My life in
Sarawak
a story of a Malaya
doctor working in the Land of Hornbill
I had never dreamed of working in Sarawak. In the
application form of civil service passed to me in Medical Faculty of UKM, just
after the final exam result was released, I wrote down Johor, Melaka and Negeri
Sembilan as my three choices. However, when I received the posting notice, I was
only mildly surprised to note that I was posted to Kuching General Hospital.
After all, I gathered that Kuching must be a big town.
My classmate who was posted together with me is Kok Juan Loong. We came to Kuching in the same flight, and we met another two Semenanjung gratuates in the airport. They were Tan Suzet and Ong Gek Bee, both from Malaya University. They appeared very calm and independent, refused our offer to carry their heavy hand luggage. I can still remember the way two of them carried each side of the sport-bag, walking down the long alley of Subang Airport.
Weeks before the departure, I obtained my restricted passport from Muar Immigration Department. It had a blue colour cover, and cost me five ringgit. I could not remembered who told me that I needed a passport to came to Sarawak, itself one of the states of Malaysia. I was and still an open-minded person, so I took this matter-of-factly and never grumbled on this seemingly oddity, which to certain civil servants from Peninsular was a total absurdity (though far from being a nuisance, as we received no-expiry stamps).
Altogether four of us arrived in Kuching Airport uneventfully and innocently, unaware of what possible progress of the story would be. It could be said that that particular fine day of 31st. of July 1989 was the page title of the first Chapter of "Our wage-earning adulthood in the Land of Hornbill across South China Sea at Borneo Island".
My first deep cut in Sarawak memory was the largeness of
the round-about near to airport. Juan Loong and I was admiring it in awe through the
looking glass of the airport taxi, thinking it could hold a football match no
doubt.
We met one senior medical assistant in Sarawak General Hospital (SGH) to get the key of the houseman quarters within the compound of hospital. Later we found that some housemen, among them was Dr Harcharant Singh, were housed in the quarters behind the nurses quarters, which was quite a walking distance.
There were about 10 rooms in the houseman quartersf. Juan Loong and I were roomates in the two-partition rooms. Gek Bee and Suzet were in another room.
Our doctor's life started the next day in the ward. I was put on active call immediately on that night in paediatric ward. Facing with piles of in-coming admission case notes, I had to forgo the college-taught detail history taking and adopt a faster and straight-to-the-point method. The cases came in like streams. I had to write down management details in case notes, where the nurses could follow - liked treatment, lab tests, observation schedule etc. Again we could not follow wholesalely what the medical textbooks proposed, as some of the treatment regime and lab tests were not appropriate or unavailable in the local context. To be professional and to be fair to the patients, I continuously and shamelessly consulted my senior colleagues, and, liked what young doctors did in all the hospitals in the world, the nurses in the ward. My situation was likened to a man thrown into the river and forced to swim and keep going.
