Life's Sugar & Spice: November 2005

or probably more accurately labelled nightmare in this instance...
Nal and i were logging onto this website to check our 'BTN Camp results'. well actually i was on the phone with Nal and i was accessing the website. the format of the downloaded page was pretty much like the notices RCSI uploads onto the internet for us to download, then read, pretty much like how our results are given... (the Biro Tatanegara Camp is a compulsory camp for government servants wanting a promotion and was a requirement for government scholars to be allowed to go overseas, as it supposedly instils patriotism in us, so on and so forth).
so before we could click to download, there was some notice that more than 2 people didnt pass the BTN test, so Nal started freaking out, and i did too, though i didnt show it, cause i remember at camp someone told us, no one had ever failed the test, except for this one odd soul... then i downloaded it and there were two columns. the first with all the ppl who passed and the second with all who didnt, and i saw that the 2nd one was of a considerable amount too. so nal asked me to check hers, and (oddly, it was 8 digit numbers with a '0' in front, very much like our RCSI student IDs) so Nal's number was indeed there. but i scanned for mine in the first column and it didnt seem to be there. i panicked and the sympathetic reaction started to kick in... so i scrolled to the 2nd column and my number was there. i felt my world slowly melt and ooze down on me,kinda like melting ice cream on a cone... i clicked on this link which was supposed to tell us what being in that column entails. it was in bullet-form, something along the lines that the score was final, no appeals would be entertained and that meant that we had our scholarships forfeited and JPA wasn't going to sponsor us overseas(all in Malay of course). i was dumbfounded. i kept trying to tell myself in the dream that maybe it was just a dream, but me in the dream was truly convinced it was reality. i didnt know whether to cry, or scream, or do what... i had no future... or i did, but it was bleak. i was not going to be a doctor, and since i was already in Dublin, i had to go home... i had never felt more hopeless than i did at that very moment.
Then thankfully, when i felt i was going to be able to feel what being dead was like, as in every dream that has us hanging at the edge of the string of life, i woke up!