TRAUMATIC INJURIES

1. Breaking Bones – Sometimes fixing broken bones can take your surgeon back to his younger days when his own bones needed some loving care. 

My body sailed over the sofa, my toes slicing through the air, my heart yearning for the satisfying crack of my foot against Trishul‘s plump cheek. 

He moved his head aside, of course.

So like the animated coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, I crashed down onto the hard mosaic floor, my hand crumpled beneath my breathless body. 

2. The Smashed Elbow – when joints are damaged (almost) beyond all hope of repair, sometimes it takes the miracle of teamwork to put them back together.

I first saw Mr Gan in the orthopaedic clinic in Sungai Buloh , arm slung across his barrel chest, elbow purple and about to burst with swelling.

Dislocated… shattered…disjointed…I searched for a word to describe the damage to the anxious patient.. In the end we settled for ‘badly broken’.

And that’s how we all ended up, some weeks later, in the operating room, crowded around an unconscious Mr Gan.