Mum came back from the hospital a while ago after being warded for 27 days. She has fully recovered from the pneumonia and her anemia is under control. It is unfortunate that she complained of back pain that was diagnosed as spondylitis while a being warded. Spondylitis is a form of rheumatism that causes stiffness and pain in and around the spine.

Mum had complained of extreme pain in her left leg in the early nineties. Traditional massage did not do any good. After all the traditional treatments proved futile, she then consulted Dr. Kazem. He operated on her lumbar spine to relieve pressure on the nerves that was causing pain and weakness to her leg. The surgery was successful but the damage was already done because of the delay. She now walks with a slight limp.

Mum never looked more frail. She has lost a considerable amount of weight due to her poor appetite. The pain in her back has been alleviated somewhat by Dihydrocodeine, Celebrex and a lot of bed rest. With time and a balanced nutritious diet, she should recover.

“It is better to have one sincere friend than one hundred pretentious kins.”

Love at first sight is pass�. In this age, hordes of lovers fall in love before even meeting in real life. Welcome to love in the cyberspace. Form over substance still rules although it is progressively being eroded by the ever-changing landscape of how we communicate. Face-to-face meetings are no longer what it seems. Webcams have superseded the need for both to be physically present at the same location. The Internet has forever altered the way we date and how we fall in love.

Before the flourishing of webcams and voice chats, there was the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). That was where Wuan and I met and fell in love. We did not fall in love at first chat. It was gradual. Nevertheless, our relationship had been very textually charged from the beginning. I was first smitten not by her appearance but by the interesting exchanges we had via IRC. Lifeless as it may seem, our web conversations of black texts against a white background burst with colours and sensations only both of us can understand. We must have had fertile imaginations then. We have even developed our own web lingo that we use in real life too.

We have not stopped chatting since we began in 1998, except for the days that we spent time together in real life. Between the two of us, we have exchanged millions and millions of words and have racked up more 1,500 chatting days.

Nobody sums up our relationship more appropriately than Savage Garden. Every time I listen them sing I Knew I Loved You, I truly understand how one can fall in love without ever meeting. I had indeed fallen in love with Wuan before I had even set eyes on her. I first fell for her wit and intelligence before I fell for her looks. I wonder how this all could have happened without the Internet. The times that I think of Wuan, I count my blessings that there is a Vinton G. Cerf, one of the acclaimed fathers of the Internet, Jarkko Oikarinen, the creator of IRC, and Khaled Mardam-Bey, the software developer who wrote mIRC, the IRC client that Wuan and I have been using to chat until now. Without their inventiveness, something would still be missing in my life.

I am a sucker for soppy love songs. It must my inherent melancholic nature that keeps me listening to these songs again and again. I guess sadness makes me feel more alive than exhilaration does. Sadness justifies my existence. I have many things to cheer about but I also have more sadness to wallow in. I do not know what I am rambling about. This must be one of those bouts of depression that comes and goes. I am an emotionally weird guy.

I called Mum�s haematologist just now. After several unanswered calls to her handphone, Dr. Goh called back. It is reassuring to know that Mum has fully recovered from pneumonia. Her CBC (Complete Blood Count) looks good. According to Dr. Goh, Mum�s blood count has never been a problem. Like all CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia) patients, Mum have enlarged spleen (splenomegaly) and liver (hepatomegaly). At the moment, Mum still complains of giddiness. So Dr. Goh is keeping her in the hospital a while longer.

The good doctor had also referred Mum to the Hospice At Home Programme that is being run voluntarily by the National Cancer Society Of Malaysia. Karen Gan, the Palliative Care Nurse, went to see Mum yesterday. When I spoke to her on the phone just now, she was very reassuring and told me to call her as soon as Mum is discharged so that she can come visit.

Palliative care provides treatment to relieve pain and suffering in terminally patients. While there is no cure for CLL, I believe Mum has not reach that critical stage yet. However, she needs to be medically monitored, get sound advice regarding her condition and proper nursing support which is what the Hospice Programme is all about.