operandi

While he was sleeping... 

Polish man wakes up from 19-year coma and discovers a new world
By Matthew Thompson  

IT SOUNDS like the far-fetched plot of a Hollywood movie - and has distinct echoes of the 2003 film Goodbye Lenin! - but it's far from fiction.
A man wakes up one day to find a world full of new colours, shops full of amazing new products, and everyone using communication devices once seen only in sci-fi films.

Not only that, but there are two decades' worth of extra wrinkles on the face of the woman he fell in love with, his children have become adults, and he has 11 grandchildren he knew nothing about.

Railway worker Jan Grzebski fell into a coma as still-communist Poland was suffering from food shortages and almost cut off from the outside world by the Iron Curtain, and did not regain consciousness for 19 years.

And, despite admitting that the changes make his head spin, he is very happy with the new reality he has woken up to.

As he puts it: 'The world is prettier now.'

Mr Grzebski lost consciousness in 1988 after sustaining head injuries in a workplace accident, and doctors treating him then found cancer in his brain as well.

Their prognosis was understandably bleak - they said he would not live.

But while the 65-year-old's recovery seems little short of miraculous, this was all due to the love and dedication of his wife.

Mrs Gertruda Grzebska, 63, refused to believe the doctors, and took him home to care for him herself. For the next 19 years, she turned him over every hour to ensure he would not get bedsores, fed him with a spoon, talked to him, and even insisted that he attend family gatherings.

The Associated Press quoted her as telling local daily Gazeta Dzialdowska: 'I would fly into a rage every time someone would say that people like him should be euthanised, so they don't suffer.'

Using an affectionate form of her husband's name, she said: 'I believed Janek would recover.'

Despite all her loving care, however, last October he developed pneumonia and was taken to hospital again. That proved to be a blessing in disguise, as his doctors saw signs of recovery and started intensive rehabilitation treatment.

Slowly, Mr Grzebski's awareness and speech returned to him. While he is still in a wheelchair, his doctor expects him to be walking again soon. 'This is my great reward for all the care, faith and love,' his wife told AP.

Meanwhile, her husband was amazed by the changes he saw the first time he was taken out for a walk in his home town of Dzialdowo in northern Poland.

Martial law has been lifted, the drab, grey streets he remembered are full of garish neon signs and billboards, and the communist ration queues have been replaced with queues at McDonald's.

'When I went into a coma there were only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere,' he told Polish media last weekend.

But if there is one thing he can't understand, it's other people's negative attitudes. 'What amazes me today is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning,' he said.

And despite being faced with such a mind-boggling array of changes, one thing impresses him more than anything else. Britain's Observer newspaper quoted him as saying: 'It was Gertruda who saved me, and I'll never forget it.'

"Real accomplishment is something rarely glamorous or ecstasy-filled:  It comes from steady, reliable effort over time; a never-ending fight against ignorance and laziness; the cultivation of productive habits . . .; and the building up of skill and experience by constant effort." 

- Steve Salerno, "Pumped for Nothing:  Motivational speakers are everywhere.  What are they really saying?" Wall Street Journal, May 8, 1998, p. W11
 

This guy's walkin' down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can't get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, "Hey you! Can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, "Father, I'm down in this hole; can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey, Joe, it's me. Can ya help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are ya stupid? Now we're both down here." The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out."

- Leo McGarry, The West Wing

Oftentimes throughout the well-trodden course of our history as a species, the burden of a people's collective hopes and dreams has rested on the shoulders of a few good men and women. Frequently the more successful ones, finding themselves afflicted with the awkward but tragically common retirement blues of having absolutely nothing to do after all the fuss has long been over, would pen down and publish their valuable insights and experiences in the form of memoirs which would more often than not be lauded for the treasure and wisdom encased within to be uncovered by the next generation of eager young minds. 

I wasn't particularly eager, though, when, by certain very mysterious forces of nature, I stumbled across a copy of a particularly notable memoir by an unarguably notable statesman. It was a difficult decision and I had to bring the entire range of my faculties to bear throughout the process, but I ultimately left the library with the cumbersome, bulky hardcover in hand. 

Allow me to say a few words in feeble defence. It was my book-out day, which also not-so-coincidentally and cruelly meant that it was the day before my book-in day. (SAF probably specialises in masochism.) I recalled vaguely from fleeting glances at the training schedule that the following week would consist of sporadic training sessions here and there with long, unbroken personal admin (read: sleep/slack/iPod) time in between. I had no choice. Really. It was a psychologically tormenting moment of decision. Ghastly images of myself laying on my bed like a lifeless corpse with absolutely nothing working my disintegrating brain or my four flabby bodily appendages gleefully made their way through my mind, clumsily tripping over a few thoroughfares of my central nervous system in the process and delivering more than a few chills down my spine. A lesser man would have succumbed to the utter sense of pointlessness and hopelessness of the upcoming events. I count myself lucky to have chosen the lesser of two evils. 

In any case, yes, so I borrowed The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, looking like an attention whore as I strode out of Bishan Community Library with what I hoped was a stoic look on my face - a look typically worn by someone who wishes the forgiveness and forbearance of surrounding passers-by disappointed by my lack of testicular fortitude in having succumbed to the urge of borrowing such a book just to pass time. Nevertheless, I've made it to a hundred pages or thereabouts, and for now I would be content just to share the historic words on page 13 by which a great nation was fortuitously called into being. To be honest, I've always had a fetish for the elegance, the air of strength and the satisfying succinctness that exude from the English language in its formal form, and that's probably the main object of my fascination with this proclamation of independence. But anyway, here it is:

"Whereas it is the inalienable right of a people to be free and independent, I, Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, do hereby proclaim and declare on behalf of the people and the government of Singapore that as from today, the ninth day of August in the year one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five, Singapore shall be forever a sovereign, democratic and independent nation, founded upon the principles of liberty and justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of her people in a more just and equal society."

i'm not even sure i want to go to OCS anymore.


i just want to be able to wake up in my own bed every morning to the ones i love.

to be able to hear your voice on the phone late into every night without having to hide under a blanket.


maybe i'm just weak

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.  

- Carl Sagan

sorry, i felt uneasy posting that before an exam, superstitious me, but comments noted, thanks. and now back to the agony and the uncertainties of some very unpredictable subjects. and while i go on a hiatus, one from which i hope i will emerge unscathed, here's to any passer-by mired in a similar situation:

all the best!

I remember I used to be a stickler for rules. Kindergarten and primary school rules were relative no-brainers and the ease of conformity made it effortless, and even addictive for me to follow the rules to the letter. The situation was greatly exacerbated by my questionable and unshakable belief in the infallibility of authority, that rules were there for a reason, and they were good for me - surely they were, since the teachers set them, and at that age, everyone treated teachers with deference and virtual reverence. I had no problems with following the rules more than anybody else in my class - my teachers loved me, and at that time it just made everything much more smooth-sailing. It was just the way the school and our parents wanted us to be - obedient and easy to manage - and supposedly, the rules would instil in us impressionable children the discipline and moral values that would put us in good stead, come what may. Between me and authority, it was thus a win-win situation and everyone was happy.

Unfortunately and inevitably, I began to grow a mind of my own. It was no longer enough to blindly follow rules in return for some temporal praise or reward. I started questioning, initially, certain inflexible rules and edicts that caused everyone more problems than they solved - rules that some lazy bureaucrat or authority penned down or ordered to absolve themselves of the potential messy problems that would add to their already heavy workload. While I began to question the rules, many of my peers still held an unshakable belief and steadfast faith in the rules, however rigid they were. They still clung onto the belief that the rules, regulations, deadlines, laws, and various other institutionalised decrees were good for them and the people around them, and a considerable number became vocal and outright supporters of any and every rule and eventually imposed their values upon others, even though these other people may not be similarly disposed to follow the rules in an advantageous manner. They did not stop to consider the unpredictably different effects of rules on different people; to quote a cliche, one man's meat is another man's poison.

Unsurprisingly, the inconsiderate conformists began to create their own set of rules for others to follow. Perhaps they were criteria which others had to fulfil to be accepted as friends. Whatever the kind of rules, whoever the authority, invariably, there would always be people who, either through lack of effort or by misfortune of circumstance, proved unable to meet the rules. Failure to satisfy these rules, per se, could hardly be considered a moral or legal failure - it was, at best, failure to meet the artificial requirements of a higher authority who may or may not have fully understood one's predicament at that point in time. Despite this, failure was often felt as a personal or character defect, even if it was not entirely one's fault. Rules that gained majority acceptance arguably did so mainly due to the very fact that they were acceptable and tenable for the majority; it would be stupid to accept a rule that one obviously could not meet, except if the authority were complete or if one still possessed the submissive juvenile mindset, like the one I had during kindergarten. Oftentimes they would be a minority of dissidents who could not satisfy the rules. Oftentimes they were marginalised and thus began to erroneously blame themselves for their failure to conform. This acceptance of blame and responsibility further strengthened, in the rule-setter's mind, the notion that failure to meet rules, in general, was a moral failure that suggested a certain character defect. The rule-setters thus became even more self-righteous and sure of  the infallibility of their own created rules, and saw fit to castigate any mavericks or failures who did not share their point of view regarding these rules.

I shudder to think of the day that these religiously conformist rule-setters become the top bureaucrats, ministers and corporate leaders of our future. 

Wait a minute - I doubt they'd even make it there. Thank God.

ocean.

and aurora.