I just came back from my ambulance run last night! I had a total of 5 calls from 9pm to 3am...all back to back! It's really the you get out of the ambulance and into the office, and the alarm goes. Quite exciting larh...but then 2 were false alarms.

Actually I thought that I would feel superbly excited after ambulance run...but then not really. Instead, I feel really sad. Of the 3 (real) calls we had yesterday, all 3 were elderly patients complaining of giddiness and SOB. And I mean while we were at the run, I can gripe that it's damn boring...no trauma cases and all...how sian...But now that i'm home and showered and comfortable...suddenly i feel really sad.

Especially there was this old lady. She complained of giddiness and SOB so we went to her house. It was a small 2 room HDB flat. And 1 second into her house, I wondered who could live in that house and not experience giddiness and SOB. You step into the house and the 4 walls already begin to close in on you. The walls are yellow with age and spotted with dirt and house mites. There's no tv. And the air in the house smells like it hasn't seen daylight in years.

You step into her room, and you'll see this extremely emaciated old lady lying on a bed. She's so frail and thin that even though the mattress under her was so tattered, fluffy and torn with age, her weight hardly even indents the soft mattress under her. She can hardly open her eyes to look at us even as we call out to her. A look around the small 2 rooms, and you can see she is lying on the only bed.

Her son sleeps on the even more tattered and torn mattress across the room. her son says she fell in the toilet and hit her head yesterday. A look into the toilet and it's dirtier, dingier and smaller than any public toilet I've ever been to. How can anyone not fall inside there?

And so 10 seconds into the house, and my world began to spin too. A look at her medications show many anti-depressants, anti-hypertensives and many others. And I begin to wonder how many anti-depressants I would need if I had to live in the same conditions.

And of course later, it was the same thing, we sent her to hospital. And she would receive medical attention over the next few days and address her acute medical problems. But she would have to return to her house, and none of her problems would have been solved, except for that acute giddiness and hematoma from her fall.

And after all those, I return to my comfortable and clean room in my clean house. And this wave of sadness suddenly overwhelms me. And I wonder what I can ever do to help pple like her and her son.

Let me just escape to my world of vcds. Where all pple are young and beautiful, and where all problems are so inconsequential and fun.