A sharing by Cheong Pak Yean and Ong Chooi Peng
People with deformities and people who are unusually good looking tend to stand out from the rest of us. We tend to stare at such people.
Commentary
What do you say when people stare at you？
You say, “Hello!”
A group of medical students overhear a conversation between a young girl and her mother and this inspires the attached drawing.
The girl is holding the doll, with mum standing just behind her. It is unclear who is asking the question. Is the mother questioning her daughter who has the deformed right face? Or is the girl herself talking to the doll with the pretty face, and the doll “replying” in self-talk?
Many people with body deformities are conscious of their body image and may feel that others are looking at their defect. They may develop a low self-esteem and seek physical and social isolation. The mother may be coaching her daughter to disarm onlookers with a friendly gesture. The girl may be engaging in play to project psychological problems onto her doll. The medical students, although they are bystanders, feel a gamut of emotions ranging from sadness to bewilderment as they observe this scene.
This behavior is called ‘Assertive Response’ in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Other less appropriate responses to the perceived insult my be flight (avoidance), freeze (hide) or fight (Kua-simi Kua in local Hokkien parlance).
-A/Prof Cheong Pak Yean
Corridor of Terror
I remember the first time I saw a man without a leg. I was seven, visiting some family friend in the hospital.
He was in a wheelchair looking over the balcony railings at the end of the hospital corridor. I had walked down the corridor and just rounded the corner as he turned his wheelchair around and faced me.
I saw a stump where his right leg should be.
He would have seen a girl with the full display of shock, horror and fear on her face.
It would be many years before I learnt to look past the deformity and to see that the stump was a person.
-Dr Ong Chooi Peng
Dr Cheong Pak Yean is a family and internal medicine physician who is also a psychotherapist in private practice. He teaches undergraduates and has an interest in medical humanism and communication, and is a past president of the College of Family Physicians as well as the Singapore Medical Association.
Dr Ong Chooi Peng practices in a polyclinic and also in a community hospital. She counts it her blessing to have been part of Family Medicine in Singapore through a time of formation and growth.
The commentary and vignette were reproduced with permission from the book ‘Being Human, Stories from Family Medicine’ edited by Cheong Pak Yean and Ong Chooi Peng and published in 2021 by the College of Family Physicians Singapore.
Pictures of illness experiences were drawn by NUS medical students in workshops conducted from 2012-2017 by A/Prof Cheong Pak Yean. Senior family physicians subsequently shared vignettes and commentaries based on the pictures.
