choo.choke oh.tuck

Yesterday was the last day of school holiday and during lunch of kuey teow goreng (inspired by one of aliya's posts) Ilham did not heed my advice to duduk diam-diam (sit quietly) and he ran around the living room and fell and hit the back of his head on our coffee table (hard, solid wood). The cut was about an inch long and it bled profusely, so I had no choice but to call Taufik to come home (he was at work!! in a huge meeting with big bosses and clients!! I felt so bad) and bring Ilham to the hospital. Ilham was conscious and he didn't complain of headaches or blurry vision (he was actually praying out loud to God to not let him die. Such a drama queen! *rolls eyes*), so I proceeded to scold him for not listening to me when I told him not to run around the living room. I told him I was not mad that he cut his head, I was mad at him for not listening to me.
He got a patch of his hair shaved and 2 stitches. I told him to remember the pain the next time he feels like not listening to me when tell him not to run around too much. (Too cruel, ke? Maybe I've become jaded because this is the 3rd time he's fallen and cut his scalp). When we were all done, I asked him if he had learnt a lesson from all this and he said he will not run around the house anymore.

So last night in bed I was thinking about the fall and how we didn't go through a cat scan and wondered if a cat scan could detect a blood clot and it got me thinking about strokes which got me thinking about paralyzation and it reminded me of that time when I was in highschool and dory woke up with half of her face paralyzed. (You see, dory and I went to boarding school together).
It was quite an odd incident, mainly because it was the first time any of us had seen such a thing happen so suddenly. She didn't fall or hurt her head (kan, dory?) or anything. It just happened. I saw her that morning and she looked slightly lopsided and her mouth didn't move right when she talked. The warden brought her to the hospital and when she came back she told us the doctor said it had something to do with her nerves and that was the first time I looked up the word "neurology".
A few days later she got better bit by bit and I think by about a month she was back to her usual smiling self, and people eventually forgot it even happened to her. During the first few days there were a lot of theories of how she got sick, though. The common one was that she kena buat (hexed), perhaps by someone jealous of her luscious lips, soft almost brown hair, percelain flawless complexion and gorgeous bod. (:D)
The weirdest one I heard, however, was the theory involving the cucuk otak (choo.choke oh.tuck).
Cucuk Otak is what we call the pins that we use to hold our headscarves in place. It's usually about 1.5inch long with a pearlized bead on its head. We usually position the pin a few inches above our ears and pin the scarf so that it doesn't move about as we move ourselves about the school. Sometimes all you can see is the pearlized bead pin head on the side of our heads, which gives the illusion that the pin goes straight into our brains. Hence the name cucuk otak - cucuk = poke, otak = brain.
So the theory was that, while getting ready for prep (study hall, between 8pm to 10pm) the night before, Dory had accidently swallowed a cucuk otak (because we have this habit of holding the cucuk otak in our mouths while putting on our headscarves). During her sleep, the cucuk otak had travelled through her body and thus had affected her urat-urat (nerves), thus creating the paralyzation. She finally is cured after the cucuk otak had done all the travelling it could and is finally expelled from her body.
It's absurd of course, but hey, we were about 200 teenage girls held up in brick buildings, what else is there to do but make up silly theories?
Anyways.
That thought made me grin before my brain officially shut down for the night last night.

Funny how the actual thought took only like 5 seconds and it took me like half an hour to type this up.
How long did you take to read this?