Prayers of a scared boy

The cancer has returned... and I am really scared.
I'm not scared of dying, but I'm so scared that I'm going to keep living a life of uncertainty.

I'm scared of pain.
I'm scared that I will become a burden to the people around me.
I'm scared that I'm not good enough to go to heaven.
I'm scared...

It's so pointless to put on a "brave front". Why? For what?
Who am I trying to impress, and who out there is of so high value that I still need to carry on putting on my masks?

Will the treatment work?
Even after the chemotherapy, will the transplant work?
Even after the transplant, will there be irreversible debilitating conditions?

How am I going to pay for my medical bills?
How do I even go on?

I believe in God.
And I believe in prayer. But these days, I really don't know what to pray for.
To be healed? Does God work that way? Is He a magic genie to come and fulfill the bidding and wishes of those who demand it of Him?
Is it even respectful to do so?

This treatment is going to be make the previous treatment look like a walk in the park.

I don't know how I am going to make it through... I really don't know.

Prologue - Renunciation

There are times in our lives where we turn the pages and begin a new chapter. There are also times when God gently blows upon the pages and turns the pages for us.
We may think we write our own stories, but every stroke we set our pen to merely fills in the template of a wondrous and incomprehensible destiny.
~ Ruminations in the quiet place

"For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. " - God

There are so just so many thoughts I need to pen down, so many feelings bottled up - anger, bewilderment, frustration, fear, and underlying everything, an eclectic mix of peace and happiness

So before I forget everything that led up to this day, I'm going to record as much as I can down in words.

***********

I won't say I'm a workaholic, but I think those who have done projects with me know that when I commit to doing something, I give my all. My inability to let go, and let God - I believe - played a crucial part in bringing me to this point in life.

CS Lewis once mentioned in his book "Mere Christianity" that he perceives Pride as the most heinous and insidious of all the deadly sins. And I'm inclined to believe that it is true. What did I stand to gain from being the best in everything? What did I stand to gain in putting my heart and soul into my work and projects? Was it truly for God? Or was it to inflate some misplaced sense of self-worth, to justify something that wasn't there in the first place?

In the game of life, the tangibles are not as straightforward as we perceive.

I think the clue I missed out was: who will stand by your side when the entire world crumbles around you?

30th May 2018

I've been having fits of hollow coughing, shivering and sweating at night, and a mild fever for quite a number of months now. It was becoming the norm. I mean, what was I going to do? Take MC again? Once every two months was cutting it quite close to the ethical limit I allowed myself. 

So I pushed myself to work - with coughing fits and a fever of 38.2. 

It came to a point during the day when I decided enough is enough, I was running hot and cold, barely able to concentrate on the flickering screen or call customers. I told my colleagues I'm grabbing a two hours off and rushed to see a doctor.

38.7 degrees, 5pm. And you know what was my greatest fear while waiting for the doctor? - That the doctor would think that I "chao keng". Yeah, I know.. wtfbrain. But I had a reason for thinking that. My bedside cabinet was filled with medicine because I have been going to see the doctor on Saturdays to ask for more and more medicine that didn't seem to work at all. The cough was getting worse; the fever, well - a combination of Dhasedyl, Dexcophan and Actifed would easily knock any discomforts out of you - along with you.  

Mr. Doctor gave me some more cough syrup and paracetamol and sent me home to rest with a ONE DAY MC. I mean, in my opinion, a one day MC basically means that the doctor thinks that you are wasting his time.

So yeah! I had about 30 hours to recover. - Decided to do something about it, and went home to knock myself out, hoping to recover with "much bed rest", as the old folks like to prescribe.

39.1 degrees, 10pm. Woke up shivering more than ever. Mum was far far away in Cameron Highlands drinking BOH Tea, so I messaged a few close friends for advice. Of course, in the banking industry, we must have "maker-checker" (right?). Someone proposes, and another checks if it is the right selection. 

Stupidity max, especially when it comes to life and death issues. 

Anyway, my checker was, guess who? (or rather, guess what?)... surprise! Facebook!

Word of caution to those who post queries on Facebook. No matter how serious your situation is, take all the comments with a pinch of salt.

My next course of action was.... to get checked into A&E. 

Because, yeah, it took me 1 hour to realize that 39.5 was a brain frying temperature. You can't blame me - the fats in my amygdala was gently being pan seared.

After being in triage for almost an hour, I finally got to see the doctor. Yay.

Mr. Hospital Doctor said that (just to be sure) he wanted me to do a chest x-ray to ensure that my previous spontaneous pneumothorax operation wasn't giving me any complications.

I have to say Mr. HD was quite an enlightened fellah. 

But seriously, for the second time in my frigging life, (the first being the pneumothorax), I saw Mr. HD's eyes widen when he saw the x-ray scans. By this time, my spidey sense was attuned enough to know that something wasn't very right.

Mr. HD sent me to critical care and after drawing a copious amount of my blood in multiple vials, whisked me off to the ward. 

Yay. Hospital. Bed. Again. 

The scene was getting all to familiar. 

Nurse asking what you want to eat;

IV drip injecting freezing cold saline into your blood;

Nurse trying to molest your biceps to get blood pressure (I'm kidding);

And for the strangest of reasons, a pee pot. 

It was like they knew I was going to be incapacitated before hand and were preparing me for it. 

That is absolutely terrible bedside manners.

*******

31st May 2018

Again, the huge crowd of medical students surrounding me. 

Like what? It's just a normal fever right? 

The best part is they ask you if you are okay to take questions, and the students expression are like... aww... okay. Wtfbrain. 

The doctor in charge came shortly after to brief me on what they suspected:

- the X-Ray revealed a >10cm growth mass in my chest, large enough to cover the heart.

- the X-Ray contradicted a scan I did in December 25th 2017, where there was nothing.

- they concluded that the growth must have occurred within a few months.

- they are investigating some protein strands in my blood and need to do a Cardiothorexic Biopsy to determine what was that growth.

A close family friend who was an extremely high ranking and experienced surgeon also helped to review my case and suggested that it was one of two types of contraindications. 

None of which were good. 

Pessimism in the Fifth Degree

I often get the comment: "Hey, you're a really pessimistic person; why are you so hard on yourself?".

Which, in a sense, is an extremely true reflection of my usual, perpetual gloomy outlook on life.

Why would someone look at the half empty glass when they can easily view it as half full?

This governing personality of my life has led me to shape many decisions in my life, both for the better and for worse. In fact, some of the most dramatic decisions in my life were made, having this mindset.

It actually boils down to the concept of living every single day as though it is a gift that you actually never deserved.

To receive every single boon without the hope of expecting more in the future, and the joy of receiving something you never expected to get.

Life is a series of ups and downs, but for the optimistic person, without resilience, life can be a painful series of imaginary ups and hard hitting downs.

To be optimistic without having resilience is one of the most cruel personality combination that can be bestowed upon an individual. On one hand, he perpetually believes that life is going to be awesome, yet on the other hand, life perpetually hands him underhanded blows.

Diametrically opposite would stand the pessimistic person, without resilience (for argument's sake). This person runs through life expecting the worst, and when you perpetually expect the worst, more often than not, life, by standard deviation would give you something markedly better.

Today, I finally managed to eat at the Pokemon Cafe that I wanted to go to for such a long time.

As a pessimistic person, I naturally believed that, given the long queues, it would be impossible for me to find time to go.

Upon stumbling upon the cafe, and realizing that the queue at the cafe was a manageable 5-6 people, it was enough to lift my spirits up and make me really happy for the moment. Better, having absolutely no expectation of the quality of the food, I found that I could focus my glee at the extremely cute designs of the dish itself.

Ironically, my "expertise" in this field of pessimism, combined with a resilience borne of countless failures in life has led me to expect nothing and find joy in everything.

At work, it becomes easy for me to take pleasure in the simple things, like solving a difficult loan calculation, or getting a simple, unexpected, compliment from a customer for going the extra mile. Having a pessimistic outlook on human reactions also leads me to be extremely cautious in my dealings with people - always according respect first, before extending friendship, and finally kinship. This methodology, while not the trait of choleric socialites, has helped me to navigate through some of the toughest relational situations in my life.

That's not to say it doesn't come with its downside (as some would gleefully point out to me).

Pessimism drives my perspective of the future. - While I would not say that I am a very enterprising person, it has prevented me from taking risks that "might" have taken me much further in life.

An example is the offer from a big investor in 2014 to help me open up a cafe / F&B related business. Naturally, I rejected that person, given that I did not believe that I had the capabilities to, and I had a stark outlook on the F&B industry in Singapore. Dejected, he redirected his funds to another cafe and that cafe seems to be doing fairly well. 

Nonetheless, even if I am offered such a boon today, I would likely still say no.

This hyper-pessimistic outlook has reached to such a point when I close my inward eyes toward the future and find myself living the "today" much more than the "tomorrow" or moping about the "past". 

Being happy with the simplest things helps me to be happy and at peace with everything.

Now, where is God in the equation?

To me, God is the source of all blessings. And to find blessings in the smallest of things help you find God in everything.

To see the smile on the cardboard box carrying aunty when you give her your breakfast (even though she would most likely throw it away... - see? pessimism), is to see God smiling back at you. 

To see the cool rain in the morning warms my heart, because I know that there is a high chance tons of people will be late at office, and I probably wouldn't need to rush so much.

To get a small snack from my boss after a hard morning of work becomes an unexpected blessing, because you know that even if it might be the stuff that he or she doesn't want to eat and passes to you, at the very least, you are in their mind.

In a sense, at the very end of my life, to know that you live your life expecting nothing but, in reality gaining everything, is my form of contentment.

Am I happy? - Yes. I am.

But am I pessimistic as well?.....

... You actually read to the end? 

Well done. Thanks. =)

A Personality Quiz (After so many years)

I'm not sure how true this personality test is, but this is my result (I promise I'm not lying):

1) The cube I envisioned fit snugly into my palm, it was slightly smaller than a rubik cube, made of a a smooth, opaque, plastic-like material, and was lying on the sand.

2) The ladder was about a feet away from the cube, and was standing by itself. It was made of a glassy, transparent, crystalline structure.

3) The horse was unbridled, not wild, but without stirrups, harness or any equipment

4) Surprisingly, I saw as many flowers carpeting the desert as far as the eye can see, but within at least a hundred meters radius of me, it was just sand. Weird, given that I never thought I'd make a good father, and with my current situation, it seems all the more unlikely that I will ever have any.

5) As for the storm, it was raining, quite heavily around me, there was thunder, but no lightning, and I wasn't even slightly afraid of it at all. In fact, I was enjoying the downpour, like so many times when I was a kid.

There it is, my... umm... uncensored personality?

The End of the Road

It's funny, when you are given a certain expected time span to live that is seemingly shorter than everybody else's - when you suddenly start to treasure life a lot more.

Knowing my diagnosis drastically altered my priorities and goals in life. 

It had the effect of throwing my entire life into disarray and centering me back on that desperate singularity that all men must meet one day.

Death.

So often, we are caught up in the hustle and bustle of life, that we forget that regardless if we are given 7 weeks, 7 months or 77 years, we must all meet the inevitable end that is inescapable from birth.

Success to me meant so many different things at different stages of my life. 

When I was a kid in primary school, I wanted to be accepted. I would do everything I could do gain a form of "acceptance". It wavered between attempting to get good academic results, and subsequently, failing to do so, I decided to join the group that gave me the attention I wanted. I would cheat, I would fabricate fantastical out-of-this-world stories that inflated a false sense of pride within myself. I lost some great friends when they realized I was heading down that dark path. Nonetheless, my ego was worth more to me compared to anything else.

When I was in secondary school, I was introduced to a whole new, different world. It was a world where rules were meant to be broken, and to escape the consequences of breaking them meant that you were one up.

These were the darkest years of my life. Leading a double, sometimes triple existence, I would - on one hand - act the good kid in school, the loyal friend to my peers, but when the night fell, a different mask would be placed over my apparently bespoke personality.

Success to me, then was to be admired by people. Being badly scarred by acne, not even averagely "sporty" by any standards, not doing well academically, it was easy to fall prey to the desperate cravings of ego. I only had one marketable point in society - and that was my youth. And if I were an entrepreneur by today's standard, I would be a millionaire. Clubbing, pubbing, drinking and... basically everything that should not be done by a kid of 13-15 years old.

I was living a high life. Cash was not a problem, social standing was not a problem. I had more than what any kid needed or wanted.

That was until I encountered death to my face. It scared me witless. But yet, it was that which scarred me so deeply I could not even look back at my past.

[Coincidentally, that was also when I destroyed my previous blog, and restarted with this.]

I had to find a sense of purpose. 

But first, I had to alter my definition of success. 

By the time I was in polytechnic, success had become somewhat of a puritan virtue - to do well in whatever field you are placed in, for the glory of God. 

I worked hard, I studied hard and if there was anything negative that people would have said about me, it would never have been that I was lazy. 

Success in that context reshaped my life, with the blind belief that as long as I worked hard, my life will be well.

The following years were series after series of chapters that proved the above point so very wrong.

Polytechnic life ended and Army life begin.

I forced myself to that puritan mould and pushed my physical boundaries to it's limits, and yet, at the most critical moment, something would go wrong - again. In the army, it was enough to relegate me to 9 months of being in a temporary Pes D status, while they figured out what was wrong with my body. Nonetheless, again, I was proven that it doesn't matter how hard you strive - if life wishes to throw a spanner in your face, it will do it, and hard.

Success was becoming somewhat of an unreachable goal then.

I decided to give one more push at trying to be "successful". And decided that hey, why not try to change the world for the better? 

What better way to reach out to the world then through media? 

Thereafter, my stint in Mediacorp ensued. It was tough. Very tough. It made Army seem like a holiday chalet. The working hours regularly crossed over a hundred hours a week, with no end in sight for projects after projects.

Burnt out became as real to me as my gastric and dark eye-rings. 

But the last straw came when I found out, to my horror, that the diploma path and the degree path were vastly different. And the camel's back broke when I realized that despite me wanting to change the world through media, ultimately, the silver screen shows what the people want to see. The law of economics drives the media engine.

I decided to take a leap of faith and consume all my life's savings at one go for one more grasp at getting a degree (prior to that NTU and NUS rejected me - a double dip holder with and agg of 3.6). 

I was accepted instantly into QUT in Australia with a drastically shortened time span to get a degree within 1.5 years.

Success to me then was making the best use of my time, to experience as much as I could, to learn as much as I could and fling open the door as wide as possible to every window of opportunity that could arise. 

It was also during that time when my perception of faith and the material world drastically changed. 

This time round, life didn't throw a spanner at my face. 

However, it did emphasize the over-pertinent point that you can never be prepared enough for what was to come next.

Success - at that point of time, again, was to grab any window of opportunity.

And the window came when I was given the opportunity to do a U-turn into the Financial sector. Without a moment's hesitation, I grabbed at that opportunity.

Twelve CMFAS examinations in 2 months. 

From a person who had absolutely NO knowledge in finance, to a full-fledged banker.

Stocks, options, structured products, insurance, financial regulations, technical analysis. It was a do-or-die. And I knew that this window would probably open only once. 

Success was when I received my RIN Code as a banker in DBS.

Or so I thought. 

I was successful, in contrast to my peers, many who were still slogging through university, or seemingly trudging through the tough media-mud.

Or so I thought.

Until an elderly man came into my office and set down in front of my desk and broke down. He was in his early 80s, and a blue collared worker (I assumed). He asked me to explain in detail why he lost so much money in a product that he bought quite some time back. He invested a sizable amount of his savings into this "basket" of products and without an exception, every one lost a huge amount of money. The word "principle protected" had a very different definition at that point of time.

Long story short, I was so traumatized by that incident I decided to quit sales completely. Because I understood the pressure that the banker was probably under to close the sales, and yet I fully empathized with the lost of this old man's (almost entire) retirement savings.

I took MC the next day and I just laid in bed. 

Was the banker successful? Was the old man just "unlucky"?

What vicious form of success was this that had to be built on the bones of others?

I quit a high-flying job and decided to "relegate" myself to a role of a service RM.

To this day, I believe that my decision to leave was correct. 

To stay in that role would have altered my perception of what was good and right, muted my empathy for suffering in place of more sales, and worst of all, it would severely scar my moral conscious and compass. 

There was a need for another definition of success.

Being an ARM at my current workplace is no bed of roses either. Getting ticked off by customers for things entirely out of our control, and likewise, managing the expectations of the bankers that we work for.

Success was making your workplace a happy one. Or so I believed. 

Make your customers happy, make your colleagues happy, make your boss happy.

There is a saying, "when the going gets tough, the tough gets going". The person obviously didn't meet a wall in his life.

Trying to make everybody happy was a huge mistake. I placed so much pressure on myself that it became nightmarish. I could not disappoint. I must not disappoint. If I have to stay back and work extra hours to complete a task to see the smile on my colleagues' / bosses' face the next day, I would do it.

In a meritocratic society, the flaw with this mindset is: "hey, this person thrives under pressure, let's up the ante." without realizing that he is at his breaking point.

And there was it.

My body decided enough was enough, and literally, collapsed.

Two serious hospitalizations in less than 6 months, with bills amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. (Thank God for insurance). 

The toll that my definition for success took was a price that could not be measured in monetary value. - my health. And not anecdotally. 

My health literally failed me.

And with that, my life.

The doctor told me that I had weeks. And I could make the best use of my time to do what I wanted to do instead.

The hammer fell. And it fell so hard that I went into depression.

How do I tell my parents? 

How do I tell my family and loved ones?

Will I be a burden to them?

Will my parents have to "send off" their child soon?

It just couldn't be true.

The "price" was just too high!
It wasn't fair!

My heart sank so deep that I thought I would never recover again.

But in the deepest darkest, the smallest ray of light provides the brightest, most steadfast hope.

My God.

My Lord beyond the blue.

Success was never about me, or was it about people around me, or even changing the world.

Success was never relevant in the first place.

The ultimate reality that all men must face is death. The inevitable, inescapable conclusion of all humanity is death.

So what have I been striving for?

Success, for me, was bought on the cross. 

And it did not matter one bit how well I did in life, or how the world thought I was or how happy I made the people around me. 

At the very end, to simply hold on to His hand, is enough.

And to know that since the beginning, He has never let go of mine.

When I finish walking through the valley of death, He will be there.

When I am done with the struggles of my ailing body, He will meet me at the place where there is no pain, no sickness, and He will wipe away the last vestige of tears from my face with the same hand that brought me to Him.

That peace, that joy and hope that is in me, must now take the forefront.

Every day I live is borrowed time, and every single moment, I must live with the peace that, should today my Lord chooses to bring me home, I will go smiling.

And when that day comes, I will shout it from the mountaintops, from the highest heavens with every fibre of my being. "Yes, I am successful, because of my Saviour!"

"For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently." ~ Romans 8: 24-25

Somehow, watching heartbreaking, heart-wrenching soap operas seems to have a soothing effect on me.
Perhaps it's because I guess... Their pain is probably worse off.

Zet-Tai, Kare ishi.
Perhaps I'd make the worst partner in the world after all.

Don't attempt to get too close to me without my permission. I bite.