Hospitals and Movies

By a strange turn of events, 3 out of 4 of my cousin's family are down with dengue fever. Only my poor aunt is still uninfected. The youngest is in KK, but my cousin and uncle are in Changi GH, and since we live just down the road from that hospital, we've become the base camp for the family to take turns keeping watch over the two invalids.

Not that they really need us to take care of them. When I went to visit them in the hospital today, it suddenly struck me how un-hospital-like CGH is. It's built like a polytechnic, everything well-planned-out and symetrically designed. And intensely blue, for some reason. I always thought SGH's yellow and brown tones were too jarring, found CGH's blue colour scheme much more soothing. And their wards are more spacious too...Uncle is in a Class C. No TV, no aircon, but not too bad, really. Six people to a partition. The only thing was to tolerate the idiosyncracies of the other patients...like this one that sang in the night, apparently. Ying Hua was supposed to be a Class C too, but they ran out of beds and upgraded her. Heh, her air-conditioned room with personal TVs is like the First Class cabin on airplanes. All in all not too bad, really.

The only thing, of course, is to relieve their boredom. They're not allowed to get out of bed, in case they bump themselves and start hemorrhaging. That, of course, is where books come in, but even a whole day of doing nothing but reading can be too much of a good thing. I think if I were ever hospitalised, books and my sketchbook would be the bare essentials if I were to keep sane. Heh, tomorrow shall bring along cards.

I think the more pertinent question, though, is how everyone else is holding up. The invalids are well taken care of by the hospital staff, but the relatives are rather edgy, I think. And understandably so; to have a whole family suddenly hospitalised is no joke. But still, all that running around and stressing themselves out over the invalids, forcing them to drink this and eat that, can't be very good for health. Especially for poor Aunt, who's had to shuttle between home, CGH and KKH. Heh, it may be that the biggest problem now is not a low platelet count, but how to prevent the family from caring itself to death.

An interesting point to note...the older generation doesn't trust hospital staff very much, I realise. If she had it her way, I think Grandma would hook them up to a continuous IV drip of water or something, the way she was forcing the water into the invalids =P And she'll brew some porridge for them tomorrow. It's interesting how these age-old remedies and the hospital's medicine are superimposed on each other. And who's to say, really, that the hospital people know better what they're doing? It's my Grandma who brought us all up, she has the personal knowledge. Maybe the hospital people are relying on people like Grandma to fill in the gaps where they necessarily cannot have enough information on. Heh, in her strange way, maybe Grandma is supplementing the hospital regime rather than interfering with it. I'm beginning to think that's the case, fusion medicina and all that.

Oh yes, and I discovered a Christian community hospital behind CGH. I wonder why sleepy little Simei needs so many hospitals...

* * * * *

Spent the better part of yesterday out, first with the Guitar people, and then with the 4N people. Ahh...that was a really good day. It was almost like a detoxifying meal. Except it's for the spirit. I guess I've repeated this enough times, so it'll suffice to say that once again, it was good to be reminded what people outside of RJ are like.

Watched A Lot Like Love, and wholly disagree with the ending. The movie wasn't really that bad. But the ending really screwed it up, I think. Wholly predictable. If the two of them had broken up at the end, it would have been a memorable movie. As it is, it was just predictable. Though the movie does give interesting ideas for what to do with your best friends...like drop out of contact for years on end and turn up unexpectedly on their doorsteps armed with amp, guitar and sappy song =P Oh well, I guess my personal stand on the issue tainted my view of it. I categorically believe that, as the tagline goes, a great romance can ruin a perfectly good friendship. Though, as always, I am open to being surprised...

Warning: spoilers ahead!

JY, Conan, Joel, Liang and me then went to watch War of the Worlds. Also not a bad movie. More exciting that the book, I must say =P Must be because it was Spielberg who made the movie. But the strong point was not the portrayal of the aliens, which I thought was rather implausible. Especially what became informally named as the "mutant vagina", that rubbery opening through which people are sucked into the tripods =P And the idea of sucking human blood just to spray it over everything is rather stupid, I think...it's a really inefficient way to Mars-form Earth. The ending too was a bit of a flop, in that they added this bit with patriotic American soldiers taking down a tripod, and they didn't explain that the aliens died from the flu bug.

But the nice bits were the protrayal of sheer human panic. Very realistic, to the extent that what we were scared of was not so much the aliens but the inhumanity of a huge group of people under threat of death. The savagery in the fight over the one working car of the whole town, then the murder of that man in the cellar. All quite poignant moments.

End of spoilers

Anyway, then Liang left and YJ came down to town to join us, and we went food-hunting, because everything was closing when we came out of the cinema. In the end ended up at the Cartel at Cine and was stuffing ourselves with sandwiches and free bread. Heh, started moaning about the amount of essays we have to write in the A's...imagine, if each 3h paper has at least 3 and usually 4 essays, that works up to 9h of lit, 6h of hist, 6h of econs and 6h of math, and altogether about 25 essays. We were hypothesising that we should hold marathon essay write-outs the way people do movie marathons. If we can survive 12h of essay writing, then we can live through anything the A's can throw at us =P

All in all quite a cool day, I guess. It feels good to know that we're going to be together for this last leg still, both the friends in and outside RJ. It's a feeling of security that I predict I'll be drawing on heavily in the months to come. And even though it is a pity that our remaining time can really only be counted in terms of months (2 months left to prelims!), it's sill worthwhile to note that we're going to go through all this together.

pondered by phoenican @ 2.7.05