Over lunch with her, I had a missed call. It was M, the patient I had met a few weeks ago, who was orphaned from birth and whose foster mother died on her 14th birthday.
Later, when I called her back, she said, "I've no money to talk to you, my phone bill is expensive. Let's sms. I can sms for free. "
" No," I said, "What's up? Tell me briefly, I want to hear from you." I knew text messaging would simply not convey her situation to me accurately.
"I need twenty dollars."
What a tragic request. I was at Starbucks, my favourite hangout now, in the midst of blue jazz, mahogany furniture and swanky businesspeople smoking cigarettes coolly outside the glass panels in the business district.
"Why do you need twenty dollars? Is something wrong?"
"Yea, I just ran out of money, that's all. I need twenty dollars to tide me over for two weeks before I get my next paycheck."
"Why did you run out of money?"
"Medication."
She had a chronic skin condition, but I wasn't sure if she was recently hospitalised again. A few weeks ago, she had text messaged me to say that she had lost her job.
"I kena sack le," she had sms-ed in Singaporean slang. "My boss say customer see my face get scared of me." I remember, she once shared that her colleagues had made fun of her before, that she had AIDS or some incurable venereal disease, when the truth was, eczema isn't even contagious.
"M, twenty dollars is not the solution, you know. I've got to know the underlying problem so I can help you better. Tell me more. Where are you staying at now?"
"You know, I'm so sick and tired of answering all these questions. Everybody asks me the same questions! I'm so tired. Look, I'm just asking for twenty dollars. Twenty dollars to tide me through these 2 weeks for my transport fare and I'll return it to you when I get my pay, okay? I called you because I thought you were my friend, I've seen the social workers already, they can't help me, so I don't want to be asked the same questions all over again. I'm tired, I'm tired!"
She was obviously at the end of her means.
I thought of Uncle Z, the malay patient with heart failure whom I visit once in a few months. He was jobless, his wife had dementia, his son ran away, his electricity got cut off and we eventually gave him monthly food vouchers and a small job cleaning desks at my church twice a week so he had something to do, some pay to call his own. It didn't matter that he had a different faith.
But two weeks ago, he called me from hospital. He was in the high dependency unit. I should have known. After all, he had been labelled from day 1 as a recalcitrant patient.
"Doctor Wai Jia," he said, even though he knows I graduate only next year, " I'm in hospital again. I titrated my own medicines, took a lot of warfarin yesterday cos I felt like I was going to die."
Warfarin is a blood-thinning agent taken by patients with heart valve replacements. Uncle Z had two prosthetic valves in his heart because of his multiple heart problems. "And now I want to go home. My wife is alone. She has dementia."
"No," I said firmly in my Sunday school teacher voice. I was on the way to church to teach my children. "You stay where you are. The doctor has not allowed you to leave. Don't repeat the same mistake. It's very dangerous for you to go home now. If you pass out at home, you will let her down more. Pastor Freddy says he'll come and see you and help you. Be good and stay at hospital, okay?"
He self-discharged anyway.
M kept text messaging me, "Have you transferred the money? I want to meet you. You got church on friday? I'm free."
I didn't. I said I would pass it to her personally when we met at church tomorrow, when I would introduce her to my friend in charge of social services. She had helped Uncle Z previously.
There I was in Starbucks, studying another chapter about fractures and surgical complications and high-tech procedures, when somewhere not too far away, someone my age was struggling to make ends meet.
I was very troubled that evening. Troubled by M, by Uncle Z's recalcitrance in spite of all our love and help, by my parents' unwillingness to let me visit and help dumpsite children because it was in Manila, "a dangerous place".
So I took my bike out again and rode with the Big Boys on their dangerously fast Wednesday night rides. I was the only girl, it was my first time riding with them and only my 3rd ride since I recovered. We tore down the road at 40kmph, and as I saw myself surrounded by swanky four, five, six-thousand dollar bikes, I found myself overwhelmed by the injustice of it all.
"I know you want to help people, but you can't help everyone, Wai Jia," said my friend who cycled next to me, when I lamented that there was nowhere really safe where children were suffering. I was struggling with the conflict of respecting my parents and making my own decision.
If I keep reasoning about this and that, I will never step out of my comfort zone. Of course these places are dangerous- why else are the children suffering? Nepal was dangerous, India was crazy, Sichuan just had an earthquake- why is this different? Mission work and public health in developing countries is dangerous. I didn't want to tell him about M, or Uncle Z- I knew it would only exasperate him.
I rode faster.
Then I remember what I had taught at Sunday school last week. I remember, it was the day I was preparing the craft for the children that I heard the news about my classmate who passed away. Did he not know how precious he was?
The lesson was for them to think of someone whom they knew could do with some encouragement, someone who was struggling or unpopular or rejected by others. They had to colour the sparrow, stick a feathered ribbon on its breast and address it to someone they wanted to bless, writing a note behind it. I wrote mine to Jordanna, my 7-year old kid. She is very, very ill now.
Maybe it was the 40kmph ride in the inky blackness, maybe it was realising my legs were truly and completely healed, or maybe it was the reminder that each of us was precious to God- but I didn't feel so frustrated any more.
Even though I couldn't quite reconcile my desire to serve the poor in dirty, dangerous places with other people's concern for me. Even though thinking about Uncle Z makes me feel exasperated and helpless. Even though wondering if M will show up tomorrow makes me feel slightly jaded.
We're each worth more than many sparrows.
And so I've just got to trust, that He'll take care of them, of E and his mother, of Jordanna with her unresectable brain tumor, of Uncle Z with his heart failure, of M and her skin condition and her messed up life, of the thousands and millions of children picking up trash for food all over the world, and take care of me, too.
*photo published with permission
a picture of Jordanna and I taken a few months ago.
She's wearing a gold medal won by my penpal in Canada,
who survived liver cancer when he was 11 after a liver transplant.
He got first prize in one of his international Transplant Games races
and mailed this medal to me to encourage her.
He is also an Iron Man.
"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?
Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.
And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
So don't be afraid;
you are worth more than many sparrows. "
- Mathew 10:29-31
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