Falling Down To Earth

I just read with interest the other day about how a karaoke hostess managed to survive a 12-storey fall. It reminded me of my own fall more than 15 years ago.

I was doing my National Service then and had 'booked out' for the weekend the night before. I had just gotten up after enjoying the first bout of adequate sleep to which I was entitled after a week at Pulau Tekong. I was still exhausted but happy and looking forward to meeting my girlfriend later during the next day so I could present her a small cosmetic ring which I had bought from Perlini's Silver. It was cheap but - I fervently hoped - symbolic.

As fate would have it, I was admiring the ring at the window when it fell out of my fingers and landed onto the sun-awning of the 3rd storey unit (I lived on the 4th floor), resting somewhere near the edge. Looking back (and I have looked back on that incident thousands of times), it was so easy to have gotten a feather duster or a longer instrument to nudge the ring off the sloping precipice and then go downstairs to retrieve it. I suppose, if I were to be honest, I was lazy and didn't fancy a walk down (and then up again) 4 flights of stairs (we then lived on the top level of a 4-storey walk-up apartment). Besides, I had, despite objections from my parents, always been climbing onto the awning to retrieve objects which had dropped onto it. Nothing had happened all those times, so surely nothing would happen this time....

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In the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, there is a chapter dealing with plane crashes. In it, he shows that planes don't just go dramatically crashing out of the sky but that virtually all plane crashes are a combination and accummulation of small factors and circumstances that bring into being what would ordinarily be a very unlikely scenario.

- If it hadn't been raining before such that the awning was slippery
- If I had not been wearing socks to keep my feet, already accustomed to the hot and balmy nights at Pulau Tekong during weekdays, warm in the air-conditioned comfort of my room for that weekend, such that the grip of my feet on the awning was reduced.
- If the ring had fallen 5cm further away from the edge of the awning, making it possible for me to comfortably retrieve it with one hand while holding onto my window grille with all the fingers of my other hand.
- If the awning had been evenly slippery throughout, such that I would have not been convinced by the dryness of the spot where I first stepped onto that it was no more dangerous than usual.
- If the phone had not suddenly rang when when I had, in a bid to to reach for the ring, loosened my grip such that I only held onto the grille with a hooked middle finger.
- If I was not startled such that my weight shifted and one of my feet moved ever so slightly onto the most slippery part of the awning.

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I had never done bungee jumping or sky diving before so nothing prepared me for the feeling when I fell. The abiding memory is that all in all, it felt very fast.

Well, the first moment, when I went "Oh shit", felt quite normal actually, the kind of feeling one gets when one jumps off a table or a less tall structure. But all of a sudden, as if pushed by some invisible hand, I accelerated towards the ground at a speed which I had never felt while falling before, the ground hurtling towards me. Friends ask if I saw my life flashing before me but I just tell them that my dominant memory of my time in the air was that it was so fast. Darn. Even now when I recall the incident, I breathe faster.

Actually, come to think of it, even though I had verily intended to, I now don't want to relive too much of what happened after I hit the ground. I will only say that the impact was a jarring thud which - and this is getting familiar - was like nothing I had ever felt before and that while I knew straight away that something was wrong with my back, it was only around half a minute later that I felt a searing pain at my right ankle and another half a minute when it became unbearable.

I do not want to talk too much about how a crowd gathered and how my Dad, just driving home from work, having parked his car, saw a commotion, went to see what it was all about and saw his only son screaming in pain for help.

I had never before known why people sometimes asked to be put out of their misery. Make no mistake, I still think life is the most precious thing we have and I still do not think I would ever ask for that. But, lying on a bed waiting to be operated on at the A&E section of Alexandra Hospital, I don't think I ever looked forward more to surgery in my life. Such was the excruciating pain despite two pain-killing injections that all I could think of was going under general anaesthesia, so that I could get some relief, no matter how brief (I might have added "or lasting" but then as I told you, I am very pro-life).

I do not want to talk too much of the pain my parents suffered and I believe that even if I tried, I could never completely articulate it, because I do not believe I can even begin to quantify it.

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For the record, I suffered a compression fracture of the spine at M1 (a technical description of the lumbar column somewhere down the middle of the spine). This, the doctor said, was a million dollar injury because despite the sensitive nature of the damaged area, it would heal completely. It was my right ankle which would suffer the most long-lasting damage. For those technically-inclined, or aspiring orthopaedists, I suffered a fracture of the lower tibia, the calcaneum and a severe fracture-dislocation of the talus, with ensuing avascluar necrosis. In short, my ankle was smashed - with irrepairable damage.

Most of the impact however, was subtle but psychological. I think that this was the first major incident in my life which so emphatically highlighted the universally known but oft-forgotten fact that sometimes in life, because of the choices you make, you do not get a second chance.

I think the fall was the first occurence which was to significantly shape the direction my life was to take, though most of the changes were non-physiological. I had, till then, been doing the 'right' things. I had always gotten good results, gone to the 'right' schools, mixed with the 'right' friends. I had engaged in the 'right' activities, watched the 'right' plays, the 'right' philarmonic concerts and said the 'right' polite pleasantries in doing so.

All that changed after the fall. Prior to that, I had always thought that no matter how daunting the problems seemed at any one time, everything would always be alright, return to normal and that I would continue on my path to success and live happily ever after. The fall made me realise how a split second could change all that, how sometimes in life, some things that we take for granted could be gone forever and never come back.

Maybe my girlfriend realised that as well, for a few months after the incident, she was to break up with me and leave for Cambridge to study medicine, never to return. I have to stress that a large part of it was because I was extremely moody after the fall - lying in bed all day for months on end does that to you - and impossible to speak to. But that didn't change the pain and anguish I felt at her departure.

It didn't help when I found that I would never run competitively again. A promising athlete in school, I had held the Raffles Institution 800m record, won medals at the National Schools Championships, represented Combined Schools and dreamt of running for Singapore at senior level. I began to see life from a different perspective and found it ironic that where once I could run so fast that few in Singapore could catch up with me, I found it cause to celebrate months after the fall when I successfully walked across the room unaided to get myself a glass of water.

After 21 days in hospital and nearly 5 months at home, I recovered enough to be able to limp without the help of crutches and too much pain. I was then sent to complete my National Service at the Military Transport Company at Pasir Laba Camp, seen by many as the backwaters of the Singapore armed forces. Imaginably, I took a while to settle there, this 'Air-Level' (that's the term they used for people who had 'A' Level qualifications), former Humanities Scholar from RJC who spoke grammatical English with good diction. This was in contrast to most of the other National Servicemen there, a lot of whom had stopped schooling after Primary 6, came from broken families, sported tattoos and smoked and drank as if there was no tomorrow. Some of them, though the same age as me or only slightly older, had kids because of an 'unfortunate incident' with the girlfriend. Incidents of servicemen going AWOL (Absent Without Leave) were frequent and as the Company clerk, I was tasked with typing out the charge sheets whenever an errant serviceman was caught and charged.

Indeed, it was during National Service that I learned that there was another strata of society in Singapore and more importantly, that while some of these people within it were recalcitrants who refused to do anything to help themselves, the vast majority of them were no worse than me, only less lucky. My fellow National Servicemen in the Company, drivers mostly (of trucks called 3-tonners, jeeps called Land Rovers, military mini-buses called..mini-buses and other road-going vehicles) were friendly, stoic, helpful, calm in the face of pressure and ever optimistic and happy, be it with their present circumstances or future prospects. They listened sympathetically to my 'sad' story, which given my mental state at that time, I rehashed to anybody who would listen, and gave me words of comfort, often extrapolating from their own experiences. They were also very willing to teach new languages - within months, I had learnt how to say 'vagina' in Hokkien, Teochew, Malay, Chinese and Tamil and had obtained my 'Certificate in Elementary Cussing'. On their part, they were amused at how I always managed to do a dirty cover version of the latest hit songs (the trick lay in having ready rhymes for key vulgar words).

We went on to have a lot of fun together though I turned down most of their invitations to go drinking and all of their entreaties to go to Geylang for some fun.

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My deployment at National Service aside, the fall had other varying effects on my psyche. At first, I was extremely angry with my lot and at my girlfriend. I could not believe how she could abandon me and run off to Cambridge. I was angry with her for making her studies a priority, as opposed to our relationship. I was young and naive and unreasonable.

Be that as it may, I felt that the best way to show her she was wrong was to show her that the pursuit of educational qualifications was way overrated, that one did not have to go overseas in order to be a success. As such, I enrolled in a multitude of part-time courses. By the time I reached adulthood and before I entered Law School, I had obtained a Graduate Diploma in Marketing as well as a Bachelor of Business Administration.

It was only later that my perception, influenced by the fall, changed yet again. I began to wonder if it was worth going down the 'straight and narrow' road on the one hand and mercilessly pursuing success in the ratrace on the other if everything that one was familiar with could change because of a twist of fate, or in my case, the laws of gravity.

It was because of this that I had less recriminations exploring what many would label the 'dark side', the world of 'intelligent guessing'. I do not shy away from saying that I feel quite at home in a casino, that I can decipher and find meaning from the statistics of most horse racing publications, that I have means to tell you the scores of football matches played at any one time from Japan to Russia to Brazil to Azerbaijan (ie. anywhere). I can tell you the relative strengths of basketball teams in Europe and the top-ten players in the squash rankings.

Make no mistake. I am not saying I am proud of what I have experienced and what I know. I am just saying that I am not ashamed of it. Indeed, if pushed to a corner, I will say that from what I have seen even in the 'bright side' of the world, what with the office politics, the back-stabbing, the unbridled ambition and outright deception prevalant in some organisations and situations, the 'straight and narrow' path, the scene of the ratrace, might be an even more dangerous place to be, with as few, or even fewer scruples, in evidence.

What I want to say is that we all have had different experiences and these experiences, like it or not, have all played a critical part in the formation of our beliefs and values. I have digressed a long way from talking about my 4-storey fall but the gist of it all is that it is surprising how a small slip can set one on a vastly different path. My experiences have certainly been more myriad as a result of what at that point of time I deemed an absolute disaster. It has taken me this long to realise that if I have learned something from all of them, then maybe I fell for a reason. Maybe, in the wider scheme of things, I didn't fall at all.