Mask

I intended to pen down our journey rushing back to Temerloh using the alternative route before it became an island and totally inaccessible; which happened last Tuesday, after studying and frequently getting updates on the roads' condition. It was my first experience of brainstorming the routes while weighing between the pros and cons and the safety vs urgency of coming back to the place where I'm currently residing for working from my hometown in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

What used to be an hour and forty minutes drive of 130km road via the highway turned into a 7-hour of 400++km journey via Kuala Pilah-Jempol-Muadzam Shah-Gambang-Maran to Temerloh. 2 cars, 3 drivers including my dad while frequently checking the road access.

The next day, the last leg of the journey had become inaccessible.
But at least Medical Department has another extra 4 physicians to mend the department including clinic, wards, peripheral referrals, covid wards, and on call.

The routes we took on Tueday, 21 Dec 2021

The routes last night, the highway has reopened and water receded in many places already

However, that is not the reason I'm writing today.

Today is one of the days when again I question myself as a physician.
The patient was so young, even less than half of my age. When my colleague passed over the case, we had that 6th instinct telling us this might be a complicated case... and true enough... the quick decisions made while weighing and thinking what's going on, the adrenaline rush while attending the rapidly deteriorating case, the added information that didn't make sense & didn't tally with the previous clinical judgment... you keep on thinking what's going on now and why is this happening?

I am grateful that the same colleague was oncall along with me; she was waiting for the never-arrived patient in critical care unit to do bedside scan and when she called the ward to ask where the patient was and got to know we're resuscitating the same patient, she came up and helped.

It was a while now, me almost breaking down while informing the grim news to the father.
But sometimes in this profession, you just had to put on that mask and wore that hat saying you're okay while delivering the gut-wrenching update in front of a large crowd.

Sometimes it made me feel like a heartless robot.

It was a very painful and difficult decision to call off the on-going resuscitation. But when we made eye-contact, we knew of the prognosis and to keep on going was probably causing more damage... At the back of our minds, what else have we missed?

As you climb up the ladder and you learn more things, you carry more weight.
You give your best maximum capacity and effort and then you pray for the best.

Today, that weight seems a little heavier. 
But you know that whatever happens, you still need to move on and attend to other cases.
So you tuck aside this case at the corner of your mind.

So that when you are all alone and the night has blanketed the world,
You can cry yourself to sleep at the incident and sift through the event to look for any pitfall or weakness on your side.

Rabbiyassir wala tu'assir
"O Allah the Most Merciful and the Most Benovelent, please bless our knowledge so that we become the tool of Your Mercy in serving the humanity regardless of race, creed, and religion"
-prayer taught by our previous lecturer and Dean, Prof Hatta S.