Have you got stuck in a maze before? I wonder how it must feel like. You run all over the place, frenzied and exhausted, but get absolutely nowhere.
It was a tough day. Walking through the catacomb of corridors in the Big Gray Place, I walked from one block to the next to the next to the next. There was so much waiting, and walking. The whole afternoon was burned away. It was, to say the least, frustrating. They lie when they tell you a hospital is a White place. It is Gray- don’t let anyone fool you about that. A hospital is a Big Gray Place.
The Professional People work in a team, so I have to see a team of people, specialising in different areas, from different places and different times, and medication is found in a pharmacy four blocks away, at a different place. They give you directions like it’s just across the road or next door, but resentment breeds slowly inside of you when you find yourself all alone in a Big Gray Place, having to navigate your way in a maze, a statistic in a line with a queue number in hand, queue after queue after queue, with multiple appointment cards and lots and lots of people shuffling past you. Everything is everywhere, faces change, queue numbers hop, people are doing a different something at a different place at a different pace.
Mess.
Before all of this, I had walked into the waiting room, awaiting my turn. I had a headache from insomnia, was very anxious and felt very low. I watch people file in and out of the Big Gray Clinic, each one burdened with a Story of their own. Why am I here today? Why am I -still- on this journey? Why am I awaiting my turn in a Big Gray Place? I knew.
A middle-aged lady smiled at me. She looked familiar- have I seen her before? She smiled and came to sit next to me.
“You’re Wai Jia, right?” she asked very gently. “I’m… I’m S’s mother. She often reads your blog. Thank you for helping so many girls.”
I nearly start to cry.
S is a girl I met only once at the support group. She specially travels to Singapore for treatment because she lives in Malaysia, which I presume does not have the facilities for this kind of support. I met her only but once. And there we were, two people from different countries, by some divine arrangement in the same building again, with her mother recognising my face. She is in the room with a counsellor, and I write her a note to pass to her mother just in case we don’t meet.
Just before my turn, she comes out of the room, calls my name and runs to hug me. ” You look so good today,” she smiles. I haven’t had a good night’s rest for days.
” I’m going to visit N now upstairs at the ward, we’re really inspired reading your blog.” She smiles, and I nearly cry. What am I doing here, still. I know the answer to that question.
I enter the doctor’s office held together and leave the room, fragile. I am in tears- I am relieved and grieved at the same time because she wants to give me meds. I remember a lady I once met who told me the bravest thing she ever did was to take this sort of medication, because her decision to help herself went against stigma and pride. I am in tears but am determined to stick to my word.
“Wai Jia!”
Just as I walk out of the room, I find a little drawing with kites and a rainbow stuffed into my hands, and myself in a warm hug before you scuttle off again- you leave for Malaysia this evening. I really needed that hug. You drew it for me while I was in the room and waited for me to pass that to me, didn’t you? Sweet child, thank you.
It’s funny. It’s funny how the things of man are so scattered, disparate, confusing even. There are so many Professional People to see now, so many appointment cards to keep, so many dates to take note of, so many places to go to pick up different sort of things, so many corridors to walk through and queue numbers to take, faces to talk to, things to sort out.
The necessity and yet, the mess of it all.
And yet, I walk into one place, the waiting room, and find all that I seem to need for the moment right there. A once-stranger friend from a different geographical location altogether, her parents, a word of thanks, a hug, and a neatly folded drawing. All neatly in one place.
It is like my White Place. It is like God, a one stop station for all our thoughts and clouds. No separate appointment cards, no different specialists for different things, no navigating through a maze and a crowd to find the right place and the right person. Everything is there. Mister God, I have ALL these things to tell you, will you listen to me?
He is always there, with everything we need. All in one place.
This is the beginning of a long journey. And I am willing to walk it through. It is messy because we are human, but it is necessary. I must.
In a maze, sometimes you can’t even see where you’re heading, how long it will take to reach the end. But I know one thing for sure, that at the end of a long, long day, after the exhausting frenzy running this way and that, one can still return to the same spot, the same White Place, to the same Person, and find everything all in one place. Everything in one stop.
No queue number, no waiting time, no appointment card, no different location and no different sort of explanation and different sort of labels for different sort of medication.
Everything you need for the moment folded neatly into one note, one place, one Person.
Just, there.
What a relief.
