Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label HUSM

The Green Party?

“For a vegetarian, you seem to have a lot of demands,” I told myself.   I am obviously out of sync with what being vegetarian means these days. At an age when everyone demands rights, I guess it is the same for vegetarians (and vegans, too). Rightly so too. Everyone deserves their place in the sun or rather on Earth, the rich, the economically challenged, the disabled bodies and pretty much everyone else.   From the things that I understood in my impressionable age, by sticking around erudite adults, I assumed that one needs to control his primal desires to be a better soul. By suppressing innate desires to attack, devour and consume fellow members of the animal kingdom, it is believed people would pick up more brownie karmic points in the repeating cycles of rebirth. Hurting the sentiments of their own kind with their uppity attitude does not count.   Of course, some have turned green for health reasons. Perhaps they had a pressing need to care for the environment or jus...

The tale behind the old wound...

HUSM, Kubang Kerian, 1986 Ask any medical student in HUSM Kubang Krian around 1986-88. Invariably, everyone would have learned everything there is to know about fistula-in-ano from one particular patient. He was a chronic long-staying in-patient with an intractable condition used in many surgical medical student final examinations. The chap was so knowledgeable about his condition that he would coach medical students on the correct questions to ask. This patient had quite an engaging story about how he acquired his debilitating condition. He was a peasant in the interiors of Cambodia during the civil war. He was apprehended by the soldiers and underwent unspeakable tortures. Traumatic insertion of blunt objects into his posterior end eventually led to his situation.   A patient is not just a person with a medical condition but the sum of the ups and downs of his existence. Hence, a medical student should never fail to paint a composite picture of his whole being. We knew ...