From the Kitchen to the Bedside

My wife worked as the number-one chef in a Thai restaurant until she got a phone call from [I think] one of her many sisters. The news was not good; her mother had four ailments and was in hospital.

A little bit of deduction about this old lady of the family – her youngest child, a daughter, is about 30 years of age, and I suspect that this daughter was the last gasp of the mother’s reproductive system before it shut down forever. That tells me that the old lady is at least 75 years of age.

And at the age of 75 or more, the lady has, inter alia, advanced ovarian cancer. I suspect that the prognosis is not good. When I got the update, I found that she had been sliced and diced; the cancerous ovaries had been removed surgically. However, I know that advanced cancers are a death sentence.

When a cancer gets to the stage of causing serious pain, it is advanced enough to metastasise. This is a process which involves the cancer releasing individual cancerous cellular particles into the bloodstream, and these particles circulate and lodge anywhere. Where they lodge, a new cancer will form and grow.

Another of the health issues which she has is a throat problem, and my guess is throat cancer, but that won’t kill her, and neither will the hypertension or heart problem.

And so, my wife received the bad news of the advanced terminal condition that her mother was suffering. What did she do? She booked flight for herself, her daughter, and our 3-YOA son on the next available flight to Bangkok, with onward flight to the province. She gave her employer 2 days notice of what she was doing. Sort of like a criminal fleeing the scene.

In essence, she was leaving a restaurant owner/manager short of two kitchen workers with almost no advance notice. This is where the Thai lack of understanding of the law of cause and effect becomes painfully obvious.

Tonight [new year’s eve], I saw my step-daughter online with MSN Messenger, and messaged a “hello” to her. I asked her what she was doing in Thailand, and she admitted that she was serving no useful purpose.

The gist of the initial part of the conversation went along the lines of “Hello, how’s the family, what are you doing?”. And the replies were the standard banter – “Hi, we’re good, I visit my former school-friends...”. Then I got down to the bit that was on my mind. When are you coming back to Australia? “Don’t know” she said.

“Do you know what you have done here?” I asked. No, she says; what have I done there? She asks.

I explain that she may not have a job here when she returns, and the same may be true for her mother. WHY? she asks.

And so, I do the school-teacher thing for her, and I carefully explain the law of Cause and Effect. I asked the young lady to tell me if there was anything that I told her that she did not understand and she said OK to that. So I told her:

If you say something bad about someone, that person will hear about it and not like you for your unkind words. If you say good things about someone, the words will reach that person’s ears and they will like you, and likely they will say good things about you. If you do something bad to someone – say steal from them – they might do something bad to you.

You and your mother have abandoned your work; you left your boss with the difficult task of finding replacements for you at short notice. The boss now has replacements, where do you think his faith will lie when you return? Don’t expect to find work at the restaurant when you return to Australia. Even worse, your former boss will tell other restaurant owners that you could run out on them at short notice, so don’t expect to get work at other restaurants either.

Her emotional turmoil was palpable, even at the distance of 7941 kilometres [by GPS]; her fractured English said it all. “But I have to have work, I have to have the money” [she needs the money to pay for phone-cards so that she can call her Thai friends].

Another thing that my step-daughter told me is that the people who know that her grandmother is on the short-list for cremation are not telling the old lady. I told her that this is simply not true; they may not be SAYING it to the lady, but they are TELLING it to her in non-verbal ways. Yaii [maternal grandmother] is no fool, even though she is terminally ill. She has a daughter in Australia and another in the United States, and both of these daughters are making a simultaneous visit to her hospital bed. Something serious must be afoot. My mother-in-law could never be fooled in such matters.

I’ll wait and see what my wife’s reaction is to the news about her employment. My expectation is that I will get a phone call from a panicking woman demanding that I talk sense into her [maybe former] employer. I don’t think I want to answer the phone.

A happy new year to all from Santa, who has been and gone.

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