995 in 2021

This past year I have called for the ambulance more times than I can count. Not for myself, or my family members, but for my elderly neighbour.

We call him Wak Hassan, and he is 80-something years old. He has really bad asthma, and the trifecta of chronic illnesses: diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart problems.

But the pain in his chest, and the gasping breaths he struggles to take, are not, I think, only physical pain.

There is a psychic pain there too. A broken-heartedness I can feel.

It is not that he has no family. He does. But all of them work shifts, and so, he is often left alone at home. He wants to go downstairs and talk to his friends, but he doesn’t have the strength to do so.

On good days, he visits my flat just like a regular visitor would. He might ask for a dish of whatever my parents have cooked that day. And we oblige him.

Unlike your regular visitor, though, he stares into a faraway distance, his mind wandering to who knows where. The television is on, but he wouldn’t be watching it.

On bad days, he says he would crawl to my doorstep to ask my family to call an ambulance for him. His breathing would be laboured then, and the paramedics who come invariably give him oxygen to breathe better.

I have been inside his bedroom. Except there is no bed. Wak Hassan spends his days and nights on a recliner — not quite upright, and not quite flat.

There is a terrible in-between-ness about it all.

I know why there is no bed. There is no bed because his flat has bed bugs. There are tell-tale black spots on the wall.

On the day he last requested me, just several days ago, to call for an ambulance, I could smell urine on him, and he was wearing the same clothes he wore the day before. Diaper likely unchanged, I thought, and body likely unshowered.

As we waited for the paramedics, he said to me: “I don’t think I will last much longer.”

Grasping his hand, and looking into his eyes, I told him: “However long you last, we are here to support you.”

And then the paramedics came, and took him away. It took all his strength to wave goodbye to me.