Yellow Tinted Glasses

I was the doctor in a ward for patients with Dementia. The patients stayed on the ward for months, and I got to know each of them well. The ward was what my English teacher would call a 'microcosm'.

Some of the patients believed I was a patient too (to be fair, with the hours I was pulling, it did feel like home). One of my patients would only talk to me if I addressed her as the Queen, HRH. One of my patients stole my ID (that I was wearing) and tried to get out of the ward, whilst another patient tried to fling his faeces at me (thanking God for the patient's poor aim). Some patients would team up and manufacture elaborate plans to get me married, and one patient told me that I had a beautiful smile every time she saw me (she had Alzheimer's and repeatedly forgot meeting me, which made her compliment seem very real). I hope it comes across as genuine when I say that I learnt a great deal from my patients. However, I must admit that, at times, I felt rather like Alice in Wonderland.

There was this one elderly patient who believed that he absolutely had no business being in a psychiatric ward. He also believed that his late wife was standing behind me.

I smiled and said slowly, "Henry, you just told me she passed away over a decade ago."

He whispered, "My wife is standing right there."

I whispered back, "There isn't anyone standing behind me."

"Maybe you have a problem. Why don't you diagnose yourself?"

"Your daughter tells me that she can't see your wife, and none of the other staff members sees your wife. You are in the ward because sometimes you see things that may not actually be there, and we are worried about how you are coping at home. We only want to help you." I say, unconsciously feeling for the pit alarm in my pocket just in case the situation escalated.

He smiled, "Are you telling me that my wife is not real just because none of you sees her?"

Around this time last year, I was in Malaysia, celebrating my friend's birthday. We were in a nice restaurant with a panoramic view of Kuala Lumpur.

They played the song 'Yellow'.

That was the first time I properly listened to the song, and I loved it immediately. I was approaching the end of medical school, a period that I found emotionally taxing and, at times, physically demanding. W told me, "There's a patient you'll encounter in the future. Maybe for you to understand the patient and for you to treat them to the best of your ability, you need to experience this."

I wasn't convinced. I believed with all my heart that bad things were happening to me, and I constantly felt unsafe. I was living in self-fulfilling prophecies. My sister would tell me, "There does seem to be a series of bad news, but I like to think that there is an invisible hand which protects you in every situation, pulls you from the edge of the cliff each time. This hand wills for the story to be written in your favour in the end."

I told myself that when the dust settles, when the sunsets start appearing beautiful again, I'll listen to the song, 'Yellow'. I didn't let myself listen to the song until then. The song was sacred, a whisper of hope.

It's funny; the stories we tell each other and the meaning we attach to the smallest things, all in an attempt to make sense of life. Yet, we are all unreliable narrators of our own stories, no matter how vividly we think we remember them.

Perhaps I am lucky to have people who have witnessed my story, each carrying their own version of the moments I thought I knew so well.

I recollected surreal moments that I missed in the chaos. Without any particular intention or forethought, I found myself wearing a yellow dress to my graduation, seated towards the back and looking out at a sea of yellow-hooded graduation gowns. I also remember listening to 'Yellow' at the end of the day in my room. It wasn't ecstasy, but it was contentment, watching everything fall into place.

Almost a year since that day at the restaurant when I heard the song for the first time, I was eating candy floss, along a riverside in Poland, with my friends... and I heard a busker sing, "Look at the stars, look how they shine for you and everything you do, yeah, they were all yellow."

It was possibly a coincidence, and I was probably noticing the colour yellow when it suited me. But what I find truly cathartic is that the 'truth' is relative. I am not saying there really is an invisible hand protecting me or that the patient's wife was standing behind me that day in the ward.

Perhaps there is an objective reality, independent of how we perceive it. But none of us experiences that reality completely untouched nor do I believe we have the knowledge to understand it fully. We experience it through our own minds, memories and lenses shaped by our experiences and biases. My patient's wife may not have been there in my reality, or in the objective reality, but she was real in his. Perhaps that is the strange thing about being human: we each live, at least partly, in a reality shaped by what we perceive and what we choose to believe.

I'm not sure how many of you resonate with this; you might be reading this thinking my mind is in the clouds, and that I exist in songs, hair jaded with privilege and flowery words. I might even agree with you, but I also trust that, rain or shine, I am exactly where I want to be, in a yellow world tailor-made for me.

Today, I am listening to the song as I write this post. In my reality, the Universe conspires in favour of a stubborn heart. I look at the fluorescent stars on my ceiling, and guess what? They are shining for me.

Disclaimer: None of the details in the above story belong to anyone I know. The names (and other details) have been meticulously changed to protect confidentiality.