Home With A Tube Up The Nose

Alrighty then.

My dad's out of hospital. He's at home with a feeding tube down his right nostril and a bad shave. The feeding tube is for the liquid diet he has to be on for a while and the bad shave was TTSH nurses' idea of cleaning him up.

He hates the tube and on day one at home he cunningly pulled it out, the whole 40cm of plastic and rubber that was his lifeline. This was about 930pm after we fed him a whole 250ml tin of Glucerna, a liquid meal replacement thats a kcal an millilitre.

Now that's a tagline "A Kcal per ml". I have been thinking that its a good way to lose weight but that would take another blog post and perhaps require defense against supermodels, fitness centres and large people bent on maintaining the status quo.

Upon asking why he did pulled the tube, he replied "There was a snake up my nose." Cute and endearing, That put a funny spin on all the frustrations we were facing looking after an old man. It is terribly tiring looking after the elderly and I have mentioned before that somehow my mother seems to pull through it albeit with a lot of complaining.

The next morning, we called the Home Nursing Foundation to have someone come around and plug in another "snake" down my dad's throat. She came around 10ish and took $50, mostly for the new tube and other nurse-type things she had to do. By the next feeding, the tube was out again. The mittens and restraints were foiled by my daddy's deviousness. The nurse came around and took another $15. I think I'm gonna be broke.

A380 Look See

Last week, I got an email apologising for not including my name in a list to visit the newest, biggest addition to the local airline's fleet, the airbus A380. I was surprised - me, moi, copywriter I? Gets asked to come along to sniff the Airbus air for writing many an EDM? No way! Well way. Woohoo.

So we made our agency asses down to Changi to see the giant aircraft. It is after all, 7 stories high and able to accommodate 555 passengers at its maximum. We did the necessary waiting - to meet our clients, to get security passes, to board the in-house bus, to go through pre-tarmac checks and to board the aerobridge from the side entrance then to enter the plane.

And what a plane. First we saw were the new Suites. They were, well, not my kind of thing. They seemed claustrophobic especially since the partitions make it hard to see around. So I guess I'm not built for superclass, atas beyond atas travel. I scooted past the Suites to the economy seats. They looked like any other economy seats except for the few extra centimeters of legroom and bigger TV screens. OKie dokie. Up the back spiral staircase to the top deck. More economy seats and then the piece de resistance, business class. Nice. The seats were wide enough for Ravi and I to sit in one plush leather seat. There was little corner for my feet and the TV looked huge. Simply put, this would be my pick for travel on this particular A380.

What sort of impressed me were the little accents of greenery and Xmas holly. They added bold yet homely dashes of colour to the interior. Well done.

See all my A380 pixes at my Flickr.

Dogs, Trees and Changes

On Dec 1, I woke up late. I showered and dressed and packed double quick. I flagged a taxi and thought 'Mister taxi driver, I am gonna make you quite happy this Saturday 7am'. "Changi Village, uncle". He took a second look into the rearview mirror, and he stepped on the accelerator. Thus began Pedal Ubin episode 4 of the year.

I was forewarned that there would be girl guides attending. About 50 of them. I prepared for them by having a teh tarik kurang manis and 2 epok-epok, one sardin the other kentang. Ah, the classic Changi breakfast of the people. Having sugar and carbohydrates processing in my tummy, I scooted along to the ferry terminal and lo and behold, young females in bright orange being organised by older members of the species in red t-shirts. Oh dear, were they thinking they would have problems finding themselves in the verdant green of Ubin. "Hey look, there's an orange thing in the jungle. It must be one of us!".

"You going Ubin ah?", asked a ferry operator/driver/brown-skinned uncle.
"Yah", I went.
"One ah?"
"Yah, one."

One the red-attired ones come forward and tell the same ferry man that her troupe of 13 were ready to depart. He waves at me and asks me to join the bright scheme of moving teenagery colours.

As I take my seat aboard the estrogen-swathed vessel, the red-one asks the ferry man in Chinese "How come there is one more person?". He dismisses her as he is more keen on my $2 than her disgust that another man may sit alongside her fair, angelic maiden of community service and knot-tying. Do they do that? Well, I dunno. It was just weird that she was concerned. I was obviously too sensitive.

By the time, we, the Pedallers Ubin or Pedal Ubinners or Jungle Fowls, made it to the basketball, some of the girls recognised the odd man out as me. Anyhow, I wasn't assigned to bring the maidens around. So all was not tense or unnervy.

The ride was ok. We did the Sensory Trail, looped around the old plantations, headed West and up to the former Thai temple and to a might-be-reopened quarry. A lot had changed on the island in the 6 months since I last been. An "official" bike track had opened up near Pulau Ketam and the Thai temple had relocated to the mainland. The latter was an action related to the re-opening of the Kekek/HDB quarry as a result of the granite shortage brought about from the Indonesian embargo. Tsk tsk. The temple was not only an obvious religious entity but an economic one too. Devotees paid for taxi rides to make the few kilometer journey and later ate their fill at the few restaurants. Now who's gonna fill the registers when the holiday season ends? Tsk tsk.

I also found out there was new puppy around, a new viewing area was set up at Pekan quarry that hosts a heronry, and that the boardwalk at Chek Jawa was already receiving visitors. Please don't go and mess it up with trash and pollute intentions with a misplaced longing to get in touch with nature for 20mins before the mozzies come and suck you dry. Think before you act.

At the end of 4 hours plus of cycling and stumbling over my words, we were back at CV having lunch - a satisfying meal of nasi lemak and lime juice. Ah, the calories of joy. Well, that's it then isn't it?

The doggies are still cute and the trees are still around to sway in the breeze. Catch all of them at my Flickr.

When The Time Comes

It's been one-kind of a weekend, the kind that sort of throws things into a unreal plane, where things you don't wanna think about cut left and right, where the weight of the unforseen comes delivered, sign, sealed, ominous and absolute. This is the bit of the blog where I realise I am going on without a story. Simply put, my father is in the hospital right now with a lung infection.

It started out simply. A few coughs and a buildup of phlegm, one could not see beyond the premature inklings of a bad cold. But it got worse and soon his breathing was affected by the mucousy buildup in the lungs. I think we tried something like 2-3 different cough mixtures before I convinced my mother to ring the ambulance. Well, I was loud and abrasive and in a "I told you so" mood. I am not that nice a person in the morning. This was last Friday, the end of November. (My dad is really old by the way, hard of sight and hearing, hence the ambulance).

At Tan Tock Seng, a lung infection was proclaimed with evidence from the a less-than-desirable white-patched X-ray of the chest. By 3pm, he had a room on the 7th floor. The docs, all three of them who endured my father's verbal and physical abuse at being poked and prodded by strangers (he knocked a tray of meds off the bed, and they clattered all over the linoleum floor). It was funny. Then the docs asked my mum and I aside and said that this case of lung infection or pneumonia wasn't easy to cure in a man of extended years and to expect the worst. The words entered my brain and were duly processed, and I remained calm and logical. It wasn't till later that the impact sort of it, and oddly physically too. It was like a heaviness across the chest and a dryness of the throat. 'So this is it' I was thinking. Nothing else really. Not like the millions of flashes one is supposed to get when falling to the death at the end of a bungee rope before the cord reaches the elastic limit and retracts. Not unfathomable but unexpected, I guess the idea that a cold may be the 'killer' was furthest from my mind. I sat in the hard leather seat in the ward and just stared blankly, nodding and mumbling occasionally at my mother's questions and rantings.

I dozed off for a while. I went to pee and wet my dry eyes. OK, bad use of liquids in a descriptive sentence. My mother and I hung around my father as the nurses came and stuck tubes into him, fed him intravenous meds, changed him, fussed about. I left about 930pm while my mother stayed over. When I got home, it felt weird not seeing my dad's room light not on (he's a little afraid of the dark). I guess I was too tired and had Pedal Ubin the next day and knocked out soon after a shower and a quick conversation with God.

I woke an hour late for Ubin. F***. It was the first time I took a taxi to Changi Point, and became $18 poorer for missing the first ring of the clock and the subsequent chain of buses. But richer for the hour of snooze! The Ubin trip deserves another post later but this catharsis is necessarily first.I got to the ward at about 4pm and found my father in a better state of health. The vacuuming-suckups and antibiotics were working and the no-food regimen was helping harden the phelgm. Hip hop hooray.

I spent 9 hours at my father's bedside today. I was adjusting, feeding and entertaining him. He's become more normal (standards differ for each family I am sure). I can only hope the lungs clearer relatively completely by end week.

More importantly, I dunno, I don't think I am ready. I don't think many will be. Though it's got me thinking about the future, of an emptier house, of the lack of demands for attention (mostly for milk) in the middle of the night and the beard I won't have to shave. It's got me thinking about the past, about how I came to realise how smart his man was for someone who didn't go beyond Primary 4 (I'll tell you about the 100 animals for $100 maths problem some other time), about the time I sat on his lap on the single front seat on the noisy 198 bus to Tekka from Jurong, about the time I came home and cried when I broke my front tooth in Primary 5, his pork-curry-rice. Plus so many other things, +++++.

Yeah you can call it a big weekend.