Stories that need to be told

Imagine after three months of hospitalization during which you were considered a ‘psychiatric case’ because the fluid toxin in your peritoneal cavity had somehow affected your brain!  Then, you finally woke up one day with a clearer mind and you were allowed to read a newspaper. The General Election was over and ………people all over the world are demanding for equal treatment, democracy and less corruption.

Then you realized that the whole world has changed! It has changed for the better!

WOW!!

I sat on my hospital bed, slightly stunt from all the news. I have been in hospital that long….?

As I read more and more in the next few days, and had the time to reflect on my two-month hospitalization.

Why is this happening?

The strange ascites case and what I was most concerned with in eHomemakers just before the hospitalization – fundraising for Pong Seow Chin’s TV documentary, The Undying Flame, which eHomemakers was about to start filming in March just before I was hospitalized. In February, 2013, through the crowd-sourcing platform, Mystartr, we fundraised Rm17,000 to make a TV documentary on Pong’s rehabilitation. We want to tell her stories so she can achieve her dream of being a motivational speaker.

As I struggle to cope with hospitalization in a public ward and being an ascites patient these few weeks, I begin to appreciate more and more of Pong’s perseverance and cheerfulness. It takes an extra-ordinary person to still speak fluently about anything even though she is in pain. And to keep smiling. I am unable to smile laying on the hospital bed even though I am not in great pains like Pong.

After a near death experience in the hospital in May, I now realize that my life has a higher purpose.

Through this blog, I hope to make changes especially in health care and economic assistance for all who deserved to be given assistance.  I am no longer afraid of any ISA or jail for speaking up. If an ordinary person like me can’t speak about the going-ons which I can see as a patient, then this country is really going downhill.

Therefore this blog will have these objectives:

n Help people who become patients with chronic illnesses to cope with hospitalization through tips, checklists and my personal experiences.

n Help ascites patient to cope with the long term treatment.

n Speak up for the health care status of poor Malaysians in the public hospital wards.

n Use my near death experience to promote interfaith understanding.

n Tell the story of disadvantaged people especially patients whose perseverance and determination to get on with life fully show us the way to live. And the way to love life.

n Dispel the myth about death through cancer and chronic illnesses by portraying illness-coping  from positive view points.

n Continue to tell my experience as a social enterprenuer.

I shall and I will get them done, as Pong Seow Chin says.

Chong Sheau Ching

June 8, 2013