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Jason Chan, a retired counsellor, an ordinary human being, decided to share his extraordinary life experience. He is one of my dearest friends, whom I have known for decades, and is a person that I admire.

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A Rather Different World

CHAPTER 16    -   The Fall that Matters

 

January 14, 2025

I was admitted to Emergency on February 3rd, 2017, Friday. Metro Vancouver was snowing heavily all day. A dinner was planned with colleagues for Chinese New Year celebration and to farewell a colleague. I drove with exceptional caution in my car with manual gear against the snow along Hwy 1 westbound and arrived at the restaurant early. It was very quiet with no familiar face, and remained so after 6:00 pm. As usual I shared my frustration with my wife by phone. She told me to call other colleagues. I did so but got no satisfying answer. Then my wife called me to drive home immediately. I returned home safely after an uninteresting drive. Soon after that, my son arranged for me to be sent to the Emergency.

 

Later I was told that I called the wrong group and my friend had to call my wife to find out what was the matter. In fact the cancellation was communicated by phone and email in the morning. By then my brain and body both in fatigue did not function properly. I got stuck with the original message and was too exhausted to confirm. Later I learned from my colleague that my writings on that day shrunk half in size and the contents were repetitive.

 

Actually, all the fingers could not coordinate well the night before. It took ten minutes to retrieve the car key, unlock the security lock, and start the engine. A day before that I asked my wife how to use a pager. A few days earlier, I spent multiple times writing my monthly statistical report. Still I forgot to send it out.

 

Two weeks before admission, my son observed that I skipped book reading before sleep, and slept more without recovering. Since my wife and I were so used to tiredness, we treated this fatigue as ordinary. No alarm was made.

 

We recalled the hard fall that happened in downtown Vancouver a few days before Christmas in December, 2016 when asked by the surgeon who did the spur hole operation. On December 21st, we toured the Christmas light display and the Market downtown. On the way I turned left while descending the open stairway of a hotel. My right shoe struck against an one inch cement stuck out from the ground. Instinctively my both arms stretched to the front with the whole body jumping forward, like a swimmer into the pool racing for metals. “Pang” was the sound in my brain, I landed hard on the pavement with my left face hitting the ground and my head shook. I sat on the ground to calm down and examine my whole body by touching with bare hands after taking off the gloves. To protect from the severe coldness, I was in full winter gear, including, long coat, thick gloves, and a Russian style hat with clothes on both sides covering my face. No wound or cut was found, except a tiny scratch on the left glass of the newly bought spectacles. After assuring no fracture bone and bleeding, we went to the market. Observations continued in the following days for deterioration, like, pain, swelling, fatigue and dizziness. Without these we waited for the Chinese New Year. 

 

Indeed, the brain with the texture like tofu shook violently inside the skull when my face hit the ground. And I was on blood thinner to lower the risk of blockages of blood flow. A tiny vein was broken releasing blood slowly between the brain and the skull. Time pushed me closer to the gate of hell.
 

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