For the 3rd day in a row, I drink my breakfast. I’m actually sampling meal-replacement drinks, you see. Today’s is strawberry-flavoured, and I do not approve. It tastes fake.

I eat a whole bunch of medicines and head out to the hospital. At 7.45am in the morning. This is a time when I’m usually asleep! It’s so hard to get a cab I resort to calling. The booking fee, plus the morning peak hour surcharge, adds another 6 bucks to the $9 taxi fare. Bah.

I head into the nice new Kent Ridge Wing, and up to Level 8, where they promptly call me for my blood test. This time I get a nice Filipino nurse. I ask if she could use a smaller needle, and she says “Sure!” Yay. My left arm is still bruised, so she moves the tray over to my right. The combination of a smaller needle and larger vein (because, as I tell her, I am right-handed) means much less pain for me. She’s so kind, she asks if I would like to be told when she’s going to insert the needle. Might as well, rather than working myself up into a frenzy wondering when the pain will hit.

“Inhale, exhale,” she tells me, and I feel the prick between the two words. As she repeats her instructions, I feel the needle going in deeper. Sometimes I think that’s even worse than the prick itself. No, it’s definitely worse. *brrrr* My fingers start going pins-and-needles, which as usual distracts me from the actual needle, then she pulls the tourniquet and I sigh in relief. Needle comes out, and I look at it before she puts it into the sharps box. “Yeah, definitely smaller than the last time,” I confirm. I thank her (sincerely) and go back outside to wait.

This time I press the plaster for a good half-hour or so. From Level 8, down to Level 3 where I have my X-ray taken. I forget to take off my watch, which has an aluminium body and stainless steel band. Immediately after the X-ray, I feel a peculiar buzzing from my wrist area. The metal of the watch must have picked up some radiation or something. Eeeep. Well at least I haven’t been blasted into bits or turned blue or green or whatever.

Now all I have to do is wait for the doctor to turn up. When he finally does, around 10.40am, I am the first one to be called. But of course, my appointment was for 10.20am after all.

He calls up my X-ray and confirms that the tumour has indeed shrunk. I tell him about my mouth sores and he examines it. Twice. Then he tells me it’s herpes simplex, a.k.a. my good friend the cold sore virus. I think to myself that it’s a pity I can’t put Zovirax on the sore. He prescribes me another antiviral since my acyclovir isn’t doing the job. Now, I can choose to take 2 tablets 5 times a day, for a total of 10 tablets, or I can have a very expensive tablet that’s only 2 tablets twice a day. This isn’t my call to make, it’s my mother’s, and she opts for the expensive one. How expensive? One week’s supply costs $151. Yep. Each pill costs about 5 bucks, each dose is 10 bucks, each day I swallow 20 dollars’ worth of antivirals. Dammit I want to be a pharmaceutical heiress.

I ask the doctor about the staging of my disease. He says that the throat lymph nodes are big and count as more than one, so I’m stage 2. Okay, good enough. As long as they haven’t spread. The spleen is the next thing to check, but that’s below the diaphragm which would be Stage 3, so my spleen is clean.

Then comes the funny bit. He checks his journal article (looks like one to me, anyway) and says that he’s going to increase my chemo dosage for round 2. Reason? My blood count hasn’t dropped, so he can turn up the dosage. I don’t know if blood count is meant to indicate how well I’m taking it, or whether it also means ‘lower blood count = fewer tumour cells’. Either way, my blood count didn’t drop, so let’s “maximize the dosage”, that’s what he said. I think, I can’t remember too good. *durrrrr*

So apparently I am too healthy, and they want to pump more cell-killing drugs into my body, which is made up of cells. OMG it’s like they’re trying to kill me! Sounds funny when you take it out of context. Anyway let’s see how I respond to round 2 with its increased dosage – maybe I won’t be as chipper this time around, who knows?

He asked me what kind of room I wanted, so I asked for a single-bedder. I’m going to be warded in Kent Ridge Wing 2, the new wing, instead of where I was previously. I no longer need the High-Dependency ward, so I can stay in the general ward attached to the Cancer Centre. At B1 and above, subsidies make no difference since it’s all private pricing, so I might as well take the single-bedder.

We go up and down the building several times to settle the admission paperwork, then down to the pharmacy to buy dressings for my chest wound, where I take note of the variety of sweets available so I can ask people to buy it for me. I have an average lunch of chicken congee at the Kopitiam, then back upstairs to pick up my amended Admission Financial Counselling form (the overworked staff member put the wrong date on it).

Taxi fare back is much cheaper, only $7.40. The bedroom is empty, because the boyfriend is in the shower. I leave the room and return in a few minutes, surprising a wet and naked person who yelps, wraps himself in a towel, and asks “When did you get back?”

“I never left,” I reply. “I could have been hiding under the bed! Or in the mouse tank!”

“You can’t have been in the mouse tank, because I checked on them and fed them.”

If you don’t see what the “obvious, logical” answer should have been, you probably have no idea how big mouse tanks are, then. How big are they? Enough to fit 3 mouse soldiers and 1 mouse officer! HA HAHAHAAAAAAA *laughs maniacally at own joke*

Oh yeah while waiting for the doctor, Ellen DeGeneres was on the TV, interviewing Nick Carter about how he lost 60 pounds. Hoo yeah I remember what a butterball he used to be! Not that I cared how he lost it. I was looking at his face on the screen, thinking “I could use him as a character model for Draco Malfoy!” Nick Carter isn’t terribly recognisable, you see. But he is blonde, and all I need to do is pointify him a bit and ta-da! Draco Malfoy. No I am not an artist I am merely someone who draws ugly pictures.

We decide to have a late dinner, and that’s fine with me because I pigged out on prawn rolls and don’t really have the stomach for an early dinner. So I take a nap. When I wake up, my rice vermicelli is ready to be slurped down.

Post-dinner, I watch an episode of House where the poor patient gets BOTH a lumbar puncture and a bone marrow biopsy. When Wilson and the syringe appear onscreen, I pause and show the boyfriend how FRAKKIN’ HUGE the syringe was. They didn’t show the needle, but they did for the lumbar puncture. *faints* Oh yeah, Wilson did the bone marrow biopsy because it’s an oncological procedure, and he’s an oncologist.

I finish the rest of the prawn rolls and have some Ruffles to round them off. Surprisingly enough, crunchy foods are easy to eat because they just disintegrate when bitten, they don’t need molar involvement at all. Pity there isn’t such a thing as a nutritionally complete potato chip…

Oh look! They put my phrase on a woot! shirt! Well technically it’s a Disapproving Bunnies phrase, but whatever.

Again, I drink my breakfast. It’s actually very pleasant-tasting, and I am surprised because I don’t usually like vanilla-flavoured things.

I sit on the couch and read trivia until it is time for lunch. My mum has made macaroni, which I can just about bite and swallow. Then I take a nap. When I wake up, the boyfriend SMSes to say he is on the way back. Hooray, companionship!

We spend the afternoon on our respective computers. He is playing his FPS again, and I am reading the Something Awful forums. It’s such a slow news day that I am reduced to reading UK tabloids online. They’re ridiculously rubbish, and are a very revealing look at a people who have pretty much ceased to care about anything beyond football, sex, the lottery, and their TV shows like Coronation Street and Big Brother. Of course, you do know that in England especially, the paper you read says a lot about the kind of person you are. Just as I’d never be a habitual New Paper reader, if I were English I wouldn’t touch the redtop tabloids at all.

Dinner is porridge with a fried white pomfret (yummy) and spinach. Then the boyfriend and I take a walk to the Esso station across the street to mail off my Little Britain DVD, and put papers in the recycling bin. On the way back we stop by our mailbox to get the mail. There is a shiny silver envelope for me, hooray!

It is a card from my sister. Apparently in Australia, they do not use postage stamps. I am somewhat bemused by this. One of my students SMSes from Malaysia, where he is on a school trip, to “check on me”. I tell him that I’m not about to drop dead suddenly, so I don’t need any “checking up” on. He’s a sweet kid, but really, I am not in mortal danger so if that is your concern, please to be filing it away in the ‘unnecessary’ section of your brain.

I don’t know if it’s because cancer changes your view of mortality (though it hasn’t changed mine), or because I’m just generally a grumpy person, but I seem to want to hammer into everyone’s head that “cancer patient” is not the same as “on deathbed”. There is no need to constantly check on me and ask me how I am. If you ask the same question every day, you will get the same answer every day, because I FEEL THE SAME WAY. Soon I am going to develop a cookie-cutter answer: “still alive”.

If you wanted details, here is this blog, to give you totally unnecessary details about what I eat and how I feel and how my bypass scar itches a bit and how sometimes my chest wound, no not the 2 little holes but the long one, sometimes twinges inexplicably. I cannot be expected to repeat all these over email and MSN and SMS to several different people, every day.

Granted, no one has yet been guilty of annoying me on consecutive days. I can totally understand wanting a status update every few days. But imagine, if everyone takes turns asking me every few days, I am still being bothered every day!

The only people I make exceptions for are those who don’t know about this blog, simply because I haven’t told them. People like my students’ parents (OMG I am so TOTALLY keeping them AWAY from this blog), or some of my relatives who just don’t do the Internet, or even people like my kid who’s Internet-deprived at the moment because he is on a school trip. They can’t read this blog, and I understand. But for those of you who do read this blog, rest assured that this will always be the most current and best source of details. Forget twitter and its 140-character limit, if you ask me how I am on MSN and SMS and you don’t qualify for the above exceptions, I will have to practice 20-character limitations.

No, having cancer didn’t make me a bitch. I’ve always been a bitch, duh. I’m just much, MUCH less inclined to waste time doing repetitive small talk nowadays. Oh, and please note: I greatly detest Facebook Chat, and think nothing of logging out without a word of warning, simply because I log into Facebook to update my stuff, which takes at most 5 minutes. This usage pattern is not conducive to chats.

Bottom line: I appreciate all the kind wishes and support, but imagine having several different people ask you the same question day in, day out, and I hope you can see my exasperation. So, don’t ask. Tell. Tell me a joke, or how your teacher picked on you in school, or tell me to do my job. Please, please don’t ask me how I am. Because I feel obligated to answer just so you won’t think I’m actually dead.

(Look! I proposed a solution to my problem instead of just whinging about it! I am not a part of the precipitate! *clap clap*)

Okay now I have to go cut my overgrown fingernails so they won’t scratch or tear my cornea when I put in my contact lenses tomorrow. I’m going out to the hospital, and going out means must wear contacts! Yes I am vain, but I learned from the best. My mother asked me last week why I didn’t wear a “nice bra”, instead of letting the surgeon see my ratty old bra. Um, it’d be kind of creepy if he actually cared, but I guess it’s the same principle as wearing clean underwear just in case you’re in an accident.

There is a voucher for a free McMuffin in the newspaper. I can’t eat it, but I know someone who can. Someone whom I must prod awake at 10am if we are to take advantage of this offer.

Breakfast for me is a packet of Ensure. It’s a meal-replacement drink, one of the free samples the dietitian gave. It’s not too bad, it doesn’t taste awful, at least. There is nothing of great interest in the paper. Besides the fact that I am personally opposed to giving SPH good money for a mediocre paper, 80 cents for a whole lot of nothing is, well, daylight robbery. But my mother finds comfort in reading a daily paper, so I leave her to it. Perhaps it’s just because the only time I have a regular daily paper is when I’m back home in KL, and everyone knows there is PLENTY of news to report on in Malaysia. So maybe I should just be happy that the paper is uninteresting, it means things are peaceful and quiet here. Ahem.

The boyfriend wakes up at 10.05am and is soon ready to head out. I put on my cap to hide my pimply face, and we go to McDonalds. Then he finds out that I’ve already had breakfast, and complains that I made him walk out for breakfast. But it was free! And you had a very nice $1 cup of coffee to go with it, too! He admits that it’s better than 3-in-1 coffee. Besides, he was under my mother’s orders to take me for a walk, so here he is, being obedient.

After breakfast we go to Guardian, where I pick up a digital thermometer to replace the free one I got from hall, back when we had dengue frenzy. The hall office gave us those thermometers free of charge, so that we could be responsible undergrads and use them to check our temperatures and prevent dengue from spreading. I hardly ever used it, and now the battery’s dead and I have no way of replacing it. Rubbish thermometer.

While at Guardian, the boyfriend picks up new rechargable batteries for his bike headlights. The no-brand batteries that were supplied lasted 3 months, which isn’t too bad, I suppose. After he replaced the batteries, I blinded myself by shining the beam at my face, then yelled that I couldn’t turn it off. I could only toggle the mode between a steady beam and blinky mode. Turns out you have to hold down the button. Heh.

I have had my exercise for the day, so no one bugs me about it any more for the rest of the day. Which is just as well, because my healed-up chest scar twinges in a funny way. I am perplexed. It’s supposed to be all okay!

Lunch is rice vermicelli, or as locals call it, mee sua. I slurp it all down, then sit on the bed for the rest of the afternoon, reading. The boyfriend’s random manic yells as he plays a free FPS game sort of disturbs the gentle, romantic mood I am trying to get into with my Draco/Ginny fanfic (stop judging me). I am already more than halfway through the fic, so it’s not a surprise when I reach the climax of the plot. I read the epilogue around dinnertime, as I slurp down fish porridge. *sniffle* I love a good love story!

At the late end of the dinner spectrum, my mother suggests going down Cheong Chin Nam Road for dinner, and tries to entice me along. I protest vehemently, saying that I’ve already had my walk, plus there are lots of people there, people who might cough at me and then I’ll die. Yes, I am being overdramatic, how could you tell?

Today as we walked to Guardian, I told the boyfriend that not playing sports kept me out of the emergency room for close to 19 years. I have only ever been in Emergency once before this, and that was for the accident that resulted in my eyebrow scar. Now, not only is my “never been hospitalized” record broken, so are my “never had a major illness” and “never been in surgery” records. Sigh. One trip to the emergency room, and suddenly I’m in hospital, I undergo surgery, I end up in ICU, and oh! I have cancer. And as the boyfriend pointed out, I got all this by doing nothing, as well. Ye-es, but I reduced my risk, see!

Oh, and did you see today’s page 3 of the Straits Times main paper? Man rushing across PIE got hit, causing motorcyclist to DIE! OMG how horrible! It’s bad enough he was jaywalking ACROSS THE FREAKING EXPRESSWAY, but he got hit. That one never mind, his own pasal. But a perfectly innocent man, probably with a family to support, DIED as a result of his “rash act”. Very the sad leh. This kind of thing doesn’t have to happen, you know. It’s just so bloody stupid and pointless. See, more proof that the world tends towards chaos and entropy.

My hair is starting to drop out as well. Well, not on its own, but it definitely has a much more tenuous grip on my scalp now. When I do my routine culling of curly hairs, a straight hair will get pulled out as well. More hair falls out now when I shampoo. So basically, as long as I don’t pull on it, it won’t fall out… time to stop the culling sessions, then.

Timestamps changed to reflect dates covered.

So I fell asleep while the porridge cooked, the water boiled away, and the resulting goop burned, leaving a charred mess. I don’t want to cook anymore. I leave the pot for the boyfriend to soak and my mum to clean up and cook me a new batch. She went out for a while, which is why I was left to supervise the porridge instead.

On any other day, it would probably have been fine. But today, I’m feeling unusually tired. All I want to do is sit somewhere comfortable and close my eyes. My entire body aches in a vague but tiring way. After lunch, I sit on the floor in our adjustable chair, which my dad brought down from KL. I put my legs up on the beanbag and sleep.

I go into my room, lie down for a while – and doze off. My mum comes in to tell me to do my stretching exercises. I do the first 2 poses of the sun salutation – and tell my boyfriend I am too tired to continue.

I am not, however, too tired to turn on the computer and see what the heck is wrong with me. It’s definitely a side effect of the chemo, since my bone marrow is clean. Chemo makes your blood count drop. Apparently it’s not just the white blood cells that are affected, the red ones are too. So I probably have a lack of erythrocytes in my system, leading to fatigue. Makes sense, after all my mother is anaemic and it can be inherited. More likely, being in constant pain is tiring.

I lie on the bed and cover myself up with a blanket. The aircon has been turned off, because I complained about the cold getting to my bare legs. I have a hoodie for my upper body, but my only pair of sweatpants are at home in KL and I don’t like feeling cold. I hug a pillow to my chest. When I wake up in a bit, I am sweating. Apparently I have over-insulated myself.

My mum and the boyfriend hover over me, pressing their palms to my forehead. They say I’m burning up. Their hands are nice and cool against my face. Later my boyfriend massages my feet, and his hands feel cool too. He says I feel very warm. But I don’t feel feverish, not the way I usually do. I’m just very, very tired.

I think about going through life, feeling always this tired. No wonder Chronic Fatigue Syndrome exists. It must be horrible, to always feel like you’re two steps away from exhaustion. It’s an extra-frightening thought to me, the person renowned for her extremely high energy levels. Without my energy, I’d be like a ciplak, counterfeit version of myself.

Dinner is a can of Campbell’s minestrone soup. I eat all of it. It’s a biiiiit too salty for my liking, but everything in it is soft and can be crushed between tongue and palate. Later the boyfriend blends me a pear. Since I can’t bite, everything solid that I want to eat has to take the “Will It Blend?” test. I drink about 2/3rds of  it, and leave the rest for him. He doesn’t attend to it immediately, which means he has to slurp down a slightly browned drink later.

It’s time for my dad to leave, and he punches me in the arm while telling me to exercise. Typical dad. I shower and the boyfriend helps me to blow-dry my hair, and later I do the same for him. He says I haven’t done anything the whole day, which is true.

All I want to do is sleep, but before I do, I tie my scarf around my head the way people with toothaches do in cartoons. I don’t have a toothache, but I do want to keep myself from biting the sore spot in my mouth. Plus, this way, I ensure my mouth doesn’t fall open while I sleep. If I’m sleeping on my back, this means a dry mouth, and if I’m on my side, this means waking up to a copious amount of drool on my face. Neither are very nice propositions.

Today, only one thing matters: Sleep.

Now I know why Dr House is such a cranky person. You’d be cranky too if you were in near-constant pain. Granted, my pain level is nowhere near his, but that also means that I don’t take painkillers to numb myself, while he does.

I have mouth sores. I don’t think they’re ulcers, they lack the sharp pain of ulcers, but they are in my mouth, they rub against my teeth, and they hurt. All the time. Even when I sleep. I’ll be sleeping peacefully, then I’m awoken by a sharp pain because I bit on the sore part while I slept. It sucks.

When I’m awake, this means no chewing. I can’t bite at all, not because my teeth are weak or anything, but because I can’t make contact between the two dental surfaces without irritating the sores again. I’ve gone on a liquid diet after lunch turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. Dinner was porridge and even then it was a nasty affair as I had to smash up the chicken meat with my spoon before I could swallow it. I am reliving my babyhood.

Despite the generally rubbish diurnal period, the nocturnal period was much better. My two old friends found their way to my place, after a misadventure at immigration, and we proceeded to have a good time gossiping about other people. Ke ke ke. Then when the news came on, Liverpool was leading 2-1 at Old Trafford, and subsequently when the match was over, I gloated triumphantly. After so many years, not only did we beat them at Old Trafford, we beat them soundly. Wahahahaha! I’ve never had a football result make me so happy since Istanbul.

Yeah I am well aware of the fact that the title is still United’s to lose, but after so many years of enduring defeat at their hands (or feet), it feels good to have one’s comeuppance. And in such spectacular fashion too. Where are you going to put that pretty face now, Ronaldo? Muahahahaha!

Someone on facebook complained that all the “closet” Reds fans have come crawling out of the woodwork now that they have a result to celebrate. Where were they before? Hiding, obviously, no one’s going to put “my team lost 2-0 to Middlesbrough” on their facebook status. That’s just asking to be humiliated publicly. Honestly, use your brain a bit la.

Wake up in the morning and I raise my weary head… bonus points if you spot the song without a search engine’s help! Get to wondering what’s for breakfast, then I roll right outta bed.

Breakfast is biscuits and Milo Fuze with oats. I really do eat like an old person – oats in my Milo, Weetameal crackers, digestive biscuits… but I can’t linger today, we have to get to the hospital for my check-up.

We arrive at 10am but it’s a long, long wait before something happens. I have to wait for the doctor to return from his rounds, and before they can poke a sharp metal object into my blood vessel for the purposes of obtaining a sample, the doctor has to order it. Hum. But eventually it’s time to face the prick. You know. The sharp metal thing, what did you think I meant?

They have a very comfortable chair set aside for this purpose. If it didn’t have a box for disposal of sharps next to it, it would be an excellent recliner. I sit in there and close my eyes. The nurse prods my arm several times looking for a vein, then ties on the tourniquet and swabs the area. I wish they’d use a needle and syringe, but I know they’re using a double-ended lancet because I saw her pick it up. Lancets are bigger, which is not necessarily better since I have fine veins.

Thank goodness the crook of the arm is not a particularly sensitive area. Of course I feel the pain of the poke. In fact, and the memory makes me squirm, I think I could also feel her moving the end around in search of the vein. *bleah* But I was also in discomfort from the very tight tourniquet, which she didn’t release for some time. My understanding is that they release it once they hit the vein, so that the blood can flow freely, but what would I know? I had my eyes screwed tight during the whole thing. The less I know, the better. And when she said she was done and she was pulling out the lancet, it didn’t hurt any less.  Cos then I had to press down hard to prevent bruising, and pressing down on the spot where you just had a hole pierced into you is going to hurt a little.

She stuck a plaster on it but I pressed it for another 10 minutes, because I really don’t need another bruise for the collection, thank you. Poor, poor vein. The nurse told me that my vein kept ‘running away’ from her, which explains the extra-long time she took. Ugh. *legs are jelly*

I finished the newspaper before the doctor showed up. He walked very fast into the consultation suite, and I followed very fast. He’s a high-energy individual, on par with me. I wore my cap, so after I sat down and he asked me how I was doing, he enquired if I was losing hair and lifted my cap to see my real hair. Hee hee, funny guy. He asked the routine questions to make sure I hadn’t picked up any infections, then prescribed me antibiotics for my cough. He did however tell me to stop eating my antacid and allopurinol, since they were no longer necessary. Yay, less medicines to swallow!

I told him that my chest wound was not looking so good, so he took a look. Then he called up my surgeon, Dr Tam, about “the young lady”. I had what he called “purulent discharge”, and he secured me an appointment later that day. He also hand-wrote a note to Dr Tam to explain the situation. Wah, so fun.

In the meantime, he checked up my extensive medical records on his computer, and I got to read the transcript of my operation. It’s fairly exciting, I developed severe apnea and acute desaturation and they opened my leg to find my femoral artery and vein. Eeee sounds gross hor! He got the results of my bone marrow biopsy back, everything’s normal. The cancer definitely hasn’t spread to my bone marrow, not that I expected it to have.

I have to go back to see him on the 18th, when I will have another blood test. When he scheduled the test, my face fell and he asked if there was a problem. Well, I can’t avoid it, can I? They need the results of the blood test to see what dosage of chemo drugs to give me. Who asked me to develop a blood cancer?

So after we were done at the cancer centre, we headed downstairs to the surgical centre. Apparently the previous doctor must have cleaned up the wound or something, because Dr Tam couldn’t tell which one was the purulent one. No matter. He cleaned it up some more and stuck a new dressing on it, while telling me that the one on my neck didn’t need protection any more. It’s freeeeeeeeee!

I asked him about scheduling another heart scan, and he figured why not. I have to be scanned one week before I see him again, however, because it takes time for the results to enter the system. Otherwise, he said my wounds are healing nicely. During the consultation, I noticed the bracelet he was wearing. It was made of small panels with pictures on them. If I had to guess, I’d say it was religious iconography, and if I had to guess some more, I’d say they were Catholic saints or something like that. It is the Lenten season after all. Of course, they could also be Buddhist bodhisattvas, I didn’t get a good look. But my money’s on the saints. No wonder he asked me what was the pendant I wear around my neck.

It was past 1pm when I finally left the hospital. We took a taxi to Bukit Timah Plaza, where both the nyonya stall and the chicken noodle stall in the basement were closed. Due to lack of choice, we ate at Wishbone, which is a nostalgically-styled Western family restaurant. It’s totally retro, man. The dining experience is similar to The Ship in KL, you get a bread roll with salted butter. Not just butter, salted butter. Good and sinful, the way it’s meant to be. Service isn’t awesome, but the food menu caters to both East and West – they’ll fry up Hor Fun for you as quickly as serve you a steak. Interesting.

My mum and I had the daily set lunch, which is Fish and Chips with Cream of Tomato on Friday. No complaints about the food, although the chips were soggy, but I wasn’t expecting better, actually. Dessert was a scoop of their homemade ice cream. I was rather hoping for the local flavours like jackfruit or gula melaka but got vanilla instead. Still, very nice and creamy, no hint of ice crystals at all. All in all, if you just want to have a no-fuss meal, it’s a good place. Not cheap, and there’s no service with a smile, but a fair number of parents were bringing in their uniformed kids for lunch. A sampling of schools: A small boy from ACS, whether Primary or Junior, I can’t tell; a CHIJ girl, and a little girl wearing MGS Primary PE kit.

Yes I know, my blog has somehow turned into a food diary. Well, my 3 meals a day are pretty much the sole source of variety in my life now, you see. I hardly even play with my mice any more, I just sit and watch them.

Dinner is fried meehoon with a salmon steak. I insisted that my mum fry the salmon in butter, in order to bring out the delicious oily flavour. In hindsight, salt was probably unnecessary since the fish is flavourful enough on its own. Later I cut up a big fat pear, and after I finished my quarter, I turned to see… an empty cup. The boyfriend just kept stuffing his face with pear without realising how much he ate. Eating monster.

My dad is taking the evening bus down, he’s expected to arrive around midnight. Tomorrow I have 2 old friends coming down, hooray! I don’t think I’ll venture out of the house – weekends are already a daunting affair for a healthy me, and in my current state I’ll just be overwhelmed by the crowds, not to mention that it’s IT Show weekend. Half of me wants to go geek out at the sales, but I know it’s mostly pointless since I’m really just waiting for Windows 7 to drop, so all the pretty laptops are just going to be “see, no touch”.

Remember I said I was going out for lunch? Well I did. My mum and I headed out to Bukit Timah Market to see if I could get ban mian for lunch, but the stall was closed. Come to think of it, a large number of stalls were closed. Either they only do the dinner session, or the recession is worse than I thought…

In the end I went with wantan mee, because I haven’t had proper wantan mee in a long time. Wantan mee is one of those things that’s irrevocably tied up with my childhood, but it doesn’t rate as a comfort food. It’s nostalgic but not something I turn to when I need some food snugglies.

When I was a wee kindergartner, my grandparents used to frequent this kopitiam where the wantan mee stall was run by a young couple. At least, they were young when they started. I watched them grow older, the wife got pregnant and had kids, the man grew some grey hairs… I think they’re still there, 20 years on. Amazing, isn’t it? 20 years of running a wantan mee stall in the same place. And because as a kid, my menu was limited to “safe” foods, there were only 3 stalls I ate from in that kopitiam: wantan mee, roti canai (with dhal instead of curry) and pork ball noodles (which is still on my list of Things To Eat Every Time I’m Home).

Another wantan mee memory involves the other side of the family. My maternal grandma used to live in Seremban, which is like an hour’s drive south of KL. Occasionally, we would drive down to spend the weekend at her place. And since my mother has nearly 2 handfuls of siblings, chances were good that I would have cousins visiting the same weekend as well, and it would be an impromptu family gathering and we’d have enough kids to have a good game of catching.

On Sunday morning we would head out to the market, where my sis, my dad and I would stand at the fountain, bored out of our heads while the ladies did the marketing. Then everyone went upstairs to the food court where we would have wantan mee for breakfast. It was more because we chose to patronise that specific stall, than because we wanted wantan mee. And yes, it is a common breakfast dish. At least, if you take my childhood as normal… For someone who is half-Hainanese, do you know I never ate kaya toast until I came to Singapore? True story.  I ate my toast the ang-moh way. With butter. My grandma, who is full-blooded Hainanese, eats kaya toast without the butter, so I never realised that Ya Kun, etc. were selling a part of my heritage back to me.

In later years my sis and I no longer had to go to the market, but there were still packets of wantan mee sitting on the table waiting for us to pour them into metal dishes. The memory of picking at those slim yellow strands, coloured brown against the metal, is practically indelible.

The plate of wantan mee I ate for lunch, however, is merely passable. I detected a hint of chilli, whether due to contamination from chilli sauce or because it picked up capsaicin from the green chilli, I’ll never know. But KL wantan mee HAS NO CHILLI, okay. Well maybe the green ones, but definitely not chilli sauce. *fumes* The wantan were okay, I picked up a crunch in them which is not unpleasant. I shall have to go back for their shrimp dumpling noodles someday. When I survey, I survey thoroughly. Don’t expect me to try the chicken feet noodles though.  I have never in my life seen the appeal of that particular incarnation of skin and bones.

Oh yeah, while making honey water I had this revelation:

When you’re 13 and different from most people, they call you “weird”.

When you’re 25 and different, they call you “quirky”.

When you’re 60 and different, you’re “eccentric”.

From now on, anyone who describes me as “quirky” is just being lazy.

Today I checked on my chest bandage, and it seemed dirtier than usual. Since it’s already loose, I had a peek under it.

It wasn’t good.

I have two holes in my chest. I mean, yes, I’ve been joking that I have a chest wound, but now I’m actually looking at them and it’s like, whoa. I have two holes in my chest, one of which is plugged up with blood, and the other with pus.

That’s totally not good. I don’t know how they’re going to clean out that hole, but it probably won’t be pleasant for me. Eeeep. I had a go at wiping it with an alcohol swab, but the yellow semi-liquid didn’t budge. In the end I covered it up with Primapore, just to keep it from my sight. The doctors won’t be pleased when they see me tomorrow. I hope the infection is just local and restricted to the wound, it’ll be disastrous if it gets into my system. Then again, I’ve been pumped full of antibiotics and Bactrim, so I’m pretty well-protected.

My mum made fishball soup for dinner. As in, the fishballs are homemade. Take that! To flavour the soup, she fried up the skin and bones of the fish that contributed the meat for the fishballs. See, so resourceful right! Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it – I’m a big fan of fried salmon skin, myself.

I finally finished the Little Britain collection. I’m glad they didn’t continue flogging the dead horse, it’s gone about as far as it can. Towards the end it all got a bit meta, which is inevitable given the very predictable nature of some of their jokes. At least they wrapped up some of the really long-running jokes, such as Lou and Andy, and the cross-dressing “laaaaadies”.

Ha ha I know someone who will just *strangle* me for casting aspersions on the noble and ancient art of yoga! No la, see what happened is, my blood clot on the left thigh didn’t quite hold. In the afternoon I happened to look at it, and there was fresh red blood trapped under the plastic surface of the Tegaderm. I must have damaged or overstretched the skin somewhat while I was doing my sun salutations. Oh yes, and all that exertion caused my Jelonet to fall out as well. I have no spare Jelonet so now my chest wound is covered only in the most basic sense by a dressing. It’s not even an airtight dressing.

I still feel like one big bruise, but since it only hurts if I poke myself, the answer is, naturally, to avoid poking myself. Duh. Easier said than done, though, when the boyfriend accidentally elbows me in the chest. Ooof.

My cousin and her boyfriend join us for a lunch of spaghetti. Nyam nyam I love pasta. Later they take my mum shopping at  IMM while I catch a nap before my student arrives for coaching. He needs to ask me Bio stuff, seeing how I’m the only one in the company who took Biology (as far as I know). He scored 28/40 for his test. I’m pleased but I know he can do better, especially since he lost marks on not-careful mistakes. After he leaves, I notice that he left his mechanical pencil behind. I rush to the bus stop to return it to him, and when I get back to the apartment I am slightly breathless. This is not good.

The gas cylinder runs out of gas while my mum is cooking dinner. We wait 45 minutes for the delivery man to bring a new tank. Esso gas costs 33 dollars a tank, in case you were curious. Dinner preparations resume and soon, I have a big plate of soya sauce chicken to tuck into. It’s delicious, but of course. Post-dinner entertainment consists of Channel 5′s Ninja Warrior, which is highly exciting thanks to the typically insane Japanese commentator. I eat a quarter of a papaya and like clockwork, I am soon on the toilet. I refuse to take the laxatives the hospital gave me, I don’t believe in taking such things anyway. But they gave me 3 bottles. Overkill much?

My face has just been getting oilier and oilier and I head off into the shower. Once out, I bust out an alcohol wipe and clean off the excess dried blood around the clot. Then I stick a plaster on it. The smell of the alcohol stays in my nose. Ugh.

I sit down to play DS, but then I recall that perhaps people are waiting for me to come  online so they can chat with me. Instead of lugging out the Acer, I borrow the boyfriend’s Eee, primarily because it’s light and it starts up fast. I can put it on my lap without burning my skin or cutting off blood flow to my limbs.

I was planning to practise some bass today, but so much for best-laid plans. Tomorrow I intend to have lunch outside so that my mum can do her office work instead of household chores. Then maybe I’ll think about practicing bass some more.

I wake up in my own bed, with my entire body feeling bruised. That’s odd. I don’t look bruised, apart from the ones I already have. But my whole body – legs, chest, tummy – feels as though my skin is bruised. Poking gently causes pain. I am perplexed.

Breakfast is a large piece of chocolate birthday cake, thoughtfully reserved for me by the boyfriend. After breakfast I do some sun salutations. I might have overstretched my bypass scar a bit, but there’s a piece of plastic holding it together so I don’t think I caused it any harm.

I sit on the floor and use my computer until it’s time to cook lunch. I watch my mum prepare my chicken porridge. I have to learn to do this for myself eventually. Don’t be ridiculous, of course I know how to cook. It’s the subtleties of flavouring and not overcooking that elude me.

After lunch I take a nap. I dream of giant sandwiches with meat fillings as large as a newspaper page. Mmmm. There is nothing for me to do online, it is so boring. I read my Harry Potter book, occasionally dabbing away tears when someone falls in battle.

My mother starts to prepare dinner. It’s a simple affair of steamed fish, vegetables and bacon omelette. It would seem that my mother too has not figured out how to flip a wet omelette. Darn, I was hoping she could teach me. The rice is too soggy. It’s not a brand we usually buy, so we’re not familiar with its water requirements.

I finish up Harry Potter 7 after dinner. I still feel like a giant bruise. I don’t know why people feel the need to tell me that it’s good I’m out of the hospital. I hate it when people make meaningless small talk, and when they say extremely super-obvious things. I’ve always been intolerant of meaningless speech, I’m just a lot more direct about it now.

I take my first shower since coming home. It hurts. The water hitting my skin hurts. That’s how super-sensitive it is. Nevertheless, I emerge clean(er). I peel off the pressure bandage on my thigh. Another bruise for the collection.  Another piece of transparent dressing to match the one on the right.

Another of my many cousins came by this afternoon with a prepaid SIM card for my mum. She can’t keep using my phone to call out, and Malaysian roaming has cost her literally hundreds of ringgit so far. So now she’s using my old Nokia 8250, the first phone I ever loved.

So far I’ve had one reporter contact me with regard to “my story”. I don’t know what story I have, or if it’s even much of a narrative thus far. Of course, to me, it’s a complete and absorbing narrative, but it’s just one of very many out there. I think people have such stereotypes about cancer patients, that they’re either on the brink of death, or bravely soldiering through an awful and painful disease. Well I’m nowhere near dead, and I have my bad days when I just want to pull an Eric Cartman and make everyone around me do things for me. It’s easy to slip into the role of patient and just act pathetic so that everyone around you feels sorry for you, but I hope I don’t succumb to that. Sure, there are some things I can’t do. Jian now has to clean out the mice, and my mum has to cook and clean for me, but I’m still capable of lots of other things, including continuing to coach my students.

In fact, I have one coming to my house tomorrow for a lesson. I warned him that I can’t talk for prolonged periods, so he shouldn’t keep pestering me for explanations. My lung capacity is half that of a healthy person’s, and speaking for too long irritates my throat and makes me cough. I don’t know if the intubation caused this, or it’s the residual damage from the persistent symptomatic cough, or if the tumour, as it slowly dies, is irritating my throat. All I know is that I cough.