Fun and games: Real Madrid's triumph and Jagex's tribulations

Such great value this post is. It's actually two posts in one! If I were to charge you to read my blog on a per-article basis, this post would be a bargain. But my blog is completely free, so all you have to do is enjoy!

Real Madrid make history again...

UEFA Champion's League final
Real Madrid 3 - Liverpool 1

I didn't watch the game live. I considered it but couldn't bear to forego my beauty sleep. But I watched the highlights the next day and what a match it was!

Both teams were evenly matched until Salah popped his shoulder. He was on fire all season and the Liverpool fanbase was hoping that he could work his magic once more and produce the Champion's League trophy for them. There was even talk that he was in contention for the Golden Ball award, which is given to the best player of the year. Safe to say, the weight of expectation was just too much for the poor guy to shoulder, pun 100% intended. He simply isn't ready to hang with the big boys.

Mohamed Salah lies in agony on the pitch after dislocating his shoulder and tearing several ligaments in a challenge with Sergio Ramos during the Champion's League final in Kiev, Ukraine on May 26, 2018. Source: Getty Images

Another player who isn't ready to hang with the big boys is the Liverpool goalkeeper, Karius. Real Madrid should give him an honorary contract for having practically gifted them the title with that strange throw to Benzema!

Of course there are lots of sourpuss anti-Real Madrid football fans bandying conspiracy theories around like nobody's business. One popular one is that Sergio Ramos, who is a so-called dirty player, intentionally hurt Salah by using some kind of wrestling technique like an arm lock to force Salah's arm into a position where his entire body weight came down hard on it when both players fell to the ground. Looking at the video footage of the incident, it's clear to see that Ramos indeed had his arm tangled in Salah's. But anybody who's watched enough football will know that limbs get intertwined all the time. There's nothing to suggest that Ramos trapped Salah's arm on purpose. Have a look at this YouTube clip and judge for yourself.

Another preposterous allegation is that Karius was paid to throw the match. This is even worse than the accusations against Ramos because it's completely unfounded. There's not even a shred of evidence to back up this claim.

Whatever. The haters can say what they like. The fact is, Real Madrid are the record-extending 13-time champions of Europe, having won the cup six times more than the next-best team, AC Milan. And the great Zinedine Zidane, such a legendary footballer in his time, has now become the first manager to win three Champion's League tournaments in succession.

Happy, happy.

... And Jagex cause trouble for themselves again

The Cambridge-based game development studio continues to lurch from one crisis to another. On the heels of the scandal they caused by threatening the creator of a popular third-party client software with legal action (see the appendix at the bottom of this post), they announced last week that they are shutting down the RuneScape Classic servers in August.

Understandably, this revelation has stirred up quite some consternation among the playerbase. RuneScape Classic is the original version of RuneScape from 2001, and is a piece of video game history. A few die-hard players have stuck with it over the past 17 years, and many felt that Jagex's decision to kill the game was unfair to those who've devoted almost their whole lives to it. Those who'd never played RuneScape Classic also criticised the move, saying that Jagex had lost its roots. Jagex really needs to tread carefully here. RuneScape is a franchise that depends heavily on nostalgia to retain customers, and the company cannot afford to alienate its stakeholders by disrespecting the long history and rich heritage of the series.

RuneScape Classic is only the latest casualty in a line of recent culls by Jagex. Chronicle: RuneScape Legends, a card battler similar to Hearthstone, and FunOrb, a minigame site, were also previously cut and will go offline later this year. The way I see it, this could mean one of two things:

Streamlining

Jagex, at the behest of its Chinese overlords also known as Fukong Interactive Entertainment, might be shedding the dead weight it has accumulated over the years in an effort to boost its income. This makes sense because the Chinamen paid $300 million to buy over Jagex in 2016 and they need to start earning a return on their investment. From the manpower perspective, dropping old and unprofitable titles frees up development time for new projects which hopefully will bring in more revenue. For example, the staff can devote more attention to making RuneScape Mobile, which is slated for launch during the next fiscal year, the best product that it could possibly be. With microtransactions, which charge small amounts of real-world currency in exchange for in-game loot, a commonly accepted and lucrative part of mobile gaming, Jagex will try their utmost to ensure that RuneScape Mobile brings in new players, who will in turn bring in more money.

Death throes

The less palatable explanation for Jagex's recent actions is that they represent a last-ditch effort to save the company. Maybe the company is in dire financial straits and jettisoning underperforming publications is an attempt to stem the bleeding from the coffers. After all, RuneScape Classic and FunOrb have been running for more than a decade with a tiny playerbase and low maintenance from the developers, so why are they suddenly urgent problems now? The official line is that they are based on outdated technology, suffer from multiple bugs, and players are using cheating software rampantly to abuse them, but these issues have been around for many years and Jagex never bothered. The abrupt decision to kill off these games seems rather... well, abrupt, and I can't help but suspect that there's something more behind it that's being hidden from us players. It wouldn't be the first time Jagex has tried to pull the wool over our eyes and it certainly won't be the last.

As a longtime 'Scaper, I fervently hope that the latter theory isn't true. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that if Jagex goes under, a huge part of my life will go with it. They really need to get their act together though, starting with hiring a competent and experienced public relations professional to stop them from repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. Their brand image has taken a terrible beating even among the most loyal followers, and repairs are badly needed.

=====

Appendix: The third-party client controversy

Old School RuneScape (OSRS) is a version of RuneScape based on a backup of the game's code from the year 2007. Jagex launched it in 2013 after many players quit the game following a massive but unpopular overhaul to the main RuneScape, now known as RuneScape 3, which introduced a more complex user interface and combat system.

OSRS has a large following among veteran players who are nostalgic for the simple game experience they had when they were growing up. The game must be played using a downloaded piece of software called a client, because modern internet browsers do not support Java, an old coding language on which the game is based. The client serves as a "translator" between the user's computer and the game servers.

Jagex provides a client for OSRS, which is referred to by players as the vanilla client. In computing, the word "vanilla" when used to describe software means original and unadulterated. But the vanilla client by Jagex lacks many quality-of-life features that make the game easier to play such as timers and automated statistic trackers, so fans with the technical know-how have developed several more sophisticated alternative clients, called third-party clients, and a large proportion of OSRS players use such clients.

On May 15, 2018, Jagex told the creator of a relatively new client, RuneLite, to shut down his client or face a lawsuit for copyright infringement. News of this broke on Reddit after the founder of RuneLite wrote about it on the RuneLite website, and players were outraged as Jagex was perceived to be showing favour to another established third-party client, OSBuddy, which had not been ordered to close. Several OSBuddy developers are former Jagex employees, and unlike RuneLite which is totally free, OSBuddy requires a payment of $2 a month to unlock the most useful features. RuneLite had been gaining traction and there had been a corresponding drop in the number of users subscribing to OSBuddy, and players suspected Jagex of trying to kill RuneLite to protect OSBuddy. To make matters worse, it was reported by several older players that OSBuddy had evolved from a cheating software that played the game automatically without user input, a practice known as botting. A few players also accused OSBuddy of stealing their account details and IP addresses, and selling them to third parties. The association between Jagex and OSBuddy was seen as an alliance of evil, and RuneLite characterised as the "good guy".

Players turned up in force to defend RuneLite and its founder, holding massive protests in the virtual city of Falador, cancelling their monthly membership payments to Jagex, airing their displeasure on social media, and sending death threats to Jagex staff. On May 16, Jagex belatedly released an official statement explaining that RuneLite contained tools that revealed sensitive code in the game engine whose function it was to detect botting behaviour, and because RuneLite was fully open-source, anybody could download the source code off the internet, decipher Jagex's anti-botting measures, and write botting scripts that evade those measures. After the developer of RuneLite agreed to take those portions of the code off the internet, Jagex backed down and allowed RuneLite to continue operating on May 18. This satisfied the playerbase and the protests stopped, but the poor communication by Jagex, who by failing to adequately explain their actions from the very beginning allowed the situation to spiral out of control, had already done enormous damage to the relationship between Jagex and its players.

Starstruck

I got the most pleasant surprise the other day.

After I published my previous blog entry, Communications and Old Media, I tweeted the link to it and hashtagged #tanglinch5, which is used to collate all the tweets about the local television drama serial that I wrote about in the post.

Imagine my shock when none other than Kathleen Beedles liked and retweeted my tweet, and left a reply thanking me for my support! I almost fainted on the spot.

Wait, what is that you asked? Who is Kathleen Beedles? Well, "only" the Supervising Producer of Tanglin, my favourite TV show!

Oh, and she is British, which makes her even more awesome, because Pinkerton.

Besides Tanglin, she has worked on a host of other television series in the United Kingdom including famous ones like EastEnders and Coronation Street, according to the Internet Movie Database, Wikipedia, and her personal website.

It is indeed such a coup that Mediacorp Channel 5 was able to get her on board when Tanglin was being created.

The infamous foreign talent policy the Singapore government is so fond of does not always work as advertised, but this is one occasion when it has borne fruit spectacularly.

Ms Beedles' expertise brings that extra dose of quality to the show that enriches the viewing experience.

And the ultimate beneficiary: me!

Communications and Old Media

"Guess where I am," said a friend over WhatsApp one recent afternoon.

"A very important and super-secret staff meeting?" I texted back. She is always attending very important and super-secret staff meetings. I think she might be a Russian spy.

"No!" she replied. "I'm at a gender reveal party."

...

...

...

What?

Twenty years old I may be, but when I don't know something, I'm not averse to seeking answers from the ever-ready founts of wisdom we all have a pair of.

"What's a gender reveal party?" I asked my mother.

She explained that it's an event where new parents reveal the gender of their baby. Duh! Why didn't I think of that? Actually I'll tell you why: I thought a gender reveal party was something to do with LGBT. I never thought of the more mainstream interpretation.

I admitted my ignorance to my friend, who teased: "You, of the Instagram age, should know what it is!"

"I'm very old-fashioned," I retorted.

And it's true. Look at all the millennials nowadays, with their Netflix and Snapchat and Instagram Stories. It makes my head spin just thinking about all the services technology brings us.

You see, I'm a bit of a relic. Every night, I watch television. You know, the box-shaped thing that emits colour and sound, and doesn't need an internet connection or a username and password or a subscription fee? TV beats Netflix any day, in my opinion. You literally just press a button to turn it on, and all you have to do is sit there and be entertained.

I can hear the protests. "But the shows on TV are so old!" Sure, I'll admit that almost all we get on free-to-air TV are 5-year-old reruns and trashy game shows, but in amongst the crap lie some gems if you look hard enough. For example...

Tanglin
Channel 5
Weekdays (except public holidays), 8:30pm to 9:00pm
This long-running local family drama revolves around the lives of four families living in the titular neighbourhood. They get into plenty of trouble and tears and hand-wringing abound, but they always manage to pull through thanks to the support of everyone else in Tanglin. Except that person they are having a feud with. And the other one who harbours some deep-seated resentment against them that will be revealed 300 episodes from now. And the other one who bears a grudge from years ago. In other words, a standard longform drama serial with the usual plot crutches: car accidents, alcoholism and gambling addiction, sudden-onset diseases, and so on. But the script is superbly written and the acting is generally commendable. Cliffhangers keep me tuning in night after night until it has become a staple of my routine, and during the emotional parts, people keep cutting onions next to me for some reason.

Code of Law
Channel 5
Mondays, 10:00pm to 11:00pm (or 10:15pm to 11:15pm if parliament has a sitting that day)
I mentioned this before. This is a police-and-lawyer drama. After watching this, you might start to become paranoid, because a lot of people get murdered in the show. Communications theorists call it "mean world syndrome": the media shows us all the bad stuff that happens in the world so we think of the world as a more dangerous place than it really is. Nevertheless, it provides a full hour of fun escapism. The storylines are crafted expertly and have twists that elicit gasps of surprise. The acting is absolutely amazing in this one, a true testament to local talent. And because of the late timeslot, the characters are allowed to use profanities, and it is so rewarding to see the policewoman shouting "You're under arrest, asshole!" while kicking a criminal in the balls.

Yes, both of these are local shows. Really, Mediacorp does a good job with them. Don't scoff. #supportlocal

See, I know how to use hashtags! I'm not that old you know. I do use Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. But Stories is the feature I just can't wrap my head around. I posted an Instagram Story once and found it to be such a mind-boggling process that I decided that I wasn't going to be a regular user. What's with all the filters and stickers and buttons and other fiddly things? And no Likes on a Story post? Where's the fun in that? The whole idea of posting something on social media is to get Likes and enjoy the accompanying dopamine rush, isn't it?

I understand that Stories was a reaction to Snapchat's rise in popularity among youth, but again I don't comprehend the obsession with Snapchat. I've never used Snapchat because I think it's an evil platform that allows rampant cyberbullying, blackmail, perversion, and vice. Think of all the unflattering photographs of unsuspecting victims that have been spread through the app, and all the pictures of naked bodies or exposed genitalia. Such flagrant disregard for societal rules will never meet with my approval. I'm by no means conservative, but neither do I condone behaviours that will ultimately result in the breakdown of good order.

My slothfulness in adopting new entertainment technologies is mirrored in my outlook on my chosen field of study, communications. Indeed, how ironic it is that my university major is called Communications and New Media, given my preference for traditional public relations tactics like media relations and event management over more novel ones with those confusing buzzwords like "digital advertising", "data mining", and "artificial intelligence". Thanks to the flexibility of the NUS (National University of Singapore) curriculum, I can actually mould my degree after my image, by taking modules in the more traditional aspects of PR instead of the newfangled "interactive media" bits. So I'll probably end up with a degree in Communications and New Media but know close to nothing about the latter half of the description. Sounds a bit like false advertising but in my defence I wasn't the one who came up with the name!

My fiftieth blog post!

Jonathan's Junkyard is having its "golden jubilee" with this post, the 50th since it was started about a year ago. What a milestone! I didn't expect it to come so soon, but apparently I write more prolifically than I thought I would, averaging around a post every week.

I thought I should do something a little bit special, especially since my recent posts haven't been on the most fun topics. But I wasn't sure what exactly to write about, until I hit another significant milestone, this one in the virtual realm.

And it's fitting that I should talk about this. Before I discovered my flair for writing, before rabbits and water and cooking videos and Roman war novels, it was there to while away the hours with me, and teach me things to boot. And until today, it's a treasured friend that I keep close to my heart.

I've written about it before. RuneScape, the medieval-fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Whew, what a mouthful!

The cape

Today is the 10-year anniversary of my account. Just before coming to Blogger to write this post, I logged into the game to claim my 10-year veteran cape.

To do that, I had to go back to where everyone's RuneScape journey begins: the courtyard of Lumbridge castle, the place where new accounts first appear in the world. I talked to Hans, the caretaker of the castle, who is controlled by the computer, or "non-player character" in gaming parlance, and bought the cape from him for 100,000 coins. That seems a bit steep but if you've been playing for 10 years and can't afford that then you need a head examination.

I was honoured with a server-wide broadcast announcement so that everybody online at that moment will know my awesomeness. Who am I kidding. Nobody reads the broadcasts actually. Even I don't. But still, it was cool.

Me being informed that I had paid 100,000 coins to Hans, followed by the server-wide broadcast announcing to all players online at that moment that I had acquired the 10-year veteran cape. And yes, "pure ebil" is my display name.

Here's a look at my character wearing the cape.

The big, shiny sword is not part of the cape. It's my main-hand weapon that I carry in a sheath on my back when I'm not using it. You can see my off-hand weapon in its own little sheath on my belt. In combat, I hold the big sword in my right hand and the small parrying dagger in my left.

The red contrasts nicely with my gold-trimmed blue armour like the cherry tomatoes in a well-presented dinner salad, making my character look so damn good!

With this cape on, I now belong to a very exclusive group of players who have stuck with the game for a decade. I do come across others wearing the cape, and we immediately feel connected and usually type out a quick comment in the chat to acknowledge each other.

Lessons

RuneScape is my idea of fun. The slow, repetitive gameplay is a turn-off for all but the most loyal of players, but I find it incredibly charming and relaxing.

Not only that, it teaches me that good things come to those who wait. I must be patient, and put in the time and effort to get my reward. For example, I made 4,859 bows the other day, so that I could train my fletching level from 55 to 65. For those who don't know, fletching is the act of creating ranged weapons like bows and arrows. This is a historical fact, not something invented by the developers of RuneScape!

There. You too have learned something from RuneScape!

RuneScape also taught me the basics of commerce. I never took economics in school and probably never will, but I understand how demand and supply affect prices because like most players, I rely heavily on the Grand Exchange. This is an automated marketplace where we can buy and sell goods. For instance, I'm selling the 4,859 bows I made that day at an offer price of 390 coins each. So the computerised system will search for another player who wants to buy the bows for at least 390 coins each, and match us up, giving me the coins I'm due and the other player the bows he asked for. At the moment, the bows are sitting in the Exchange unsold, because they're not commodities that move in big quantities, but the Exchange will keep trying to complete the transaction until it succeeds, that is, a buyer for my bows comes along and puts in a buy request for at least my offer price.

The Exchange, and indeed the whole economy, is entirely player-driven. Market forces determine which items go up in price and which go down. Supply and demand are the key drivers of this.

One famous example is the introduction of Stiles. There's an island where players can catch lobsters, tuna, and swordfish. Previously, players had to take a ship to the island, catch a full load of fish, take the ship back to the mainland, offload the fish, then repeat the process. This made it very tedious and those types of fish were in short supply, so each of them could fetch hundreds of coins. But when the developers of RuneScape put a man called Stiles on the island whose job it was to swap real fish for notes, which are basically slips of paper representing an item thereby saving space in players' backpacks, the prices of those fish tumbled to under a hundred, because players could now stay on the island for a long time, catch load after load of fish, exchanging the fish for notes as they went, then, when they were good and ready, return to the mainland and dump literally thousands of fish onto the Exchange. Supply shot up overnight so the market crashed.

Besides content knowledge like this, RuneScape has imparted people skills to me too. The account I'm using now is actually my second. I lost access to my first one more than 10 years ago after being tricked by another player into giving up my password. It was the infamous scam where the conman would say something like "You can't say your password backwards in chat. It gets censored out. See: *********". And victims like me would stupidly try it and of course it won't be starred out and every player in the vicinity will suddenly know our password. Can't we just change the password immediately? Well, yeah, assuming we're smart enough to realise that that's the solution to the problem. I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't streetwise at all back then, allowing myself to get tricked in the first place and then not knowing how to remedy the situation until it was too late.

I remember feeling hot all over when I failed to log in the next time and it finally dawned on me what had happened. Luckily it was a pretty terrible account so the scammer didn't get much. Being young and pretty dumb, I didn't train my levels as efficiently as I do now, and I was clueless about making an income, so my account was practically unskilled and poor. Nonetheless, it was a valuable learning experience for me. My second account, the one that turned 10 today, is much better than the first and, more importantly, it hasn't been scammed of anything, not even money or items.

But although I became more shrewd and less gullible when dealing with other players, I didn't want to become a hermit and refuse to interact, because that would have defeated the purpose of playing a multiplayer online game. And I'm glad I made that decision. I've come across lots of fantastic people in my travels across RuneScape, and chatting with them while fishing or woodcutting has opened my eyes to different cultures and ways of life. It's really cool to hear from rifle-toting Americans who shoot raccoons for sport, for instance, because that's something I'll never get to see here in Singapore.

All in all, the RuneScape community is a great one to be a part of. I attribute it to the fact that the vast majority of us are mature, as we're mostly in our 20s now. Sure, you'll find the usual boob jokes and bad-tempered quarrelling, but if you look below the surface, we abide by an unspoken code of honour. Nowhere is this more evident than at limited resources like mining rocks or popular combat training monsters, where each rock or monster will only award points to one player at a time. If more than one player is in the area, we somehow manage to reach a silent agreement on how to divide up the rocks or monsters so that each player has an equal share to themselves, because rushing for the same rock or monster would just be a waste of time for all concerned. And if one player is already next to the rock or monster, no other player should go for the same one. If we judge that the place is saturated when we arrive and can't support us without causing a drop in overall efficiency, we should switch to a different server which is less crowded rather than stubbornly competing with those already there.

What will happen if you violate this creed, you ask? Well, my young padawan learner, prepare to find your character's screenshot and display name in a rant post on Reddit, possibly accompanied by a boob joke involving your mother. Social shaming for the win!

Some dark thoughts

The pillow came down over the sleeping boy's face.

His father held the pillow firmly as the child struggled and writhed. Standing over them, the boy's mother gasped and sobbed.

At long last, the little child lay still. He was finally free.

Free from a life of suffering and despair.

Code of Law

The scene I just described is from my second-favourite television drama after Tanglin. It is also aired on Channel 5, and is called Code of Law.

It might look like a murder, but what happened in the story was that the boy had Batten disease, and the parents had decided to conduct a mercy killing as the prognosis for patients with that illness is grim.

Watching the storyline unfold made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Not unpleasantly so, that I was compelled to stop watching. But it did get me thinking about my own life. And death.

A swipe at Creationists

Whoever believes that we human beings were created by some intelligent and sentient "thing" (like God or some sort of Creator) should have dysphagia happen to them.

Dysphagia refers to difficulties in swallowing. It can be caused by many things as the throat is a very complex area of the body, with many different muscles working together every time you swallow. If so much as one part goes wrong, the whole system breaks down, and dysphagia results.

It gets worse. Do you remember the anatomy you learned in school? The air passage leading to your lungs is in the same place as the food passage going to your stomach! That is why people choke and die.

If you still think that is intelligent design, then I am sorry to say that you are not intelligent.

Aspiration

To make matters even worse, food and drink are apparently attracted by some kind of magical force to our lungs. They dislike our stomachs with a passion. So each time you swallow, you are basically forcing the food or drink to go where it does not want to go. It will always try to go down your windpipe.

For people with dysphagia, food and drink do occasionally succeed in going into the windpipe. This is known as aspiration. Stupid, I know. Nobody aspires to aspirate, that is for sure.

What is the point of all this information, Jonathan?

It was not a very Good Friday for me this year. I woke up with a problem I had never encountered before.

Every time I initiated a swallow, I suddenly felt like air was spurting out of my nose. Sometimes, little shards of food would also shoot into the back of my nose before being brought back down into my throat by gravity.

This made it very difficult for me to get food down into my food passage. All the food just hung around in my throat.

Drinking was easier in terms of making the liquids go into the gullet, but more uncomfortable because liquids are by nature quite flow-y so they loved to go up my nose a lot more than the food did.

I was a little disturbed by this development. It was causing mealtimes to become rather stressful and unpleasant. So I asked Dr Google to diagnose me.

Within minutes, I was reading Comprehensive Management of Swallowing Disorders (2nd edition) by Carrau, Murry, and Howell (2016). This enlightening textbook revealed that I was suffering from nasal regurgitation caused by velopharyngeal incompetence, and I could be treated with a palatal adhesion or pharyngeal flap surgery. In plain English, the piece of tissue that is supposed to seal off my nose from my throat when I swallow is weak, so food, drink, and air all rush through the gap and into my nose. The surgery would take extra tissue from another part of the throat and sew it onto the weak area, making it easier for a tight seal to be formed between nose and throat.

I also discovered another issue which I think I have had for a while, called cricopharyngeal achalasia, which has resulted in the formation of a Zenker's diverticulum. Basically, the muscles at the top of my oesophagus are not working properly and a pouch has formed just inside the opening of the tube, collecting some of the stuff I swallow. That explains why I occasionally have random bits of undigested food appearing in my mouth (or on my bed at night)! This condition is also treatable, with a cricopharyngeal myotomy.

Unfortunately, Dr Google has no hands, so I cannot ask him to conduct surgery on me. I had to seek help from a real doctor. So I went to see the otolaryngologist at KK Hospital, where I have my other specialist doctors too.

I should not have bothered. The professor, the head of the department, that saw me the first time had the bedside manner of OJ Simpson. He was rude, brusque, crass, and had no interest in understanding my concerns. And I was shocked at how insensitive he was when we had the following exchange...

Him: How old are you?

Me: 20

Him: You are very lucky to be out and about. A lot of my other patients with SMA who are around your age are just lying flat in bed, unable to do anything else.

I have never written an expletive in my blog before, but putting that conversation down in black-and-white makes me so angry that I will break with tradition by saying this: What the fuck is wrong with this guy?!

As a medical professional, such a statement is totally uncalled for and completely unacceptable. And this guy is the department head! Ridiculous.

After the first appointment, the guy asked me to go back for an assessment known as FEES (flexible endoscopic evaluation for swallowing). So I went back for that a few days later, and it was as much of a clusterf*** (I have cooled down enough to put asterisks in the relevant positions) as the consultation with the department head.

A flexible endoscope is a camera on the end of a thin wire. During a FEES test, a doctor holds the wire and pushes it into a patient's nose until the camera travels all the way into the throat area. Then a speech therapist gives the patient food and drink, and observes the movement of the throat structures on the live video stream.

The doctor who was assigned to holding my wire was some junior one, and boy was she a bitch! She kept making those tutting noises like you would to a recalcitrant child, ostensibly because what she was seeing on the video monitor distressed her greatly. But she never once explained to me what the problem was. In fact, she behaved as if I was not present in the room.

After I had wrestled down a bit of food and drink, the bitch took out the camera. She turned to the speech therapists (there were three of them, and I have no idea why) and they all huddled together like penguins in a snowstorm. I heard them whispering, because I am not deaf. "QOL?" "QOL." Heads bobbed up and down in unanimous agreement. My god, that was a circlejerk if I have ever seen one.

One of the speech therapists turned to face me and said (to be clear, this is a paraphrase and not a direct quote) that in their esteemed opinion, I should eat my meals through a rubber hose inserted into my nose (the technical term is nasogastric tube) because eating by mouth exposes me to the dangers of aspiration. Supposedly if I aspirate too much, bacteria will feast on all the yummy food lying around in my lungs, giving me infections. (Would you like some hors d'oeuvres, Mr Leptospira?)

Wait, what? Are we just going to ignore the fact that food is going up into my nose when I eat? That was the problem I presented at the clinic with in the first place! Oh, right. That problem is easily solved by feeding me down my nose instead.

Essentially, they derailed the whole issue. Instead of addressing the problem with my nose and throat, they just wanted to find any excuse to intubate me. And by the way, QOL stands for quality of life. How robbing me of my freedom to eat and drink by mouth is supposed to enhance my QOL is beyond my ken. Not being able to eat and drink will break my spirit and send me into a downward spiral from which I will never recover.

I suspect that the reason they failed to target my problem specifically is that they are afraid. They are lily-livered cowards who are not fit to lick the shoes of real medical practitioners. They have never seen an SMA person with this problem and have never experienced treating one using surgery. So they avoid the issue entirely by recommending the most drastic solution available to them, one that would allow them to dodge all possible future difficulties with eating that I may pose to them.

After all, one can never have problems with swallowing if one never swallows.

Source: memegenerator.net

But because they are egotistical bastards, they will never admit to their shortcomings. So they trot out some lame-ass excuse like "Surgery comes with inherent risks." No shit, Sherlock! But if your balls shrink at the very thought of doing surgery on me, I shudder to imagine their response if I get appendicitis (a random event that happens to the best of us). They will probably just leave me to lie there in agony.

This entire fiasco has made me lose faith in almost all the medical professionals in Singapore (trust me, I have dealt with enough of them to form my conclusion). In general, they are a bunch of incompetent yet arrogant fools. The only one I still trust fully and will put my life in the hands of, is Professor Kevin Lim Boon Leong (I have used his real name because this is a positive mention. I do not believe in naming and shaming, which is why I did not name the lousy doctors earlier. Also, I have no wish to be sued.), an orthopaedic surgeon and the best damn thing to come out of KK Hospital in all my years as a patient there. I gave him a very expensive Hamley's teddy bear, bought using my own meagre cash stash, for good reason. Not only is he a skilled surgeon, he has impeccable bedside manner and always treats me the way doctors should treat their patients: courteous and friendly.

What now?

You might be wondering if my dysphagia was ever adequately addressed. The answer is no, and I do not expect it to change in the future. So I have decided to cut off all contact with those useless toga-lifters who want to put a rubber hose in my nose, and find ways of coping with my problems on my own.

Full circle

I started this post by talking about a mercy killing. I have no desire to be killed, for mercy or otherwise, but my point is that I know my disease is terminal, just like the Batten disease the boy in the story had is. It will take away one thing after another from me until it succeeds in claiming the ultimate prize: my life. I am ready to go anytime. In fact, I embrace it. Better to go now, while I still have more or less a normal existence and retain most of my bodily functions, than to die lying on a bed in a pool of my own excrement, having not seen anything outside the walls of my room for years.

And this incident has made me even more determined than ever to enjoy my every day. I will never know when another part of my body will give up on me, so I choose to do whatever I want now, while I still can. Like drinking Pepsi, my favourite thing in the whole wide world. I have one every evening now, because who knows how much longer I will be able to consume them? Not like I will live long enough to get diabetes anyway. Those long-term concerns do not apply to me!

Having a shortened lifespan does have its privileges...