It scares me that I'm now in my final year and I'm hearing this question a lot more often than usual, and I actually have to come up with a real answer. Previously, I would demur and smile and not answer the question directly, telling people that I was still in university.
However, that excuse doesn't seem to work anymore. It's probably because people are starting to realise that I have to choose a place to work, and hence they are starting to foist that question on me with a startling regularity. And of course, like in a game of tennis, if you don't return the hard balls they throw at you, very soon people are going to stop talking to you because they find that you're really no fun to talk to.
Honestly, I'm fun to talk to as long as you don't talk serious. That sounds like a long shot in the funny considering I look really serious, but really, I am full of crap. The face is just an illusion.
To be fair, some of them have offered suggestions. TNP has for one, confirmed that they would like to take me back. But I'm not so sure, because as much as I loved working there, I do realise that I need to work elsewhere to grow, not just as a journalist, but as a person. I'm constantly looking elsewhere and I realise that there is so much more to see, so much more to experience, and with that huge world out there, how could I ever stay still?
And really, after awhile you get sick of doing stories about men screwing other women, men screwing around with each other, women screwing their men, women screwing other women, and children screwing around with screwdrivers and landing themselves in hospital. That's a lot of screwing around but that's essentially the nuts and bolts of TNP.
When I was a boy, I wanted to be a musician. However, everyone knows that Singapore and music don't mix. I would have probably been a musician if I was shit at my studies, because at least my parents would go "okay if seems that you have an interest in nothing else so we're going to let you study music."
However, I love music enough for it to be a passion, but not enough for it to be my life. And I think that making it my life would take the passion out of it. I still love it a lot though, and every day just tinkling the ivories of my piano gives me a simple joy.
And in my teens, I wanted to be a doctor. I figured that saving lives was cool. I probably would have been a decent one, but asked to choose between my two passions, I realised that I preferred writing and reading more. I still remember an internship I did at a hospital during my JC years quite vividly, and it kind of made me realise that maybe, I wasn't cut out for it.
Not because of the hours, or because I felt that I lacked the aptitude, but really because I felt that I would never be as dedicated as I should be. In a job like that, where people place you in charge of the most important thing they have, their lives, being uninspired is the worst possible thing to be. One incident still sticks in my memory, of how the ward I was in lost a patient because the surgeon on duty decided to go MIA.
A patient had suffered a triple A, or acute aortic aneurysm. The aorta is main blood vessel by which blood leaves the heart, and an aneurysm is the term for a vessel rupture. The vessel walls were weakened and they had burst, so the patient was bleeding out, and doing so internally. And it was really shocking how fast it happened. One moment, the patient was sitting and talking, and within the hour, he was unconscious and pale.
I interned in the ER, so I watched as the doctors rushed the patient in, and tried to resuscitate him while pumping him with fluids to try and keep the blood circulation going. And the doctor was screaming and paging for the surgeon to hurry up and save the man, but he was nowhere to be found.
And it was horrible to watch. I watched as the doctors and nurses administered doses of adrenaline to keep the heart going, but it was a losing battle. They also pumped fluid in, so much that when the patient finally passed on, his colour of his blood was clear. The whole shift on duty was devastated, as they always were when they lost a patient.
That incident really left a very deep impression on me, because that man could have been saved, and I knew it. I knew the only reason he had died was because he had no chance whatsoever, as a doctor who had taken the Hippocratic oath to save lives had in fact neglected his duty.
I am not dramatising this incident out of Grey's Anatomy, House, or any of those medical dramas on TV. Doctors in those shows can screw around, and patients die nice deaths with nice soundtracks in the background and nice camera angles. I wish I was, but I live with the knowledge that a man died because someone else didn't do his job. The reality is often gritter, starker, and far more compelling. And it never leaves you. I have a feeling that doctors remember every patient they lose, and it takes a toll on you after awhile.
A doctor is essentially a glorified mechanic, with the only difference being that he repairs machines that are still running, and there is no margin for error. Of course, there are perks in being a doctor, like how everyone fawns and respects your profession, and the remuneration is not too bad either. But it just wasn't for me, because I wasn't sure I could live with the guilt if I ever slipped up.
And now, I'm a journalist and people tell me that maybe I have a gift for it. But I really believe that it is easy to be good at something if you are sincere about learning the ropes, and about applying yourself to it. I don't want to pigeonhole myself into something, because I believe that I have yet to find something that I really want to do, something that I don't have to wake up to every day thinking that it is a drag to go into office.