Clinic duty: 16/1/2008

Today was my first clinic duty for the year. I went a bit early today as I had anticipated I may take up some time finding myself a parking space. I was right – I had to go 2 rounds before I could find a spot. Even that one was quite a distance from the HIV clinic. The walk would be good exercise, yes, but earlier in the morning I was mowing the lawn at home, so I actually had enough exercise for the day!

When I got to room 9, SN was there, about to explain to a female PLWHA about her medication which the patient was just about to start taking. The other 2 fellow volunteers were not there yet. According to SN there were a few cases she wanted to hand over to us today, but since all the new cases for today involved Chinese speaking patients, we figured we’d better wait for my colleagues to arrive. Not all these patients can speak well in Malay or English, so I’d rather wait so we’d be able to explain ourselves better. When we draw up the duty roster for the volunteers, we make it a point that for every group, there’d be Malay, Tamil and Chinese speaking volunteers. All the volunteers can speak English, so no problem in that department. But not all are that fluent in Malay, especially if the patients we deal with speak certain dialects like the Parit dialect. That's where I may come in handy. As for patients who speak only Tamil or Chinese – you can count me out for these ones!

The first case handed over to us for today was a couple – both HIV positive. No buddies were assigned to them as they travel a lot and so they didn’t see the point of being assigned a buddy. Well, at least they have each other’s support, so I too think they could do without a buddy. Nevertheless, we still gave them our brochure just in case one find day they may need our help. The couple spoke Chinese most of the time during the session, so I don’t really know what the conversations were about. All I did was to jot down the required details from the medical files to our contact report. You see, whenever a case is referred to us, SN would give their medical files to us to enable us to get the necessary particulars. Once we’re done, we’d send back the files to SN before she’d call the patients into the doctor’s room to see the doctor.

The next case referred to us was a patient whose spirit and positive attitude I truly admire. When a guy in his late 40’s came into the room, I thought he looked healthy enough. Since the conversations were sometimes in Chinese and sometimes Manglish (oops, nobody spoke proper Malay or English, huh??), I could understand and join in the conversations.

You know, this guy whom I thought looked “healthy”, was actually already on HIV medication and in addition to that, also has cancer and still needs to undergo chemo treatment. Yet he was so lively and could even joke around with us. His wife, who came into the room a bit later, told us her husband had actually gotten over the initial depression. His positive thinking helped a lot. As a matter of fact, he even asked about our voluntary duty. He said he may even consider helping us out once his chemo treatment is over. I think if he does become a volunteer one day, he’d make a good one – especially in providing peer support.

The next new case was a young lady of Thai origin who married a Malaysian. Oh, none of the volunteers knew how to speak the Thai language, but luckily this lady knew how to speak in Chinese (she married a Malaysian Chinese), so at least one of the volunteers could converse with her with ease. Me? As usual, when I didn’t understand the conversation, I’d just write down our contact report.

This lady, who is 10 weeks pregnant, will be moving to Johore soon to stay with her husband who works there. So her case will be referred to JB and as such we didn’t assign any buddy to her.

SN had wanted to refer another new case to us today, but there were so many patients, SN was so busy that by the time she wanted to refer another case to us, the said patient had gone back.

Anyway, in between SN moving around, walking to and fro the doctor’s room and our room, she did manage to enquire if we were in touch with a few PLWHAs who had missed their appointments. One of them, Helena, never bothered to come for appointments, and worse still, didn’t even bother to bring her kids for tests despite being reminded by the doctors many times! One of my colleagues even went to her house a few times to coax her to at least bring her children, but she was reluctant. To her, it’s better not to know at all rather than finding out they’re positive. Sigh!

And remember Miera, the young Malay lady who specified she didn’t want a Malay buddy for fear she may be looked down upon by fellow Malays? Well, she too had missed her appointment. And since she had already started her medication, missing her appointment meant she must have stopped taking her medication as she would have finished the earlier supply by now (if she did take them in the first place!). SN was rather mad with her, which is understandable, really. Here we are, so concerned about their well being, and yet they themselves are not bothered to take care of themselves!

I also asked SN about our dear Yah Ah Ngau. The moment I mentioned Yah’s name, SN giggled. Yah came last week for her appointment and SN was amused with the changes in Yah. “Aduuuhhh… bukan main lagi sekarang, pakai baju macam orang muda!” And better still, according to SN, the same day last week, Lin (Mr. Darling’s ex-wife) came to the clinic too! I asked SN if Lin and Yah actually met each other. Well, no they did not, but even if they did, I doubt they’d know each other’s link to Mr. Darling. Unless of course, they start conversing with each other, and Lin talks about her useless ex-husband and Yah talks about the romeo who proposed to her! And maybe somewhere along the line, their stories start to ring a bell somewhere…

But don’t let our imaginations run wild… this blog is supposed to highlight true stories about the lives of HIV positive people, not cerita rekaan semata-mata… hehehe…