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Harmony and Understanding
One curious thing about Neung is that she is very schematic for hair. Ask her to describe someone, and the first thing she will mention is invariably that person's hair. I demonstrated the point very effectively to Neung's teacher -- who hadn't noticed -- a couple of months ago. I called for Neung to come over, and when she arrived I said "No, you're not Neung; you're Keanu." "No," she replied, "Keanu has yellow hair."
Last week Neung came out with the most remarkable manifestation yet. We were discussing the characters on the TV show Smallville, and Jill mentioned Pete. "Who's Pete?" said, Neung, forgetting for a moment. Now, for those of you who don't know the show, it has perhaps nine or ten regular or semi-regular characters, and Pete is the only one who is African-American. "Pete is Clark Kent's friend," said Jill.
"Oh yeah," said Neung, "he's the one with hair that is this short."
4/7/2007
Family
The last couple of weeks were crazily busy for both Jill and myself. She was doing a lot of teaching, including some new topics for her, and I had to make a trip to the U.S. Then we were working together on a very intense two-day consulting project. It was also Neung's last week at school, with all the extra stuff that that entails. Meanwhile, in the middle of last week I strained my back badly. (And can I just say that I am very aggrieved about that? It reminds me of my father's disk problems, and i remember that I always felt he seemed very old when he hurt his back. But he was unfit and overweight. I am probably as fit as I have ever been, and my abs are in pretty good shape. I'm not supposed to have back injuries!)
All in all, it wasn't the best time for an unscheduled trip to Jakarta.
Sanam telephoned on Friday evening. Neung's grandfather, Panya, who was working in Indonesia, was in the hospital. It took a while to work out what exactly was the matter, during which time we entertained visions of him being permanently paralyzed from some kind of work accident. It turned out that he had had a stroke, and had been taken to hospital in Jakarta. Panya is actually not that much older than I am. But he has always seemed much older: he has had a hard life, and smokes heavily, and I guess it finally caught up to him.
So, the next morning, Jill, Neung, and I flew out there. Jakarta is not somewhere I know, and it is not the easiest of cities to navigate. It also has the reputation of being a relatively dangerous place, particularly for Westerners, so I was not that comfortable being there. But we always felt that, when Neung came to live with us, we also sort of acquired a new set of in-laws. We had always told Sanam and Panya that we were family, and would be there for them if they needed us. We never had any doubt that we needed to make the trip.
When we finally tracked the hospital down and got to see him, Panya was better than we expected. He had suffered a brain-stem stroke, but was able to talk and move his arms and legs. Right now he can walk, though with difficulty. The most obvious symptom is that, most of the time, there is a kind of hiccup in his breathing. The stroke has obviously hit him hard -- how could it not? I wrote that he has always seemed older than his years, but he has also always seemed strong, so it was a shock to see him in a hospital bed.
Jill and Neung stayed for two more days, allowing Panya to see Neung three days in a row. Then they went back to Singapore, and I stayed in Jakarta. The doctors had said that he would be fit to travel in a couple of days, so I decided to stay in order to accompany him back to Thailand. The company he was working for were a great help -- they dealt with everything surrounding his hospitalization, and also arranged a ticket for him to travel back to Thailand. Then I went with him from Jakarta to Phuket and checked him into a Thai hospital overnight. We wanted to be sure that he had a thorough checkup and also we thought it was good for him to be monitored after making the trip. The next day Sanam came down from Ban Nam Khem with some friends, we checked him out of the hospital -- he was very eager to leave -- and took him back home.
Sometimes -- most of the time, actually -- Neung really impresses me. This was not an easy trip for her, any more than it was for Jill and myself. She didn't want to go; she wanted to enjoy being out of school. There was a lot of time in cars and airplanes; there wasn't much for her to do in the Jakarta hotel, and of course it was strange and scary to visit Panya in the hospital. And she is only six. Yet she didn't complain, and when we got to the hospital she just jumped up on the bed next to Panya and cuddled up to him.
We are still anxious. Panya has not yet had a carotid artery scan: he was unable to have the scan yesterday because of his hiccups and (I learned later) he refused to take any kind of sedative or muscle relaxant. The hiccups are no longer plaguing him all the time, thankfully, but they seem to return when he is tired or stressed, and he definitely found hospital tests to be stressful. We heard this morning that he is apparently doing much better, and Sanam has promised to take him for the scan in a few days, when he is feeling better. In the meantime, we just must hope that the blood-thinners prevent him from throwing another clot. To add to the worries, the MRI they conducted in Jakarta showed an incidental finding of a tumor elsewhere in the brain. Whether it is slow- or fast-growing, malignant or benign, we as yet have no idea. As it is asymptomatic, the neuro-surgeon advises doing nothing for the moment, and doing another test in a few months. We will have to see if we can persuade him to submit to that test when the time comes. One problem at a time, though.
Now I am back in Singapore, having had -- once again -- one of the stranger and less pleasant weeks of my life. Yet it was an important week, as well. We had always told Panya and Sanam that we were family. This week, I think we showed it. Sometimes clichés say it best: when we arrived in the Jakarta hospital and Panya saw Neung, his face just lit up. The trip was worth it for that moment.
7/7/2007
Update
A day after returning to Ban Nam Khem, Panya apparently had another stroke, this time weakening the left side of his body. Panya and Sanam honestly do not quite grasp the gravity of this, but we eventualy persuaded them that he had to go back to hospital in Phuket. They went to the other hospital in the town, because Panya had taken a strong dislike to the first one (for reasons that I cannot qute fathom). He has now had the carotid artery scan, and the good news is that it seems to be relatively clear. But we are still unsure how much the second stroke will have set back his rehabilitation -- and of course there is the continuing worry that he will have yet another stroke.
9/7/2007
Excuses
Neung learned English remarkably quickly -- by the time she had been in Singapore for a year her English was as good as any of the native speakers in her class, and she is now apparently reading above her grade level. Maintaining her Thai is more of a struggle, although she is doing quite well on that also, particularly since we hired a Thai helper to ensure that Neung was exposed to Thai daily.
That is the background against which I set this little story. Neung was reading to us last night, and came to the sentence "The air was crisp."
— The air was cold.
— No. Not 'cold'. 'Crisp'.
— The air was skip.
— Crisp.
— Scrip.
— Crisp.
— Scrip.
— No. Cr-isp. Crisp.
— Scrip.
— Cr-i-ss-puh. Crisp.
— Scrip.
And so it went on, until Jill and I collapsed in laughter. Neung was aggrieved.
— Hey! I'm not an English child!
9/7/2007