Have you ever looked around and realized that the world is just replete with promises of satisfaction? Think about it!

Blockbuster movies, parties with friends, breakaway shopping sprees, travel trips, hunting for music, chasing good books, enjoying food, and all the colorful product advertisements everywhere - do they not all target at our search for satisfaction? And the world is just full of such promises of satisfaction - that it is blinding.

Many of them are short-lived. Some of them are lies. We all know. Yet it is easy to get lost, and in the process, all we end up thinking and speaking of is about ourselves. All of this is like "a chasing after the wind", as the book of Ecclesiastes aptly puts it.

There is much more to say, but I'll stop. It actually takes some effort to think about this in the context of our personal lives (yours and mine)! But tell me what you think.

Grandpa passed away on the day I arrived home just before the last Christmas. It was a weird week that followed, beginning my holidays back home after several years overseas.

Weakly could he still nudge his head when he saw me standing beside his bed that morning, but it was a swift deterioration, and he passed away - so quickly - about nine hours later.

In retrospect, should I have spent more time with him earlier the day? Should I have insisted more strongly for him to be admitted to hospital earlier? I don't know; in retrospect there will always be many what-if's and if-only's. But I'm thankful I arrived home in time when he still had enough consciousness left to recognize me. I know he had always wanted to see me for the years I was away.

In the week that followed with the funeral service and relatives visiting, I realized, too, that there are many things so close, yet not usually talked about.

What other times in our lives do we talk about finding a good and suitable cemetery to buy a spot, in preparation for the future? What other times in our lives are we so open, even in the extended family about life, death and the next generations?

So I suppose I have grown up, my friends are getting married, my parents are soon retiring, and my young cousins now able to walk and talk. The people I have around me - many so very dear - are changing, and will not be around forever. Sometimes this is closer than we think.

Indeed we are all but a mist, that appear for a little while and then vanishes. Yet God has set eternity in the human heart. It amazes me, but I know many avoid the topic.

In the nursing station I overheard her say in a firm voice, “I told her clearly, ‘if you continue to swear, I'll just walk off and stop looking after your daughter.' I don't need to tolerate this kind of behaviour. I don't work to be abused.”

“Yes, but I don’t think she was swearing particularly to anyone though,” her colleague beside her tried to reason.

“It doesn't matter. This kind of behaviour is simply not acceptable, especially in a hospital ward."

Some patients or their relatives can be inexplicably rude and difficult to deal with, I can testify! Dealing with them have been terribly unpleasant and stressful experiences, needless to say. The conversation between the nurses about zero tolerance for abuse happened more than a year ago now, but somehow, now and then I still remember it and it makes me think...

What are our real conditions for helping someone?

Can you imagine someone helping you unconditionally? It's a very strange feeling to be at the receiving end, is what I think.

This is a story during my week of attachment with the Paediatric Outpatient Clinics... (names anonymized, of course)

Clarice's aunt was her carer. She had brought Clarice in due to concerns about her oppositional behaviour at home - trashing her scooter into windows, hitting her brother, skipping school, coming back home late without informing her aunt, and so forth, according to the referral letter.

But walking into the room was a surprisingly rather demure young teenage girl, dressed in pretty pastel colors with a little flowery handbag on the side. Perhaps she was just more reserved around strangers, especially before the doctor?

Her mom was in prison for drug abuse. Her dad had been gone for several years to somewhere nobody knew. Her aunt was single, but was taking care of two more children in addition to Clarice, all whom had to be taken away from their parents for child protection issues. She was really running quite tired, she said in our discussion, coming to her "end of wits" in trying to manage the behavioural problems in her house.

But we didn't think that Clarice had any "medical problem" such as ADHD that we could address with medicines. The most we could do is to recommend her to give counsellors and child psychiatrists another try. I felt a little bad for what seemed to be like pushing the onus away, but it was perhaps the right thing to do.

At the end of the consultation when interestingly not much else could be said from us, the paediatrician turned to the teenage girl sitting quietly on her seat. "Clarice," she said, "if there were three wishes you could make and they would come true, what would they be?"

"That I could have a hundred wishes more," Clarice replied without too long a delay, but she laughed when she realized it was a silly answer.

"Um..., that I would never grow old," she added with a self-conscious grin, "andddd...."

"... And that mom, dad and I can be together...," she said after a pause.

This is one of the stories when I worked in the Neonatology Intensive Care Unit - NICU. Babies, so very small, so very fragile, in incubators filling the room. Machines kept a constant eye on each of them. They were all special, yet was this a farm to grow babies? I would rather call it a nursery, one where everyone was trying their best. There is something special inherent in little children, it seems.

And on this baby's cot were photos of dad and mom's wedding. A shining bride and a dashing bridegroom. They were a young, newly wed couple, and this baby girl was their first child who was supposed to carry all of their dreams. But I wondered if she, sleeping quietly with a tube down her trachea connected to an artificial ventilator faithfully working to help her breathe, knew that.

Mom happened to be on-scene the previous time when the baby refluxed and breathed in (aspirated) some of her gastric contents. It was a really serious problem as you might imagine, but this baby was prone to doing it. The stomach acid would eat away the things along its path, and the lungs would get inflammed and damaged very badly.

It was a full-on resuscitation attempt that ensued, and the whole scene frightened mom quite a bit. She described her heart having "stopped twice". Not everyone sees these things everyday. They question something deep in our hearts we often forget, but I digress.

A few days later, mom called for a Not-For-Resuscitation (NFR) decision on her baby girl. She was insistent on it, probably not without reason - and it was very hard on the staff, especially since the little baby girl had gone through so many resuscitations and survived. Of course the baby girl was the daughter of her mom, but the medical and nursing staff couldn't come to an agreement, even after another long discussion during the morning ward round. We were at loss.

What is in store for this baby girl? Who can tell? There would probably be some brain damage that will leave a mark permanently all her life. It was difficult to even put a figure on the probability and severity of the disability, but surely the figures increased a little bit with every event that needed resuscitation.

Later the day, when I was winding up my jobs and getting ready to head home, I saw mom sitting beside her baby. Mom leaned forwards to put her face close, as though to listen every of her baby's breaths. Her index finger wrapped around her baby's teeny little hands. Unbelievably small they were, but beautifully pink.

I suddenly realized, then, that the decision must had been tremendously difficult for mom as well. It could not have been one that was made so blithely. I have no question about her love for her child, that I must say.

It is hard, for me, to think of anything while trying to refrain from passing any form of judgment. Tell me what you think.