Bed and bored in Hotel California
By Yeoh Siew Hoon
Last week, I was offered a chance to play a game I was pretty good at back in school but hadn’t played in a while (read two decades and more) and so I jumped at the chance.
Unfortunately, I jumped too high and landed too hard that I did some injury to my right leg. In denial for two days, I limped about in pain, shrugging it off as a small sprain.
On the third day, reality struck (read highly swollen and bruised leg on which I could no longer limp) and I was taken to an orthopaedic surgeon who took one look at it and said, “It’s a tear of the inner muscle tendon joint blah blah blah. We need to scan it to see how big it is.”
I was then sent to the MRI centre. Now if you haven’t ever experienced one of these wonderful, magical machines that can read the human body like a book, you’re not missing anything.
Firstly, I thought it was a bit of an overkill to subject my whole body to a scan when it was only the lower half of my right leg that needed seeing to. But these machines work on an all or nothing principle – it’s why they cost a lot of money.
Secondly, it can be a bit off-putting being put into this brightly-lit chamber which makes funny whirry noises and goes whoop, whoop whoop every so often.
To cope with it, I called up Alice, my old friend, and imagined myself going through her Wonderland.
The headphones helped. I think the person who put together the music track had a sense of humour. By the time the playlist came to “Hotel California”, I was “thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell” …
To cut a long scan short – 45 minutes of being moved in and out, and about – my tear turned out to be 4cm across and 10cm lengthwise which, means “it’s fairly big so you need surgery”, said the doctor. He then looked at his watch and said, “I can operate this evening.”
I had gone in to see him at 11am, got my results at 4pm and by 5.30pm, was under the knive.
That’s efficiency, Singapore style.
The calf repair operation lasted an hour, so I was told, because I was thankfully unconscious through it. I remember though that the nice-looking doctor who put me to sleep was named Ernest – Ernest loves football and drinks a lot of wine. We were discussing wine when I fell asleep.
The last thing I remember, I was “running for the door, I had to find the passage back, To the place I was before, “Relax,” said the night man, We are programmed to receive, You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
So here I am, sitting up in bed, right leg in cast propped up on cushions, computer on my lap – the only thing I can do productively for the next few weeks or so is write.
Thank heavens my fingers can still do the walking …
Catch more of Yeoh Siew Hoon every week at The Transit Cafe
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