It seems that I have been surrounded by a lot of the same type of fear recently. The fear of the great unknown, of disease and pain, of death. And with the fear there is a great sense of helplessness...
. ~ .
It first started with my Grandmother. My father's mother is the only grandparent I have left on both sides of the family. About 2 months back (or was it even earlier?) she suddenly suffered from a minor heart attack.
She was feeling breathless at night and it didn't get better the next day so she was sent to the hospital. She was in SGH for close to a month. We thought she had to go for surgery, a bypass if it's serious and if it's not so serious, stenting.
We were so sure that she would at least be able to go for a surgery that we kept spending time prepping her about it. We slowly psycho-ed her that a surgery would be the solution to her pain, she will either survive the operation and get better, or simply not survive the operation. And though my Grandmother hadn't been quite so lucid for the past 2 years since she fell and hit her head, she seemed to understand and accept what we told her.
Little did we know that even an operation was not an option for her. After a long and extensive check, the doctors at the Singapore Heart Centre decided that she was not fit enough to have an operation.
There were too many arteries which have calcified and given her age, even if she were given an op the risk is too high and it will not improve her standard of living overall. Bypass operations are expensive and beyond that, they are very hard to recover from, so in the end she was ruled out for the bypass.
"What about the stenting?" we asked. Also out. Again too many arteries are affected and no point at all to stent for her. Believe it or not there is no way out, the only thing that we have left is time, time for the inevitable to happen.
When the doctors had come to this conclusion they decided there was nothing much more that the hospital could do for her and she was discharged. We didn't say a thing to her about her not being able to op, that she has no chance to really be treated this time.
Somehow, as though by sixth sense, she had known. It could be that she could see it in my Aunt and Uncle's faces when the doctor talked to them, it could be that she was still wise enough to deduce that something was not right, she suddenly became depressed and refused to eat when she went home.
No medicine, no food, she just simply clammed up everytime we tried to give her something. It got so bad that not that long after she was discharged she was admitted again, this time to TTSH. All the time we tried pacifying her, coaxing her, scolding her, bribing her but nothing worked. We were for a moment just as helpless as she was. She couldn't help her situation, and we couldn't help her.
My Mum said it could be the fear of death in my Grandmother which brought about her wilfulness. We have basically been told that she would never really recover from her heart problem, and death was a matter of time. It was as though she was trying to push herself further along that path, and the only thing that kept her alive was the fact that she wanted to live. That's why when she was hungry, she still ate, and when coaxed like a baby, she sometimes also ate.
She has now come out of that funk and we worry less cause she's eating and taking her medicine again but truly nothing fundamentally has changed. We are still waiting for time to catch up with her...
What is it like for her I sometimes wonder. To come to a point in life when we are completely helpless and at a loss about what we can do. Perhaps I have already entered that phase in my life, except the helplessness is not for myself, but for the people around me.
. ~ .
I saw and experienced the same helplessness in someone else I knew very recently after my Grandmother's episode. A colleague came to the office and all of a sudden he collapsed when he reached his desk. It was completely unexpected and caught us totally off guard. All I could think of at that moment was, "What happened?! What happened?!"
All there was at that moment was fear. His fear that something would happen to him, my fear that something might happen to him.
I later learnt that he's now suffering from a condition. The big and ugly C word that has struck terror and depression in him. There are many things that could run across a person's mind in a situaion like that.
Will death come? When will it come? Why has this happened at so young an age? What about the money? As the sole breadwinner who is going to take care of the family if anything happens? What about work? Will the job be jeopardised especially at this time when money is so crucial? When to let the family know? What to do next? Will my next day be my last?
I could only imagine how terrified and how lost I would be if put in this situation. Yet all I could do was to stand aside and watch things happen and ask "Why?" and "How?".
The fear was almost enough to drive him to his death but thank God he overcame his negative thoughts. But the fear would not end. He has the courage to live but no one is brave enough to not fear about how the future may unfold in this situation...
. ~ .
Even more recently there was the same fear and helplessness again. (Am I now beginning to magnet in all this?)
One day, I woke up to find my roommate in tears. She wanted to know if I had any medicated oil and she was crying.
For no rhyme or reason she had gotten up that morning with extreme pain on one side of her body and she could hardly move when she first got up. It was bad and she didn't know what it was.
Again I was thinking "How?", "Why?" but I didn't know what to do at all. I was frantic myself in my heart. It sounded like symptoms of a stroke but it CANNOT be!! She's even younger than me! I didn't dare to voice out the question in my heart.
She was crying badly cause she didn't know what it was. We woke up our other housemate but she also didn't know what this was all about. We were just bumbling around trying to calm her but we were at a complete loss. I realised that especially for me, I was just completely stoned. There was nothing I could do except trail them around in the house from the room to the living room, to the toilet and then back again to the living room.
As my roommate has a family member who is not well back at home, she is all the more sensitive to all of this. While she never voiced it out in her pain, I could sense that the fear really ran much deeper.
What if something bad happened to her, too? Could this be hereditary and she got it earlier than she thought she would? She is in a foreign land in order to make more money to help her family with the financing for the treatment of her family member. What is going to happen if something happened to her? And I thought, she is all alone here, who should we contact if something goes wrong? What should we say?
Yet I could do nothing at all, nothing I could say would comfort her as it was legitimate fear and her condition was foreign to us all. How could we reassure her when even we don't know what this really is?
Very luckily in the end we found that it could have just been a very severe case of a stiff neck like condition. The body is just frozen in place and movement simply hurts very badly. I could only say "Thank God!" that nothing really is wrong and this could be just a result of the extreme work stress we are facing in the office.
But what if something did go wrong? What could I have done about it except to wallow in the deep sense of helplessness?
. ~ .
I have had enough fear and helplessness to last me for a long time if not a lifetime. I see the fear in those around me and I experience the same terror, albeit in a milder dose. I pray sincerely that all around me will feel better. I pray for a way where I could be more of use to my loved ones.
And I wish never to be plagued myself by the same fears and also the torment of the unknown...