Gardening Can Kill You?

That was what Sonny had hinted at yesterday. I had been gardening again after  having been physically inactive for months. Actually, that’s putting it very mildly. The undiluted truth is this: The only places I visited this past several months are the kitchen, the bathroom and the backyard to hang the washing, and at night I retired to bed by holding onto the handrail and climbing slowly up the stairs. The rest of the time found me sprawled in a hand-me-down chair that has parked itself in a corner of the living room.

(Note: If you’ve been following this blog… the visit to the Inobong Station was not really my choice. My friend put my name down for the trip. Meg told me to go and even said she’d help carry me if any moving around got too strenuous. Rita said: "You’re so lucky! You should go." And Sonny said: "Why don’t you go? You never go anywhere!")

So in an effort to start ‘getting into shape’, just in case some family get-together that involves a walkabout comes up, I thought I should go back to gardening, which, for me, is really just turning the soil a bit, weeding and transplanting or repotting long-neglected plants. No digging with a cangkul. Certainly nothing that would impress my mother.

When I had finished with the stamp-sized patch in front of the house, I started to tackle the backyard. Not easy here because of the long grass near the fence and a type of ants, big and nasty and a whole army could be nesting in innocent-looking leaves. You wouldn’t want a single ant to fall on you and God help you if you accidentally touched a nest!

Then the other day I saw that my lemon tree which last year produced a single fruit—and   a deformed one it was too—was flowering again. Hurray! I was encouraged enough to dig around the stem and to feed the tree a spadeful of horse manure. Then I watered it diligently twice a day. Alas, when I checked it yesterday, most of the matchstick-sized ‘fruit’ have dropped and left an emptiness where it was once pregnant with lemony promises.

I got so discouraged all over again. Why does this happen, this dropping of the baby lemons? Is there anything I should do that I haven’t? Talk to the tree? Done that!

Now, while I was pondering on whether to chop down my lemon tree and plant something more worthwhile, I spied something in my neighbour’s backyard that renewed my resolve and urged me to go full steam ahead… again.

See what I saw!

My neighbour's beautiful winter melons!

I couldn’t wait for the sun to dip down a little more before starting on a cleaning/pruning frenzy in the backyard. I trimmed the lemon tree, pruned the other neighbour’s bougainvillea branches that were encroaching into our air space, cut the lalang bush, weeded and dug the vegetable bed and chased away Pudding—who should have known better than to think the mound of soil is one of her many toilets. (She almost died during the birth of her kitties. I saved her life by taking her to the vet and paying for her expensive C-section. The least she could do is to show some gratitude by not peeing and pooping on my vegetable bed, don’t you think?)

Anyway, after all the cleaning and digging were done, with salty sweat stinging my eyes, I viewed the result of my labour. Even I was amazed at what I have done! Just the other day I had been tempted to pay a walk-in Om grass-cutter to cut the grass and clear the mess in the backyard. It had seemed too daunting a job for an old couch potato. Take it from me, you just need a bit of inspiration to accomplish a mission that may look quite impossible. Mine had been the two beautiful winter melons on the wrong side of the fence and the amazing pictures and success stories my gardening friends have posted on Facebook.

Now this goes back to ‘gardening can kill you’…

The morning after the gardening marathon I woke up with an attack of hives… from above the knees up to my chest. I know I have hypersensitive skin and a dermatologist has warned me to refrain from doing a lot of things so as not to aggravate the condition. But what I saw yesterday was nothing compared to past experiences. I couldn’t help ‘marveling’ at the pinkish wheals which popped up on my skin. They looked like 3-D maps created by pouring viscous pink glue onto my skin. And the itch, oh the itch was driving me crazy. The more I scratched, the bigger the wheals grew. World maps were forming on both my thighs and pink plateaus appeared on my tummy.

Was it something I had drunk? Or eaten? Was it because of gardening? Perhaps I had touched some toxic sap when I chopped off certain plants? After lunch I tried to take a nap so the itch wouldn’t feel too bad. That was when Sonny said: “You better go see the doctor before your throat swells and you stop breathing.” (Some people don’t mince their words.)

Could my air passages swell so badly that breathing would be affected? I couldn’t die yet. Not before I’ve planted the garden! Not before I’ve finished my second book! Not until I…

So I went to the doctor who asked questions which showed he had already decided that my problem was due to clothes that weren’t washed well! His parting words had been: “This has nothing to do with what you’ve eaten or drunk. More likely you didn’t wash your clothes properly.” OMG!

OMG, what am I going to tell the washing machine? That I’m going to fire it for slacking on the job?

Hope is Grief's Best Music

Serious diseases are never a ‘nice’ subject to talk about. When they strike close friends and family, we’d wring our hands, shake our heads and ask "Why? Why? We’re good people. Bad things shouldn’t happen to good folks."

But life is seldom fair.

Let me tell you about John Doe, a former school teacher. He had looked forward to retirement and to spending more time with his family. He was going to travel, grow a garden, run a marathon, play with the grandkids. Alas, he fell seriously ill. A visit to the hospital confirmed the family’s worst fear. The doctor said: "It’s cancer. Third stage. He can go home because there’s nothing we can do. There’s no hope."

You can imagine the utter helplessness the family felt although they had braced themselves for bad news. I know the feeling because it was my sister’s story too. Cancer. Third stage. And it took just several months from diagnosis to the final goodbye.

Not a nice topic, this cancer.

I used to gloss over cancer statistics and race through the description of the symptoms because reading them was turning me into a hypochondriac. I confided to a close friend: I’d rather not know if I had cancer because the knowledge (not the disease itself!) would kill me.

Dear reader, according to MAKNA there were 70,000 new cases of cancer in WM between 2003 and 2005. Cancer strikes roughly 100 men in every 100,000 males;  132 women in every 100,000 females. Among the men (Malays, Chinese, Indians) the most common type is cancer of the large bowel. With the women, however, the most common type is breast cancer.

According to College of Radiology Malaysia, the highest incidence of breast cancer is in North Europe and North America and the lowest in Asia. Incidence ranges from an average of 95 per 100,000 in more developed countries to 20 per 100,000 in less developed countries.

Based on these statistics, it would look like we, Malaysian women, are better off than those in Europe or America. But don’t celebrate too soon. For every 100,000 Chinese women, 60 get breast cancer. Indians: 55 per 100,000; Malays: 34 per 100,000. (Average about 49 per 100,000 females.) That’s just breast cancer. There are many types of cancers: lung, leukaemia, stomach, cervix, skin, etc.

(Note: There are no figures for Sabah/Sarawak on the MAKNA website. If you’re urang Sabah reading this, don’t feel bad we’ve been left out.)

Cancer has spawned thriving industries and businesses: hospitals, research and education, pharmaceutical, etc. Just think, if we woke up to a cancer-free world tomorrow, countless people will have no jobs and cancer-related businesses will have no clients.

For some people cancer is good news. For others it’s a death sentence.

Let me finish telling you about John Doe, the man who was told to go home because there was no hope. A drowning man will cling onto any flotsam. So when John’s wife gave him a concoction she’d made, he didn’t ask any question.

The next time he went to the hospital for his review the doctor demanded to know what Mrs. Doe had given her husband. She was aghast.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.”

Drugs are expensive.  Jabs cost an arm and a leg. All she gave him was tea she had made by steeping some jungle leaves in hot water. She and her husband have been clinging onto this flotsam, their only hope when the doctors have given up hope.

“You must have given him something,” the doctor said. “Because the cancerous area looks clean.”

All pictures from Google Images