Hail the new addiction MO! by Dr. Afiza Azmee

God doesn’t give you what you ask for. What you want doesn’t simply materialise from the great blue sky.

Life doesn’t work that way, alas.

Instead, He gives you the means and the tools and the experience that you can make use of to attain what you want.

As I have mentioned before, I asked God for patience as I am fully aware that I am  lacking in the quality of patience. I am easy-going in mundane, daily matters. Mundane routine don’t flap don’t faze me or disturb my mood. I couldn’t care less about which restaurant serves what good dishes, I am not a hypercritical foodie. I eat anything and everything. (I am only particular about coffee. But not even the brands of coffee do I care. Just any good tasting coffee will do no matter what the brand is). I am not a fashionista. I am not brand-conscious. I wear whatever that is nice-looking and cheap. You don’t have to please me with expensive presents. When in doubt, just give me the latest book that has won an Orange Prize or a Pulitzer Prize or a Booker Prize.

I don’t get offended easily. I don’t have an opinion about food, clothes, houses, cars, the best way to clean or cook. I am not a fanatic fan of football/celebrities/dramas/movies. I can never understand how fights ever get started at the stadium. Just doesn’t make any sense to me. I am, however, a fanatic fan of books but it’s been a long time since I last got worked up about which book  is better than the other. I have accepted that people have different taste when it comes to books and authors that they like.

But when I feel some people have crossed certain boundaries, certain concepts of truth/justice/fairness (my version of it, at least) or certain universal principles that I think everyone should have, I cannot calm myself down. In such situations, I am adamant that things should go my way. My way of thinking is better. And if you refuse to see it and put the blame on me, manipulate me in anyway (or try to)… if you don’t immediately see that I was right (that I don’t insist you to go my way because it is MY way, but because it is the right way and the most just, the most righteous for everyone), then I get immediately upset.

You see, a beauty queen will be upset if people criticise her image.  A surgeon is defensive if people criticise how he approaches a certain surgery. A  designer is upset if people criticise her design. A singer would feel humiliated if people criticise her singing. A chef/a cook feels defensive if people suggest that there is a better way to cook rendang, for example. (Been to any gotong-royong memasak, recently? You will get what I mean about how sensitive and defensive a cook can be, it is so funny!)

I consider myself as a self-developed thinker and ethicist. I don’t defend only myself, but I also defend others, especially my patients, against stigma, against their bosses, against their tormentors (read: husbands). I have called up employers, I have called up husbands, I have called up instructors (pretending to ask for collaborative history but actually really just want to SUBTLY let them know that ‘hey I know what you are doing to my patient. She confides in me. I am on to you, now. You better be careful in how you proceed with my patient from now on. She is no longer alone in this. You better watch out’ Hahah. Contrary to the belief of my family members, I can really be sweetly harmful when I put my mind to it, as opposed to stormy harmful. The storm can come later if required. There is an art to subtle threat that I have learned in the past.) Sometimes, just doing the phone call is helpful…sometimes you need to follow-up on the phone call with a more assertive action. Once, I even offered to accompany my patient to lodge a police report against a particular member of her family… so that she won’t chicken out at the last minute as she always does (disappointing me each time). But she didn’t take up on my offer and I was left frustrated. Maybe I should be less over-involved to protect myself against this sort of frustration. Some people will never take the assertive action  that they should, it makes you want to pull your hair in distressed on their behalf. Maybe I should really learn to accept that some people just deserve the problem that they have.

There are risks I took without consulting my specialist because I know if I consult them, I might get a different management plan altogether that would not allow me to do what I want to do for my patients. It doesn’t happen always. Most of the time, management is pretty straightforward and we see eye to eye. But when it does happen, it makes me feel stressed.

(I think most MOs feel the same way, anyway. Many MOs take risks of doing something behind the specialist back because that’s what they want for the patient. I am not the only one. Many MOs in other departments also, if they are senior enough and if they feel bothered enough, would have learned how to manipulate the system to get what they feel their patients deserve. I bet, many specialist when they were an MO would have done something like that as well. So they really shouldn’t be upset if their MOs now do the same thing. It’s part of our learning process and that particular action of taking-risk would enrich your clinical experience and eventually serves you well as a specialist. We are no longer HOs who just follow mindlessly. Sometime we make mistakes and commit errors in clinical judgment but those experience must be gone through.  Sometimes we need the freedom to determine what we want for our patients, right? That is one way you can attain job satisfaction and self-actualisation in who you are as a doctor, who is inherently an agent of good and positive change for others. It gets frustrating if you can’t do something because your boss thinks differently from you. Sedangkan you yang tengok patient in the casualty and the clinic. You are the one who went for home visit. You are the first liner! Nothing you say to present the case would ever equal to the specialist seeing the case herself/himself. So you are the one who knows what your patient really needs. You have to fight for them. So, there are minor things you do for  your patients that you won’t consult with your boss if you know he/she won’t agree with you. Or you will manipulate the system in your own way, present things in a different way. I know which specialist will sign OKU form easily so that my patients can get a much needed welfare money, before some politicians can swindle the money away. I know which specialist will allow me to admit patients into the ward. If my patient needs expert counselling that I cannot deliver due to time constraints and lack-of-expertise,  I know which specialist will willingly takeover a difficult case if I consult the case with her. I know which specialist will deliver a good scolding to a patient who needs that scolding. If I don’t want to give something that a rude demanding patient insists for, I know which specialist will have the same line of thinking as I do and I will consult with that specialist so that I can tell the patient “Sorry, even my own specialist say no. See?” Haha. You know how it is…as a lowly ‘female MO’, sometimes I need a male consultant to deliver the same message effectively because some patients would only listen to males! So I have learned to call my male consultant to say exactly the same thing to this patient who keeps bothering me and my addiction SN. That shut him up for good! Haha. )

So, because I think of myself as a logician, a thinker and an ethicist, I get defensive if people criticise my logic and my ethical reasoning and how I want things to be done. Sorry…everyone is allowed to be upset about SOMETHING, right? Like the beauty queens, the designers, the surgeons, the singers and the chefs of this world. Depending on how you define yourself, you get defensive about those things.

I also pride myself of being an amateur linguist. I would probably be quite sensitive about anyone criticising my essay or my blog post. Once when I was in Form 5, I had argued with my English teacher when she criticised my English essay. (But I never, for example, argued with my Math teacher because heck, I knew I was bad in maths, so why would I get defensive about it, right?) My excuse for arguing with her was because she said my essay was plagiarised from a novel. I asked her, “which novel?”. She couldn’t name it, of course. Just because my essay was good with a different plot twist, doesn’t mean it was plagiarised from a novel, for God’s sake. (she hated that plot twist because there was a controversial element to it that she opposed to, being conservatively religious as she is, compared to me at that time. In my defense, I was just being creative. If she didn’t like that plot twist, she could just tell me so; rather than accusing me of plagiarising!) My sister was a novelist! My father wrote poems and quotes at the first page of all his text books when he was younger! My younger sister is a TESL teacher. My inclination towards language and literary creativity runs in the family!  Our whole family are great readers! We talk about books all the time and we compete with each other in coming up with great phrases all the time. So can you imagine how upset I became when I was accused of plagiarising a non-existent novel?? Such an unjust accusation, not supported by any evidence, directed towards my ability which I took most pride in. My God, I wanted to blow up! I called up my parents and told them what this teacher said to me. My father was very angry when he heard about it. I had no idea that he could be that upset over it, or else I wouldn’t have told  him.

For the record, my parents were never the sort who would fight my battle for me. Before this incident, they would always assume that I deserve whatever rare scolding I might get from teachers. If I got bad marks in any of my test, it must be because I did not study enough rather than because the teachers were bad at teaching. They have never confronted any of my teachers for anything…. until this! I was surprised when my mother and my elder sister came to MRSM Langkawi bringing a bag full of my previous essays and short stories that I had written in the past to show to the teacher that I have always written with the objective of being creative. That just because I introduced a plot twist that she may not like was not enough justification to accuse me of plagiarising. I tried to stop them from coming. But my father insisted and I felt so stressed that they wanted to come. It was so ironic. All these times, they never wanted to side with me when I feel I was unfairly scolded by my teacher. But when I didn’t want them to come, (because heck, I was already 17 and I could fight for myself) they insisted in coming! I didn’t know whether to feel touched or irritated. The teacher finally apologized to me after my mother and my sister went to see her. (I was not there when they confronted her because I had a Math test.) And I also apologized to my teacher because I knew how forceful my mother could be when she was feeling angry. I was thankful that it wasn’t my father who came. Or else, the situation would totally be out of control. And I learned from that experience that I should never tell my parents things that I could handle myself. Haha. (This sealed my fate as a very skeptical person towards authority, in general. I became even more skeptical after 2 years of housemanship. I swear I will never put myself in the position of needing any validation from an unjust authority ever again. I avoid authority because I never want to kiss their ass. I think of all authorities as having a tendency to abuse their power unless proven otherwise. I don’t know how I am going to cure this overvalued idea of mine… just knowing that I might not be thinking fairly doesn’t cure my tendency to feel exactly like that! I have met many nice people in the position of power, and I think of them as the exception rather than the norm. I guess, even I can be illogical at times.)

I also pride myself of being a good reader, so I was VERY DEFENSIVE when I first met the brilliant Miss A who interrogated me on my choice of reading which, I now admit, was not as sophisticated as her own choice of delicacies consisting of many notable classic literatures that I had never even heard of before our paths crossed. Compared to Miss A, I was a novice in reading. My defensive stance became meek when I realised I could actually learn from her.

Well, everyone has some stuff they get very sensitive about.

But whatever it is, no matter what I said to defend my temperament, it does not justify my lack of patience. Like Miss A had said, we should aspire to be the one with the bigger heart. Ignore minor annoyance, walk away from the source of your major irritation, and if you can’t ignore those things any longer, then educate people with kindness. Don’t snap!

Or perhaps, I have attained the age of maturity to have learned not to respond to anything and everything. Just walk away. (I feel more wise and matured just writing about this! Haha. But even now, I cannot imagine how I could have dealt the situation with my English teacher any better. I mean… even maturity and wisdom have a limit somewhere.)

So, having an excellent insight about my severe lack of patience, I plead to God to bestow on me some measure of patience. Make me nice, lol.

And He answered my prayer by making me into an Addiction Medical Officer.

Hahaha. Yeah. He gives me the tools and the experience I need to acquire patience. He doesn’t just arrange for me wake up one day and be Mother Teresa.

Addiction patients can be manipulative. Check.

They sometimes use religious concept out of context to justify their actions. Check

They don’t have baseline standard criteria that I demand in people around me. Check.

They tick all the boxes that would totally TRY my patience. And if patience is a sort of muscle that have remained atrophied all my life before, I am gonna get a lot of exercise these days, trust me! Haha.

So, wish me luck. Hopefully, I can become a nice person through this experience. Something good may come out of me having to deal with the population in which anti-social traits are prevalent.

After all, who am I to judge people? We never know how we will end our lives. Just because some people are not up to snuff now, doesn’t mean they will never change. Maybe the ongoing never-ending struggle that they have to face to overcome their addiction (although at times they fail in their struggle again and again) gives them one massive pahala jihad people like us don’t get.

You earn pahala through struggle, right? It is not the outcome/natijah that brings you the reward from Allah. It is your effort that counts. And with drug addicts, the effort is constant for the rest of their lives. And every time they fall from grace, fail in their struggle and then repent, they get pahala taubat each time.  Who knows, maybe some drug addicts are more beloved in the eyes of God, than us normal people who only go through life blindly and repetitively with no major struggle whatsoever.

A food for thought, huh?

So far, life as an addiction MO is nice. I get to stay in my own Addiction room at the back, that’s the best part. Even though anyone can use that room at anytime (it’s not like I am given an exclusive right to it by my HOD, unfortunately) but not many MOs go to that room anyway, because the room is quite isolated at the back of the clinic. So I have come to think of that room as mine. (I am quite possessive of that room, to be honest. Even though my name was not written on the door of that room, I really think of it as mine and would feel quite forlorn if some other MO sits in that room instead of me. Haha) The isolation space that the room provides is the best part…. a space for me to do my work and to think out loud while listening to my kind of music. It’s like a separate universe from the rest of the crowded chaos at the front.

Ah… peace and serenity! I could really get used to being an Addiction MO. Having my own room is sweet! Sweet, indeed! I love it. My patients love it. We can talk privately without background noises disturbing our conversation. No patients knocking on my door, asking “Lambat lagi ke, doctor?”, annoying me with their disturbance while I am talking to another patient.  I can focus on my patient in tranquility. They feel heard and satisfied. And I feel satisfied. That is the sort of environment conducive for proper consultation and disclosure.

That room at the back is also very conducive to turn me into a Miss-Nice-Girl. LOL.

So, that’s how it comes about that this ‘being nice’ business is not so hard these days. In fact, it is rewarding in its own way.

So, until next time, folks! I shall try to update once a month. Might be hard though with the exam looming near.

Until then, I remain, your humble blogger.