Rain was pouring heavily as I watched my parents drive away, I felt the cold breeze of the rain coming through the window when I realized that this moment was the beginning of a long journey. As I walked towards my room through a narrow corridor, tears began to fill my eyes and I felt my ears turning warm. I sat on the bed looking down at the floor while my tears dropped on it like raindrops one by one. I was overwhelmed with questions buzzing around my head. Why am I here? Why me? This wasn't fair, I thought as I felt my blood boil through my veins.
Suddenly someone knocked on the door, it was the doctor. "How are you doing today?" the doctor asked.
"Do you really have to ask? I’m barely surviving here," is what I wanted to say. Instead, I clenched my teeth, and I said, "I am not doing so well."
The doctor told me about my restricted diet and what treatments I will have to do in the next few months, and all of it sounded very unpleasant to me. That entire day, I was in denial that this is what my life had come to. I kept thinking about what I would be doing if I had not taken this gap year. I was reminiscing about the times I went cycling with friends, the times I was excited to go shopping for new clothes and the times I got to bathe in the refreshing ocean. Yet, the reality was that I was in agony because of my eczema.
I woke up the next morning hoping I would at least be happier with a delicious meal, but was I wrong about that. I got a bland bowl of congee and I was very sure the cook had some kind of problem with salt measurements, because every day after that I got the same bowl of bland congee. The sun rose every day and with it my anger and confusion about being in this helpless position. During the morning I would hear other patients outside my door socializing, but I made sure not to go out in the mornings because I did not want to see nor talk to anyone. One day, I opened the door slowly and peeked through the narrow slit to see the other patients who seemed to be having a good time laughing with each other. I was curious to see how anyone could be laughing and smiling whilst being so ill.
My ward had 10 rooms, each with a patient suffering from a different kind of illness and I hated the fact that I was one of them. I did not want to associate with the other patients because I did not want to accept the reality of my condition. So, during the day, I would just distract myself by going online and watching what comforted me: MasterChef, Jamie Oliver’s cooking shows and Man vs Wild. These shows were the perfect distraction because I would always imagine myself being in the show, cooking and thinking of flavour combinations or climbing a tree trying to escape from a hungry bear.
Two months went by as I tried to numb my anger and pain with digital entertainment, hiding from the reality of the situation. However, there came a point where I did not even want to look into the mirror as I was afraid of the person who stared back at me. Eyes sunken into my sockets, cheeks looking bony and my curly hair in desperate need of a trip to the salon. As the sun went down each day, I would feel a sense of panic and my breathing getting heavier as my anxiety rose. I was most affected by my eczema during the night, I feared waking up because I did not want to see the devastation I have done to my skin after a gruesome night of scratching and feeling the burn like someone had just poured acid onto my skin.
This led me to think about the purpose of my life. ‘Why am I wasting valuable resources of food, light, water and a safe shelter when some healthy kid from an orphanage could replace me and live a beautiful life and actually contribute to society one day? I asked myself this question because I certainly could not see this future for me at that moment. Perhaps it was during this lifetime that I had to pay for my previous sins, as my Buddhist grandma would say, "karma is not something we can escape from." Yet, I would always have to clench my teeth after hearing that because it made me wonder what I did to deserve this torture. As a teacher, I would always make sure to let my student know the reason behind any punishment because they could then learn not to repeat it. But in my case, I was being punished without knowing the reason, and that I could not accept that.
I was boiling in a pot of negativity until one day a little girl with short straight hair moved into the room next to mine. The next morning, after I just had my bland bowl of congee, someone banged on my door. I was startled since it was unusually loud. I opened the door to see this little girl, half my height, dressed in a white and blue dress looking up at me with a huge smile on her face. Piumi was her name. ‘Can I come in?’ she asked excitedly. I immediately said that I’m busy and told her to go find her mother. I did not know how, but this girl knew I was lying, so she opened my door after I had closed it and came in without my compliance. I was so self-conscious about my skin, I wondered why she did not say anything about it yet because all she wanted to do was talk to me and play with me. Then she sat next to me on my bed and leaned over to see what I was watching on my phone. ‘Do you have games on it?’ she asked. I replied by saying ‘no’ since I did not want her breaking my phone, my only lifeline.
To my surprise, she ran to her room and came back with her board games and said that we should play together. At that moment, I stared at her wondering how she could so easily neglect the state of my skin and just talk to me like I was a normal person. That night, after she had gone back to her room, I laid on my bed looking at the moon-lit ceiling wondering how she made me feel so comfortable to the point where I actually got the same sense of satisfaction that I did from the shows I watched online, but this time it was with another person. Days would pass by with her coming into my room every night to play board games and I gradually started to look forward to that time of the day because even though it was nighttime, it was the brightest moment of the day for me.
A week before I was discharged, she helped me do something that I could not do since I got there 4 months ago. She held my hand when we walked out of my room in the morning to see the other patients chatting over some fresh hot tea. My knees were like rubber and I was purposely avoiding eye contact, but to my surprise everyone greeted me with huge smiles and said, ‘there she is finally.’ We talked for hours that morning and I felt like a normal person because everyone there had their own story to tell which made me feel like my problems weren't so bad, for once making me feel like I did not stand out from the rest. That week, my morning bowl of congee was perfectly seasoned, and my laptop had dust collected on top of it. On my final day, I looked into the mirror and saw a beautiful resilient lady before I stood at the window where I saw my parents leave four months ago. On this day, it was bright and sunny, and the cool breeze made me smile with a sense of release as I watched my parents drive in to pick me up. I drew Piumi a picture of us two as a reminder of how much she meant to me before I left the hospital, not caring about who looked at me and what I was wearing because I finally accepted it for myself.