any hushed whispers saying “he is so attractive!”. The only comment was “Wow you are so hardworking.”

So much for Abby Wong’s theory. She had gotten it so wrong.

Let’s try my theory: Girls find boys who cooks attractive. They will positively drool dreaming about waking up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee tantalizing their nostrils and the melodious sound of luscious vegetables being chopped into bite sizes ringing in their ears. They fantasizes going home after a tired day of work to find piping hot spaghetti ala carbonara waiting for them on the table.

The next thing to do is to prove it. So last week I baked a cheesecake to work and share it around.

After getting my word that it was really me who created such delicious fare, here came the questions:

Question 1: Are you still single?

Question 2: What’s your criteria of a girlfriend?

Question 3: Are you willing to consider a girl a few years older than you?

Question 4: Maybe I should introduce my cousin to you.

I swear its true.

It was hence proven that guys that can cook is a much more attractive commodity. But then there’s a problem, we can’t just push a stove into any public place and proceed to cook our breakfast on the spot, can we?

Disclaimer: This is not, I stress, REALLY NOT a piece of self advertising.

Reflections

2009-06-02T14:12:00.001+10:00

On Friday I ended my tour of duty in the radiotherapy unit pharmacy, which is just a nicer name for a pharmacy dealing with chemo drugs and dispensing to cancer patients.

It was not a fun place to work, considering the fact that all the patients I saw had an uncertain future in front of them.

I had seen concerned son and daughters standing outside the chemo room for hours, peering through the glass door as their aged parents underwent chemo infusion inside. I had dispensed cancer drugs to mothers who had their young children in tow, and heard crying relatives. It was not a pleasant experience but nevertheless, an enriching experience.

As a pharmacist, I believed that we should sometimes try to think from the side of the patients. What do they expect from us? How do they perceive us? How should we show empathy, to show that we care even though the time we spend with them is limited by how busy we are?

During my stint in the out-patient pharmacy, I wrote a short story from my perceived viewpoint of the patient, which I titled “On opposite sides”.

Now that I had finished my radiotherapy unit, I came out with another short story written from similar viewpoints. Just scroll down to read it.

From tomorrow onwards, I will be posted to the Satellite Pharmacy. Hopefully it will be another good learning experience.

On opposite sides 2

2009-06-02T13:46:00.002+10:00

“This is for your cancer.”

The pharmacist in his crisp white-coat didn’t mince his words. He didn’t try to sugar-coat it, or attempted to soften the blow. Like a newly sharpened knife, the stark reminder was stabbed straight into my heart. “Yes girl, you really have cancer.”

Cancer. Ten years ago, it was the poster of African kids with bald heads. Okay maybe that was AIDS. Five years ago, it was the horoscope sign of my supposedly best matched beau. Ten months ago, it was the fiction I watched on my favourite medical soap Grey’s Anatomy. Five months ago, it was a hard lump on my left breast.

With robotic efficiency, the pharmacist delved into a monologue on how to take the medicines. I caught snatches of “once a day”, “not with milk”, “only when necessary” while the others flew pass me in tiny wisps, or perhaps repelled by the piece of glass window separating us.

I felt like a high priest sitting in a confessional window, with him the sinner in the process of divulging his crime. How ironic that mental image, as it was I who was now serving a sentence with a span of unclear duration nor destination. How had I sinned?

For me, cancer felt like a prison sentence where death is a lottery not a verdict; baldness is the forced crown not a crew cut; poisons slowly infused into you body the sadistic punishment not stokes of the rotan. It was sometimes too painful to think about it. I had wallowed in enough self pity to let the tears come streaming down again.

“Do you have any questions, miss?”

He peered at me across the window. Was that a condescending look? A silent rebuke for catching me zoning out?

“Yes. Er no. Thank you very much.”

Quickly I reached for the bag full of medicines he had pushed to my side of the window. In my haste the bag slipped from my numb fingers and fell to the floor with a plonk.

A few concerned people rose halfway in their seat, “It’s okay,” I mumbled. I went down on my knees, reaching for the assortment of bottles and packets scattered around like a shattered piggy bank. I brushed aside the tails of my bandanna that has became slightly dislodged and trailed across my eyes. I looked up to the window, half expecting him to tower above me, cold mirth in his eyes. The window was blank.

“Come, let me help you.” He was squatting right besides me, picking up the packets of medicines, peering into each packets of white round tablets to check for damages. For the first time, he looked human, a slight softening at the edge of his eyes, a discernable line on his forehead. Like a hypnotizing pendulum, the name tag he wore around his neck swung to and fro, suspended by a thread of silver beads, drawing me to it.

“Walter Ong” it read. The name had a familiar ring. Walter Ong... Walter Ong… suddenly the memories came flooding back. There he was, a young kid who once plucked off a stem of Aloe Vera and dabbled the soothing juice to my skinned knee. Surely it was the same Walter, the kid from the next class with the double eyelid and sweet dimples. The silent kid who once gave me a rubble band to play with when I was banished to stand outside the classroom as punishment. The kind kid who helped to carry my lunch box when I was inundated with too many books.

I looked at him, searching vainly, futilely for the slightest sign of recognition from his impassive face. There were none. Like the doctor I was seeing, he had learned to mask stark knowledge well. Or had he really forgotten about me?

“Here you go. Remember to take the pyridoxine tablets as I had told you. 5 tablets in the morning. Then your fingers will be better, okay?” he handed me the reassembled packet. I nodded in a daze, gazing into his eyes. He averted them. I stared at the back of his white coat billowing in the soft zephyr as he walked swiftly back into the door he came from, his footsteps growing fainter and fainter.

I rose and walked towards the exit. Just before I exited into the sun lit path, I can’t resist stealing a final glance. He was back in the window, and he was looking at me. Was that a sad wistful look? Perhaps he did remember. Perhaps he didn’t want his memory of me to be scarred by the bald bag of bones which I am now. Perhaps he wanted to spare me the awkwardness of meeting here. Indeed the oncology clinic was the worst place to meet and reconnect with old friends, especially when you are on different sides.

Should I buy one?

2009-05-26T21:00:00.000+10:00

I wanna a small laptop coz its cheap and light (1.2kg). Then I can go online at Starbucks without bringing my spineless tanker of a laptop. Or go hospital watch drama will on midnight shift.This laptop looks aesthetically pleasing too and only priced at RM1699..hmm any suggestions?

Oh by the way, its the Dell Mini 10.

I’m thinking of getting the pink one…no, not that I’m girly or what, but I think I should treat a laptop as a girlfriend (so that I will be more careful taking care of it) rather than an extension of myself. Since girls loved to dress in shades of light blue, purple or pink, I should dress my laptop in pink (since its the only available colour).

Lalala any suggestion on that?

Only in Malaysia

2009-05-23T21:31:00.000+10:00

I (L) Malaysia, but does Malaysia (L) me?

It somehow seems inappropriate to criticise an entity that will pay for your livelihood for the next few years. Hence perhaps it is better to view the idiosyncrasies encountered in a positive light.

To apply for a pharmacy job in Malaysia is like a test for your adeptness to Malaysian way of life, especially for those studying abroad. Those who think a government who constantly cries for its sons and daughters in far away land to ‘come back to mommy!’ will glorified those who did heed the call with pomp and pageantry is in for a shock. Janganlah jadi anak Malaysia mudah lupa seems to be the general tone of things.

The “Come back to happy Mommy!” illusion.

First, lets start off with some hearty congratulations. Kudos to the government who deserved praise for having such a foresight to set such a good introductory course for aspiring pharmacists so that they will view further red tape and befuddled information as part and parcel of Malaysian life.

Yes, so you have graduated overseas in a good University. And being a patriotic student with all the semangat and intention to enhance the wellbeing of the general rakyat, you decided to do what others choose not to do: you are going home!

Here comes the first step. how to apply for a pharmacy job? Well there seems to be no written instructions online. Alas zaman IT still is in its infancy in Malaysia. But never mind, someone back home say people now apply through the SPA website. So you go to the website. And lo and behold there seems to be more than one way to apply. And it was assured that all the ways are equivalent. It was only later from friend of friend that I knew calling up SPA was the way to go.

In the SPA website, it was written there that while you are waiting for their reply, fill a form with the Kementerian Kesihatan Malaysia (KKM) and Pharmacy Board of Malaysia (LFM). So off I go to the LFM website. The form was there! Hurray! But hold on! here it stated that to only fill in the form when you got the appointment letter from SPA. So who’s correct?? Lets go to KKM website to check. But the KKM form seems not to be online. But there’s an enquiry section! Where I had sent an email into oblivion.

Finally two months later, we all JPA pharmacy kids managed to figure the correct procedure out. At last we finally got out of the amazing maze!

My happy face after negotiating the maze.

And so off we go went for an interview. The questions ranged from “how we choose the Agong?” to “do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend”. It all depends on the interviewers, but from what I heard, nobody doing pharmacy is going to fail the interview (because we have a shortage of pharmacist!). I asked them, “so when will I get a job?”. A few weeks, they said. You know, government got a lot of red tapes. At least they were straightforward. We need to discuss it in a few meetings and liaise between three departments.

After three months of idling around, the letter finally came. Yes congrats, you got Sarawak. Now Sarawak got three hospitals that they can send you to. Kuching, Sibu and Miri. And no, you can’t know which hospital you are going to be sent, no matter if you call them or go visit them personally at KKM. When you go and lapor diri on the first day of work at the KKM head office in Kuching, then you will know (even though they look like they do know). What about if I’m from, lets say Sibu? Oh, fly down to Kuching and lapor diri first. If you get Sibu, fly back. If you get Kuching, fly back to Sibu, collect your belongings and fly back to Kuching and start work. Come on lah, Malaysia must help its own industry. Now the aviation industry in the doldrums, go support them!

Fly Malaysian Airlines. Frequently.

But then, before you get angry and frustrated about Malaysia, remember that all this is actually a well-conceived personality test. It tests your patience and ability in problem solving. Teaches you the value of keeping in touch with friends too. We here only accept the best people! It aren’t supposed to be easy, as at the finishing line of this 110m hurdles lies a well-paying, secured and glamorous job (hopefully).

To all my juniors in VCP, since I love you all so much, here’s really how to apply for a pharmacy job in Malaysia (for overseas grad).

1. Call up the SPA directly to arrange for an interview ASAP. The telephone number is available on the SPA website. Currently this is only applicable to pharmacy, medic and dentistry students studying overseas. Don’t apply online, they take ages to reply (if they reply at all).

2. After you passed the interview (seems its just a formality), they will send you an offer letter within two weeks. Send back the attached acceptance form immediately. Once you get the offer letter, you can apply for a provisional registered pharmacist licence from the Pharmacy Board of Malaysia, which is available from their website. In the meantime, also go to Kementerian Kesihatan office to fill in a “Borang Maklumat Diri”.

3. Once you are registered with the pharmacy board (you can call them up to rush them), your info will be sent to the Kementerian Kesihatan Malaysia, who will then place you in a State (also can call to rush them). They will then send you a letter to tell you when and where to report yourself to.

Sounds simple, but trust me, it is only so after you had gone through the whole rigmarole. Good luck in your on-coming exams!

Updates updates

2009-05-21T23:20:00.001+10:00

We waited by the window, a yellow card in hand, looking intently and waiting patiently as the longer hand of the clock reluctantly arched its way into the big bold line on the uppermost of the circle. '”Okay, its five already!” The man on the front of the line exclaimed, and excitedly punched his card through. One by one, we watched as the machine efficiently rolled our yellow cards into its stomach before spilling it out again with the time we clocked out printed neatly on it. In black ink. One minute early, it will be red.

The definitive picture of a government servant.

I had now reverted back into the normal 8-5 work life routine. For this week and the next, I am located in the Radiotherapy Unit Pharmacy (RTU). It is a satellite pharmacy catering for four wards: Palliative Care, Ambulatory, Male RTU and Female RTU; as well as an outpatient chemo day care centre and clinic.

It was a pretty relaxing station compared to the market that is outpatient pharmacy. There is nothing much to do, besides filling medications and checking that the filled medicines are correct. I have all the time in the world to recheck everything before dispensing or taking the drugs to the chemo room as there are no impatient patients at all. Besides a wrong drug or dose will have severe consequences here.

Hence for the past few days,I had been dealing with a lot of expensive and dangerous drugs, Since it was so specialised, it had provided me a good chance to refresh my memory on all things about cancer. It was indeed fascinating to see the regimens and drugs we had learnt in practice.

Something different about pre-registration here compared to Australia is that we can do the final checking and dispensing of the drug. In fact I spent the whole of yesterday morning checking and dispensing drugs by myself as the only RTU pharmacist went off somewhere to work. It felt like being a real pharmacist-in-charge.

Anyway, am glad that it will be Friday tomorrow. Will be going for a Continuous Medical Education (CME) talk from 7.45am-8.45am before starting work at 8.45am. Will also have a long lunch break from 11.45am to 2.15pm tomorrow, and a 30 minutes morning tea in between 8.45am – 11.45am. So essentially will only be working for 2 and a half hours in the morning. And 1 and a half hour in the afternoon. as will be attending presentation from 2.30 to 3.30pm. So grand total of work hours is only FOUR. I love Fridays. And till now, I am still loving my job as a pharmacist.

Mother’s Day Special

2009-05-11T23:45:00.001+10:00

For this year’s Mother’s Day, decided to go for a Korean theme: bibimbap and kimbap.

Close up of the bibimbap, which is in essence rice mixed with some very healthy and colourful vegetables and Korean hot pepper paste.

This was a picture of the finely shredded vegetables before being assembled.

A close up picture of kimbap, which is the Korean term of Sushi. Decided to call it that coz korean sushi don’t need to prepare soy sauce and wasabi.

Went to my grandmother’s place. All the Happy Mothers and the delicious food…

and the pretty home made blueberry cheese cake.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Job update

2009-05-10T14:12:00.001+10:00

I had now worked a full three weeks in the hospital pharmacy and till now it had been a tiring but rewarding experience.

However, for now, I sure will not want to be going to the hospital to see a doctor because it was swamped with more people than I think it can manage. As a consequence, for a lot of patients, the trip to the hospital is a stressful and harrowing experience. Sometimes I chatted with random people while waiting for the lifts and in the hallway, and the topic will always be how it is so hard to find a parking space at all in the hospital compound, and how long they had to wait, first to see the doctor, and then to get their meds from the pharmacy.

In the outpatient pharmacy, the patients lining up were so long that I think they need to wait at least 1 hour to get their meds from the time they put the script in, even though our client charter stipulated that everyone will be serve within 30 minutes. The situation was so bad that pharmacists from other departments were deployed here for the whole week and there were a few instances of bad-tempered people letting off their steam with loud verbal abuses. I quite emphasize with their predicament, but there is simply nothing much that I can do. I can increase the speed I assemble the meds, but that will simply increase the chance of mistakes. In terms of meds, I do think accuracy is more important.

What can be hoped now is that the economic recession will go away as soon as possible. Everyone said that the best job now is in the government sector because of its stability, but we do feel the pinch in terms of increased workload. One of the accident and emergency hospital told me that the number of patients she saw this year easily tripled the number last year as more and more people can’t afford to go to private clinics now.

Anyway, on the bright side of things, my speed of assembling meds had gone up a notch. I can do around 100 scripts per day now, instead of the 50ish when I first started (yeah we need to record how many we did). mistakes were kept down to 1-2 per day. I also spend some time at the front counters everyday, telling patients how adn when to take their meds and give them some reminders, especially for dangerous drugs like warfarin. There is simply no time to talk about side effects, and probably the culture here is still what you don’t know wouldn’t kill you.

I did three patient counselling in the hospital counselling room last week. The first one was using an insulin pen and a pharmacist was observing me, so it was kind of a nervy experience. But the next two were all done by myself (I guessed I passed lol) and the very first person I counselled by myself turned up to be one of a past director of the hospital, a Datuk and Doctor nonetheless. I taught him how to use a Turbohaler. The pharmacist assistant was like: do you know who that is? when I came out of the room. The main problem I think is my Bahasa Malaysia fluency. Still need some brush-ups.

Anyway, next week will be my final week in outpatient for now. My next posting will be in the Radiotherapy Unit. No idea what I will do there, but I heard that it is far more relaxing than out-patient..

Sunday night

2009-05-03T20:15:00.001+10:00

He stared at the blank screen of his laptop, the notepad devoid of alphabets.

A story line.. a story line… a story line. He scrunched up the mass of curly hair on his head. A few strand fell down, settling with a cris-crossing pattern on the keyboard.

He clenched his fists in determination. I must write something. He forced his hands to knock in the first letter. And then another.

An hour passed. And another… yet another…

Like a methodical carpenter assembling a few pieces of wood together, an artistic sculpture soon materialised. Planks of wood held together into a structure by scrawny bits of nails here and there. With a little stretch of imagination, some may say it resembled a chair.

“Hey how was your weekend?”

“Oh I took Air Asia for a quick shopping trip to Kuala Lumpur,” breathlessly she said, a radiant pink hue appearing on her cheek.

“Oh My God! It must had been fun. Oh how I wished my weekend was like that!” another she exclaimed, her hands clasped in front of her chest.

“So what did you do?”

“Oh, nothing much. My boyfriend and I just went for a 2 days 1 night trip to Bako National Park,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders.

“You didn’t say! Or else we could had arranged a trip together!” Both females are now having their hands on each other, patting each other as if congratulating themselves on their accomplished weekends. Their action nearly knocked down some artificial potted plants.

“You gals really know how to have fun,” the other guy said, his back rested languidly upon the cubicle divider, “my weekend playing a round of golf at the new Sarawak Club golf course seems pale in comparison.”

“Ooo..you played golf!” They looked at him with round adoring eyes. “You should teach us that next time!”

As the giggling and chatting idled down, they discovered a figure had been lurking unseen right in the middle of the room until now.

“What about you Wally? You had been quiet all the while. Surely not another weekend spent doing nothing?”

The glare of the spotlights on him momentarily blinded him, causing him to blink and squint. With a victorious smile, he shook his head.

“I spent the whole weekend writing a wonderful piece of story. Oh you should had read about it. It’s about this poor guy meeting a rich girl…”

The smile was still hanging on his face when a flashing box that had appeared on his laptop screen for the last five minutes finally caught his attention. Windows had finished updating. It will now restart automatically it said. Before he had time to react, the computer screen turned black, swallowing his story with it.

He stared at his laptop blankly. He felt like screaming but no voice came out. He felt like smashing his laptop into smithereens but instead he sit there, slumped in his chair. Oh how he hated Sunday nights!

May

2009-05-01T15:08:00.001+10:00

After working for just 10 days, I am already rewarded with a holiday. In appreciation for my hard work, the Malaysian government decided that we should have a Labour Day holiday. Yippee!

And so its May already. It wouldn’t be long before we say goodbye to 2009. On a brighter note, there’s still more than half of 2009 to savour (the half glass empty, half glass full view of things).

Okay to expand on my previous post, outpatient pharmacy is very busy. There’s a constant flow of people wanting to take their medicines. And Malaysians are generally an impatient lot. They expect to be served immediately! Why can’t they see there’s a lot of people in front of them and appreciate that it’s not easy trying to assemble the huge amount of medications they need to patch up their bodies.

Of course, I can’t completely blame them. Me too had been guilty of such transgression. I often sat on the other side of the counter while waiting for my turn in banks and post offices and immigration offices, wondering why it took so long to process something. Slow snails and lazy bums at work! Now that I am on the other side of the counter… lets just say I will be more patient next time I am queuing up and not badmouth those people working on the other side.

My brain often can’t function after I reached home from work. It was exhausting job. Haven’t been writing for a few weeks. I had some descriptive essays written ages ago but haven’t fashioned out a worthwhile story to go with it. I just have enough inspiration to write the short piece below this morning. Hopefully can think of a more substantial storyline this long weekend in between time spent studying. There’s just so much about pharmacy that I need to re-remember. Enjoy.

On opposite sides

2009-05-01T14:29:00.001+10:00

He looks at the prominent red LED clock on the wall. He contrasts the numbers displayed with the one printed on his tiny slip of paper. 42 minutes and he is still waiting. He stretches his shoulders awkwardly, trying not to bang into the frail lady sitting on his left and the squirming kid on his right. The back of the plastic seat is too low to support his now aching back. He undo the first two buttons of his shirt in a vain effort to cool down the unattractive concoction of impatient and frustration that is starting to boil in his body.

He glances up at the girl sitting on the other side of the counter. She wears a constant smile, laughing and joking with the young man she is serving. Damn, he thought, there she is, taking her own sweet time swooning over a hunk while he is festering here, waiting ages for his turn. He looks at the red LED clock again and grimaced. Damn, his parking ticket will be due in another 5 minutes. He needs to pick up his son from school in half and hour, and there’s still a heap of papers he need to tackle before he can afford to take forty winks.

At long last, they say goodbyes and the guy is gone. He looks at the number under the clock. 1431 it flashed. Still 3 more numbers to go. He glares at the girl again, he sees her chatting to the girl on the next counter. He groans as the frail lady next to him stands up and shuffles to the counter. This is going to take long too. He sees the girl getting up from her seat and opening a door next to the counter, inviting the old lady to come in. They disappear from his view, and he is left staring at a big blue empty chair behind the counter.

He drabs the perspiration forming like hot water bubbles on his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. He feels dizzy in the afternoon heat that was left encountered by the malfunctioned air-conditioning. A baby cries somewhere in the sea of waiting people. Some kids resort to treat the place as their playground. running and shrieking around.

1434 the number flashed. His turn. He walks angrily to the counter. What kind of attitude is this, he demands in a raised voice. Do you know how long I had been waiting? Do you know I have other important things to do? He raves and he rants. His anger spills like a flowing river, and it is silently absorbed by the girl on the other side of the counter.

She looks at the man when he finally run out of steam. She offers him a smile, and apologises profusely for the wait. She has a soothing calm voice, a melodious chime in her voice even. She gives him his medications, explaining what they are for. She looks concerned as he spells out his difficulty in remembering when to take his medicines. She nods and inform him the best way to take them, giving simple practical advices. She smiles and she cares. She is the epitome of niceness and he feel a prang of guilt over his own behaviour.

He leaves the place a contented man, with the medicines and a piece of priceless happiness to treat his high blood pressure.

Out of sight, the girl heaves a sigh and shakes her head. This is a hell of a frustrating job. What had she done in her past life that merited a punishment of meeting with a slew of angry customers everyday, she wonders. Only her self-discipline and work ethics stopped her from yelling back at the man. Whoever coined the word the customer is always right should be shot, she thought angrily. Somehow in the last five minutes, her happiness had flowed to the man and in return, his angriness had filled the void inside her.

Work

2009-04-26T21:59:00.001+10:00

Now I started to realise why most of my friends had been blogging so sporadically over the past few months. Working is really energy draining. All I wanted to do after coming back from work is just to relax and watch my Korean drama.

Yes I had started working since 16th April, the day after my previous post. Fortunately, I had managed to get a place in Sarawak General Hospital. What a relief. At least for the first year, there’s no need to live alone in some remote area of Sarawak.

What SGH used to look like. Now its under construction.

For my first rotation, I was attached to the Outpatient Pharmacy Department. Not an ideal place to start my year as a Provisional Registered Pharmacist; akin to a youth player being suddenly selected into the first eleven of the football team. For it was easily the busiest department as it caters for patients visiting the numerous specialist clinics in the hospital. For the last few days, all I did was just to read the doctor’s prescriptions and fill the necessary medications for the patients to take home, doing around 50-60 scripts per day. Nonetheless, it was quite a good way to get familiarise with the colours and sizes of the available drugs. Next week will likely be taking some tentative steps into patient counselling.

Drugs,.my new BFF. Should I go out with the red one or yellow one tonight?

It had been and will continue to be a steep learning curve. My brain had been rusty from nearly half a year of idleness. For the past week, I had been busy learning and being assessed on the counselling points for all the inhalers and insulin devices. Next up will be on Warfarin, nasal spray and eye drops etc. What’s more, I had to do it in three languages: Chinese, Malay and English. I miss Australia where just English will do.

Insulin pens and inhaler devices.

Anyway, as far as first impressions go, the pharmacy department is far more organised then first thought. Hospital pharmacy in Malaysia is more or less comparable to the ones in Australia. What I like about their medications filing system is that all the drugs are grouped together according to mode of action, for example, cardiovascular drugs are all in the same area. This really saves time while filling. Another thing is that they packed the drugs in convenient packs of 30 or 90, which saves time. There are also far more pharmacy assistants compared to Australian hospital, and the ones I had seen so far are also very competent.

I guess that all the updates for now. It is time to again prepare for another baptism of fire next week. Lucky its going to be a four-day week. Oh why it’s Sunday night already…

Down Memory Lane

2009-04-14T23:31:00.000+10:00

Last week, my mum uncovered something interesting: a yellow manila folder containing each and every one of my primacy school semester exam papers.

This was the very first semester exam I set for, nearly 17 years ago.

Chinese Language. 11 May 1992. Not a bad start.

Mathematics. 12 May 1992. Oops. A bit downhill.

Moral Education. 13 May 1992. Getting worse.

If you doubt the authenticity, here’s the prove that it’s really my paper. Notice my name? And the year?

Hmm was there only 3 subjects? I didn’t remember much about the first semester exams. Guess it was too long ago. The only thing I remember about it was the aftermath.

The whole class was sitting down in groups around square tables. Along each side of the table there was a long chair which seats two student each. Yeah, that’s how we were sitting last time, 8 students to a square.

The teacher was asking the class. “Who do you think got 1st place in class?” Names were brandied around . I remember suggesting a name (alas, I forgot who). The teacher shook her head. Then a guy named Alan say out my name. And yes its me! Haha that’s why I remembered it clearly I guess. But then, the innocent me never really thought about academic excellence. It’s more like enjoying what I was studying. It was much later, I think in primary 3 or 4 when I started to have that academic competitive edge.

But I do remember the semester 2 exams in Primary One. I was down with measles that time, so I only went to the exam one week after. I had the exam in the staff room, sitting next to my form teacher on her table. I had curious teachers looking at me. One even ask my form teacher “is this your son?”

Come to think of it, I remembered quite a number of events and incidents that happened in primary one. Like who was sitting next to me and my impression of him (I thought he was quite scruffy because he was picking his nose). He also forgot to bring his pencil box, so I lent him a pencil. I remembered the girl who peed in class and the guy who excreted faeces in class. I remembered who is the class monitor. The name of the teacher. The girl who was accused of stealing from the canteen etc.

Can’t believe 17 years had passed since then. It was like reminiscing the start of a marathon when I had already passed the finishing line. But it was fun. Anyway I thought I just wrote it down here so that I can reflect upon it in the event I got dementia or amnesia later in life. Memories carved in words.

Lucky Guy 13 Final

2009-04-13T23:23:00.000+10:00

“Boon Phiaw Kho”

I doffed my square hat, walked into the glaring lights, collected my scroll, said a few thank yous, shook a couple of hands, and dissolved back into the dark anonymity.

It was often argued that the journey is more important than the destination.

I entered Uni with the well set destination being to graduate with a First Class Honours pharmacy degree.

Luckily I didn’t just focus on the final destination. Because all I have to saviour the success of reaching my destination was a paltry 30 seconds. Yes, that’s the time for me to walk across the dais, collecting my scroll in the process. It barely reflects the four years of hard work and dedication I put in.

In the end, it was the journey which I cherished most. It was in the journey where soft skills were learnt to complement hard facts. It was in the journey that acquaintances were made and friendships built. There are so many good friends that there is no fair way to anoint one as the best. Suffice to say, they all left footprints in my heart. It was also an eye-opening journey to all things unimaginable and previously unconceivable. It made me appreciate how diverse the world really is and how limited my knowledge were.

Something that I had never disclosed before is that I also entered Uni with three dreams. The first one was academic, ie graduate with First Class Honours. The second one was co-curricular. I wanted a life besides studying and also to make a difference to the life of other students, especially international students. I felt that after all the associations and activities I joined, I did achieve that. Being given the Community Achievement Award was icing on the cake. It was actually a nice feeling to have what I had done being recognised.

The third dream, I was ashamed to say, was to be popular. I know, it was a vain little dream, a castle in the air furnished by too many teenage dramas and movies, and a personal story by a friend. He said it offhanded it ages ago, but it somehow etched itself to my memory. During his birthday one year, the whole library full of students broke into a spontaneous rendition of Happy Birthday. Gee, I thought, it must felt good to be popular.

I don’t think I managed to fulfil that dream of mine. The nearest I got was being stopped by five or six people in the library asking about assignments and how-do-you-dos. Did I try hard enough? I have no idea. It is sometimes hard to judge oneself. There were times I felt lonely in the Uni, lost in the sea of people. There were also times where I felt so lucky to have people around me, joking, having fun. However, I was not too disappointed for not fulfilling it, as it was more of a bonus dream. Besides, there were enough things to make me feel grateful.

Yes, I had graduated, putting a full stop to my memorable journey in Parkville Campus, Monash University. Nevertheless, it was not a full stop to continue learning. It is just a milestone, with the time off now being a pause to reflect and recollect before embarking on a greater journey.

As a final note, thanks for indulging the narcissistic devil in me by reading these posts since I put the first one up more than half a year ago. I know I used a lot of Is and mes, Nevertheless, I hoped you are entertained.