‘We are led to those who help us most to grow, if we let them, and we help them in return.’ Glinda, Wicked.
“I’m depleted,” I thought as I set the alarm for the last clinic before some unplanned time off, locking the cacophony of angry parents, behaviourally challenged children, and army of borderline forensic teens away for the next three weeks.
“I’m depleted,” I groused as I browsed sullenly, doom-scrolling in my car, still on hospital property – balking at the idea of having to address the litany of socio-emotional reciprocity required in e-mail correspondence sure to guarantee safety from A1 criteria met on the DSM-V.
There are a billion minute irritations on the open wound sustained from the million cuts caused by working for a public system under stress, especially for a mind that absorbed transference like a thirsty sponge.
Being met with anger and despair in so many consults centred around children weighed under by the misfortunes of postcodes, family dynamics, or sometimes just a simple roll of the dice of parental mental health, it is almost impossible not to have anger and despair beat itself into one’s pin-cushioned soul.
So, it was with moderate-to-severe dudgeon that I finally drove away into the holiday I was asked to take, having shown some overt signs of getting crispier around the edges and flirting too closely with burnout.
Fair enough; just look at the actual state of me in this moment. Head on the steering wheel at the red light, wondering how in the world I worked my way from small town Malaysia only to end up away from everything I grew up with, in such a hateful headspace.
I’m in desperate need of an antidote to this horrible sensation of hopelessness; my courage and resolve to practice medicine equitably is shrivelling like the Tinman’s heart.
It was certainly not the first time that my courage quailed within me. I have never been someone who was naturally courageous, having spent most of my childhood hiding my true nature from the small pantheon of altar gods at home, my small tropical school, then on to the bigger world of the universities in two big cities that bought me a ticket out of my home country.
And because the emerald green express has but one stop, I took it all the way to my current state of ruin, in pursuit of purpose. I certainly tried to jump into the soporific poppies on the side of the tracks plenty of times on the way, but here we are, despite best efforts.
Yes, despite best efforts. Not mine, but those of the world that had built itself around me on this brave new road.
Brick by brick, built of courage borrowed from a pantheon of family, friends, that one man in Zimbabwe who pushed me off Victoria Bridge on a bungee when I refused to jump off myself.
Every major leap of faith in my life had been encouraged by the courage I saw in others. From the midwife in Melaka General Hospital smacking my little butt at birth that needed a wee bit of newborn resuscitation, to my grandfather tackling the government forms for me despite not knowing how to spell in English.
Again, in my mother and father raising two children while witnessing both their own parents’ funerals before I was out of kindergarten.
I sowed a small seed of courage as I watched my heroic sister soar with the magical possibilities of choosing to be herself every step of our younger years. We spoke of leaving our country that hated us for different reasons, and like all big sisters do, she paved the way forward and I followed her to Melbourne; learning from her mistakes and triumphs.
I’d also grown up learning that people come into our lives for a reason, bringing things we must learn — 缘分 or yuán fèn, my mother used to call it.
Wisdom and knowledge were divine gifts; a privilege to be grateful for when brought into one’s life. Some lessons were, of course, more painful than others, but no less valuable.
For instance, I learnt that belting out Celine Dion while building Lego simulations of the Titanic was something uncles will punish me for. I learnt the importance of slowing down when the head boy died unexpectedly during A levels. I learnt from a college friend that true passion for medicine could be quelled by a lack of financial and ethnic privilege.
At other times, learning was an absolute joy.
The years spent poring over the medical Grimmerie in Melbourne taught me so much more than the anatomy of the human brain. While the professors taught me how to know, patients and their families taught me how to understand.
In tandem, my new world took shape as it merged with those of my friends. Some taught me how to be patient, some to speak up more, some to listen more intently to the subtle notes of the unsaid, some to be less subtle and just spit it out when among friends.
We hated and loved things, possums and people, gossiped over sticky date pudding, studied the works of Miyazaki, and gambled dumpling money at Crown Casino.
A few short years passed and we were too busy growing our brains to be grateful for all the milestones in training we agonised through. Too much time spent in clinical medicine hollows your chest out if you don’t treat your heart with the care you might not hesitate to give another.
I watched as some of my friends nurtured the love they have with partners, and children in the years to come. I felt in a year travelling with friends what it meant to open our hearts to accept love even for the parts we hated about ourselves. I learnt from mentors who nurtured the love they have for trainees like myself, so unsure of ourselves.
I experienced how a vote of confidence in someone so lacking in natural courage, like myself, saw me return to the tropics to confront more than Darwin’s cyclones and crocodiles.
One of my best friends, of tomato-eating fame, reminds me all the time that the heart of the child in me would swell with pride if he could see the person I am today. I could never be sure about this fact, as I remembered him viewing the world with nothing but cautious hope.
But the person I am today can reassure him with reckless abandon that a few things we’d always hoped for would turn out true. That even though there will be so many times that the anchors of the world weigh heavily on our heart, it would always be buoyed by the constant love we will be surrounded by, and the joy of reciprocating it. Celine and all.
That even as we move in and out of each others’ lives, the good handprints left on our hearts are as important, if not more, than the bad.
Feeling the slightest bit lighter, the light goes from red to green, and I smile again. Three weeks of unplanned leave to share more memories with beloved friends and family might be exactly the ticket.
If my road in this lifetime is to experience the pain of a million cuts, I can surely muster enough courage to trust in the knowledge that those little yellow bricks, gifted with so much love by people along my path, are proof that we are headed somewhere good. Somewhere that I can hope for, that will change me for the better.
Because I knew all of you.
Dr York Xiong Leong is a general paediatrician in Eastern Health, Melbourne, working in public inpatient and community paediatric services, and a medical educator with Monash and Deakin universities. One of the best compliments he has ever received is “Babe you barely live on this planet”.
