20 years ago..
I lost my legs in a 6-hour surgery on October 1st 2003. It was a foreboding task for my neurosurgeon Dr. Richard Veerapen and his medical team at Sunway Medical Centre. They opened up my spine to discover a huge mess of scar tissues, old tumours, new tumours, fine blood vessels and nerve endings - all fused up in a major confusion. There were spine tumours coiled like a serpent around my central nervous system. The mass totalled the size of a small farm egg larger than a golf ball. The new tumours came off like sacs of fish roe, while the old tumours were alike 10-year-old chewing gum stuck on the rough surface of a concrete wall.
The outcome of that surgery was unknown for years afterwards. It was a bloody mess.
The thing I learnt through my experience with neurosurgery is this - a tumour in the brain is far easier to remove than a tumour in the spine. We are not even supposed to expose our spinal cord, let alone go in to mess around with a knife. You can cut out a certain 20% of your brain mass and still function normally, while the spinal section offers no such margin. A spine surgery has ZERO margin for error.
I went in to this surgery knowing full well that I am gambling for a second round of miracles. The fact that I had 90% recovery the first surgery 11 years before (1992), was already a lot of miracles used up.
How I have changed in my personal views..
Everyone around me crumbled when we found the tumours in the scans. I was distracted and heartbroken by my personal affairs that it had made me a little fearless. I thought like a poker player. What could I do? You get dealt some cards, you play.
A conman once told me, "Life is like a poker game, it is not about having a good hand, but playing a bad hand well" and I had taken this to heart.
I am not a gambler - at least not on felt tables - my life already has very high stakes.
Some people called me the walking luck. But I came to realise that it is the devil's lie.