肥婆凳

While Vivian was staying in the hospital, I had much opportunity to sleep on the hospital sofa.

Although you may consider that not very comfortable or relaxing, I am accustomed to sleep in a sitting position. In fact, I used to sleep that way throughout my secondary school days - because the place I lived was too small and my bed too short.

Awkward as it seemed, there was an unexpected advantage: When I first became an assistant intern during the summer holiday before my final year, sleep was, for god's sake, highly precious. There's little time for it, and it was not easy to find a reasonable bed - not even for the genuine houseman - in those days.

But I was saved when I found in the ward a large armchair, which we usually called by the nickname fat woman's chair (肥婆凳) (because the nurses usually put overweight post-operative patients to sit there, in order to prevent lung atelectasis and bedsore). There was no fat woman sitting on it at night, and I could happily get a half-an-hour nap - sometimes even longer.

And I kept this habit throughout my physician training.

PS. Fat woman's chair disappeared from the hospital ward around the time of 1997 handover. To me, it is a tiny bit of sweat memory in the good old colonial days.