Some people are born lucky and some people are born unlucky. I was a born both lucky and unlucky. Lucky because I was born into a good family. I had a father who was born poor but was capable and able to earn enough for the family to live comfortably. And I had a mother who was kind, loving and taught me the best of values. Together they made wonderful parents.
The unlucky part was that I was born different and not in a good way. In this entry I will tell you how I was born different but it is only in the rest of the entries that you will know the effect it had on me in life.
My mother gave birth to me in the middle of the night on the 6th of June 1984. It was the year Malaysians celebrated because it was the year we launched our national car the Proton Saga. It didn’t matter that it was a entirely a Mitsubishi with a Proton badge on it. Just like in primary school, when an eraser has your name on it, it’s yours.
I was born at Loh Guan Lye’s Specialist Center, one of the best hospitals in Penang at the time and delivered by one of the best doctors. I was the 3rd child my mother had and the first one that had complications that my mom had to deliver me by a C-Section. I came out healthy and kicking as my mother looked on at me and wondered what kind of person I would grow up to be.
By the time the 3rd day passed my mom started to notice something about me. She noticed that my eyes had never once opened. Without being able to do much she waited each day constantly checking back at me to see if I felt it was time for me to open my eyes and see the world I was now in.
That time came almost a week after I was born. I opened one eye and looked around the strange room I was in. Suddenly I was out of a dark warm comfortable place with a soundtrack of my mother’s heartbeat into this room that is bright and occasionally noisy.
After some tests the doctors diagnosed me with an eye ptosis. A condition where the muscles of my upper eye lid of my left eye was too weak for me to open my eyes. So I’ll only have one eye open half the time and the other one almost completely closed. The problem though isn’t just an esthetic one but a medical one too. If I didn’t do anything about it, I would eventually go blind in the weak eye.
The doctor established that I had to go for surgery to correct it but as a newborn baby it was too early. I had to wait until I was 3 years old to operate.
It was unfortunate but let me get back to the lucky part. My Dad as I said earlier was a capable man who came from nothing. He was a 34 year old at the time building his career. I’m not sure if it was because of his training as an engineer or whether he was born like that but my father was a planner. He’s the type of person who plans for dinner before we even have lunch.
He had 3 years to plan for my surgery and in that time he did enough research and put aside enough money to make sure that I went for the very very best doctor. Based on his research, the very best doctor for my condition at the time was in Singapore.
So at age 3, my parents brought me down to Singapore for my surgery. I have this vivid memory in my mind of me being in an operating theater and the doctors pinning me down while they cut me open. It was like a scene out of a Steven King book but my parents brushed it away. They say it was impossible. Impossible because I was fully asleep at the time.
That makes sense. I don’t know what kind of doctors would cut open on a fully awake screaming toddler of age 3. Perhaps it was a dream. In any case the operation was as successful as Operation Overlord (me being the Allies of course and the evil ptosis being the Axis powers).
There was just one catch. The surgery had corrected the ptosis on one eye but my other eye still had a bit of an issue. The doctor suggested I go for a second operation to correct it but by then my parents thought that they had put their 3 year old son through enough and declined.
The result of not doing the second operation was that while there wasn’t any medical effect to it, my eyes weren’t even. One of my eyes consistently looked bigger than the other. So I kinda look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Now that’s all fine and dandy when I’m a toddler knocking toy trucks against one another at home all day. But things got a bit more brutal in school.
So there I was, a boy with a huge mole on his face and one eye bigger than the other checking into primary one. I was like George Bush (Jr), everybody couldn’t wait to make fun of me. That’s something I’ll leave for the next entry.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space