When Help Given is Help Needed

“Today, there’s only one objective: to make the patient feel that they are not alone in this struggle against cancer.” This was the primary advice the Singapore Cancer Society (SCS) representative Paul Tan told us in the morning briefing.

After all, what could go wrong? The job was simple: deliver a bag of staple food (mostly Carrefour home brands) to the cancer patients under their care. 80 people, 20 cars, 120 recipients, 6 bags per car, 4 hours including lunch, and having the rest of the afternoon off. I’d say yes any day.

Alas, it wasn’t so straight forward, he added. Especially for first time volunteers, this might be the first time they will encounter patients with no lower jaw, see-through throats, feeding tubes into noses, shit bags and other unpleasant treatment a cancer patient has to go through.

To put things in perspective, Paul added that one should not judge the patient at all, and keep the advice, regardless of how sincere it is, to our selves. And never share our mobile phone numbers for our own sake. Keeping the mood positive and the situation practical, he noted that some patients might get too emotional once we discuss about their situation, they might cry or other unexpected might happen. “Cry with them,” he said, and humorously added that we should “keep it to 15 minutes.” In other situations, the patient might live in a “5 room flat with a big TV”, but we often forget that nobody plans for cancer, and many people are caught off guard, not able to sustain the cash flow they used to earn to live by month by month, but not able to sell the flat because they will need to fork out cash to move to a smaller place. Therefore, we are still helping them by providing the needed supplements during this period of time.

Isn’t it always the case? We provide help to people in need when we can, however, we will never know if one day we will be the one receiving aid because things just doesn’t work out. The individual social safety net in a place where everyone’s supposed to “fight for their own lives”, such staple food might even make a life and death difference for some desperate patients.

For one of the recipient for my car, it was speculated as such a situation. After we delivered the food he had to haul it over to the neighbour. For someone his age (70+) it wasn’t possible for him to personally cook for himself, plus he’s in constant pain. I kept thinking whether he has already struck a deal to sell his flat back to his government – so much for public housing.

Then there’s a bigger self-esteem / will-to-live kind of problem, which we didn’t encounter but some of our colleagues did. The fear that people will look down on them, the fear that cancer is “contagious” or even, the fear of knowing about having cancer. One team actually delivered to a family where the family members took the food and told them to make a move quickly as they didn’t want the cancer patient to know that he/she is already diagnosed from cancer.

Keep the patient away from the truth – sounds like channel 8 dramas, and here we are seeing real families doing this.

“No matter what, keep telling them cancer can be cured, and encourage them to stay strong and stay healthy.” Fair enough, at least this is not a true or false statement as we humanity haven’t reached the end of the tunnel for all kinds of cancer. Some cancer can be treated, and many cancerous tumors, if discovered and removed early, can be eradicated entirely.

Unfortunately this wasn’t the case for another patient we met who started with liver cancer and saw the tumour spreading to his whole body. Already parts of his liver and internal organs were removed from 2 operations, but now it’s the leg, requiring him to take morphine and walk with a stick. It was comforting that the wife has been very supportive, and he’s still fairly sharp and conversant.

Some even made a stereotypical racist observation that Malay and Indian families tend to get through these tough times together better as they often stay together as a big family, while Chinese families tend to leave their older generation to their own device. I didn’t get to make this comparison, but what we saw was the living conditions of rental flats (the infamous one bedroom flats) and the social fabric around many individual older generation.

Many patients didn’t explicitly invite us into their flats. As the volunteer’s personalities differ, some will “force” their way through all sorts of “tricks”, like helping to move the immovably heavy bag of goods into the house, or opening up the bag to explain each of the food items as a way to strike up a conversation, while others simply take the gazillion “thank you”s from the patient as a cue to wish them all the best and move on.

Would it be better if we had pre-prepare some gift items, like a small get well card? Maybe. SCS didn’t release the families and names of the patients we were delivering to until the 11^th hour, so there’s not much time to personalize such cards.

Another point we learned was that even SCS depends on such larger scale activity to stay in constant contact with their patients. For example, we only learned today that 2 of the patients on the list have passed on. Upon receiving such feedback, SCS will switch to providing some other form of assistance to the family to cope with the lost instead.

Speaks a lot for a 5-decade old society, which is just one of the many charitable organizations in town. I hardly know any part of their operations when we did a small round of fund raising 4 years ago – it was just a cheque handed over. Volunteering allows us to take a closer look to this kindness operation. True to the business development nature of some of my colleagues, already we’re talking about mobile applications and other internet / gadget-ish things to enhance the entire experience for both the patients as well as the volunteers.

Sorry, no pictures. If you have nothing better to do, go volunteer today, or better still, get your organization to go together!