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Saturday, June 17, 2006
[5 days and 4 nights...]
I'm back from my in-camp training. And a lot has happened in 5 days. I was actually already back yesterday, but was unable to blog. You'll know why by the end of this entry.
I'm not going to say much about what we did during the 5 days, except that whatever we did, judged from the perspective of someone in active service, would be a rather light schedule. However, because we were no longer in active service and were not in the best shape of our lives (a grand total of 15% soldiers in our unit passed IPPT, the lowest passing rate in the entire Army), it was pretty exhausting.
Things started going bad for me on Wednesday afternoon, when I got the sniffles. I suspect it was due to the dust in my bunk. By the next morning, the sniffles has turned into full-fledged runny nose. I reported sick, and at the medical centre found out that I was running a 37.5 degree Celsius fever. I was given medicine (which everyone who's been in the Army can testify to: they don't make you better), and 2 days worth of light duty status.
As anyone who's ever been in the Singapore Army can attest to, if you're really sick, the only types of medical status you really need is either for you to go home to recuperate or to be sent to the sick bay to have a good rest (read: sleep). Light duties doesn't mean shit. You don't have to participate in the "heavy" stuff, but you still had to help out with the odds and ends. Imagine burning up with a fever inside you, and having taken medicine which makes you drowsy, but not allowed to sleep. It's the absolute worst feeling in the world, I kid you not.
By Friday, I was feeling way worse. The medicine isn't working. What we get for fever in the Army is Rapidol, which is probably a cheap knock-off of Panadol, and is really a general painkiller. I was running a fever (I didn't know how bad it was at this time), coupled with the lack of sleep (I didn't sleep well during the night, my body felt as if it was on fire and I also received some very disturbing news...More on that in my next entry), made me extremely weak and lifeless on Friday.
Don't get me wrong, I did sound out that I wasn't feeling well. Did anybody care? Nope. I was still tasked to remove the sand from the road we used when the company returned from outfield training on Thursday, and it took us from 10+ in the morning till noon. Isn't that nice...Sending someone who's running a fever to clear sand from a road under the sun. In the first place, clearing sand from the road? Seriously, what the fuck? It's an armour camp, and we're located in the middle of the jungle, surely you can expect some sand in the camp?
I was so tired I had to lie down afterwards, which was a no-no at the time because we had a ton of things to do in order to be cleared for out-processing (aka. being done with the whole thing and going home). The "polite" ones didn't say anything (maybe they just didn't care), some guys passed by my bed actually made some very disparaging remarks about how I was malingering. One of them was actually from someone I thought was my friend. I don't anymore. To each and everyone who made those remarks, I have 2 words for you.
Fuck you. ("Fuck" is the first word, "you" is the second word; I know some of you guys can't count)
We have a total of 10 ICTs, one down, nine more to go. You WILL fall sick sometime, and I'll return every bit of your bullshit with interest, at above-market interest rates. Motherfuckers. I didn't get the best soldier award at our ORD function if I was a malingerer. Yes, you read right. I'm rubbing the award in your fucking faces. They engraved my name wrongly on the award, the very least I could do with it is to rub it in your pie-eating (and I don't mean Apple) faces.
I guess this was the time to see who your real friends were. As it turns out, I didn't have any among my Army mates. At least not those who turned up for our ICT.
Now that I've got that off my chest, we finally out-processed at 4pm+, the last company to do so. By that time, not only was I running a fever, having the sniffles (I didn't take my medicine for this because it made me extremely drowsy), but I was also feeling giddy. I nearly fell down several times while walking out of the camp. Good thing I managed to get a cab, and I had to call my father to come down to help me with my bags because I was simply too weak, exhausted and giddy to do it by myself.
I paid a visit to my own doctor in the evening. By that time, my temperature was 37.9 degrees Celsius. That's rather high, considering that a normal person's temperature is 36.9 degrees Celsius. I was given 6 different types of medicine, and after 1 dose of all 6 medicines and 11 hours of sleep, I'm 95% recovered. Yes, that's right. My doctor's medicine cured me in 11 hours. The medicine given by the SAF couldn't cure me for 31 hours.
I'm just glad to be home. I haven't seen my aquarium for 5 days, and when I did, I couldn't believe the amount of snails in there. I've since removed about 30+ of them. I want some snails in my tank for general house-keeping purposes, but they spawn like crazy. And as it turns out, my mobile phone operator now supports cell info display (I wasn't using my usual phone when I was in camp). I've only experienced this when I was in Thailand and Australia, until now. Basically, if you enable this feature on your mobile phone, you can see which cell you're connected to. Doesn't change anything really, but it's a pretty cool function nevertheless.
^^^ by Locksley @ 8:11 PM.
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