A sabbath visit

I spent like an hour or so in the hospital on this sabbath day to visit the tan tock seng patients in the C class wards along with my brother. The main purpose was to talk to these physically unwell patients and at least provide a lending ear if need be in any way. On the way to the hospital, my brother emphasised to me that doctors tend to overlook the relationship that needs to be established with a patient. The relationship helps in building the trust that the patient needs to give to the medical servant because it's this very trust that heals the patient. Statistics have shown that 60% (or around there) of the healing is done by the placebo effect and that arrives with the belief, faith and trust. Amazingly true because at the end of the day, faith is what heals everyone.

It's my first time ever so it felt awkward and fears were like zooming in and out of my head- "what if i can't communicate in chinese with the patient?", "how do i even end a conversation with a patient?", how, how ,how? All these are like basic conversation skills except for maybe the chinese part, that's not so basic. I have no clue to medical terms in chinese. And that fear came true, i could hardly speak any chinese words properly and the moment i left the hospital, i told myself - ok, no more chinese barrier, i'm going to brush up on my mandarin as soon as i'm done with my As.  That's not the whole point my blog post though. 

As my brother and i left the tan tock seng, he asked me what i learned, and i wasn't really able to observe anything really significant apart from the fact that the C class wards are decent and look comfortable enough and also the aforementioned point. When it came to his turn, he told me that one major observation is that people don't really want to talk to you until they are given their fundamental need. And for those patients, they needed to recover badly from their physical ailments. That explained why the people there were reluctant to talk to us, ok maybe you'd have thought that observation was pretty obvious. But i found it profound as this principle can be applied across contexts. Take a loner who likes to hide in a corner (this being his basic need), he will never talk to you if you take away this need. Perhaps that example was a bit off, nonetheless, it's true. 

This experience opened my eyes a little to what happens behind the walls that i pass by quite often. Now i realise that it's a lot harder to serve people when you're not a professional cause they just won't trust you. And that's why studying hard is good as that's the way you earn people's trust :).