I try to be sympathetic, but his voice just gets on my nerves.
It is peevish, it is querulous and it is very loud.'Missy,' he screams, and his voice reverberates throughout the neighbourhood.
My bedroom must be at least 100m away from where he sleeps, but he sounds as clear as if he were next door.
Who is this angry old man who shouts so loudly at such ungodly hours of the day - 11pm, 3am, 6am - and disturbs everyone's sleep? And why is he so unhappy?
We started noticing his 'Missy' cries about half a year ago.
H, who is new to my neighbourhood, was startled the first time he heard it.
What's that, he asked, alarmed.
Relax, I said, it's just a patient in the nursing home behind our house. Missy means nurse. He's calling for the nurse. He's probably one of those difficult patients.
I knew what the sound was because it wasn't the first time I'd heard it.
Back in the 1990s, there was a patient in the nursing home who was also prone to 'Missy' fits. Another patient would bark 'Encik' all the time.
We put up with their shouts for years until there was silence, which could mean only one thing - they were dead.
Although they were strangers and had caused me sleepless nights, I felt a little sad thinking about that.
Nobody, I'm sure, would want to deliberately make a nuisance of himself or be unpopular with the nursing home staff and their fellow bedmates. They must have been in a lot of pain to be bellowing for attention so often. It can't be easy to be old.
I got a taste of it recently when I attended an Age-Friendly Workshop organised by the Changi General Hospital.
The sessions teach frontline hospital staff how to be more sensitive to the needs of the elderly.
I joined a group of nurses and care co- ordinators, and we started off by listing the ailments the old are likely to suffer from.
We were told to divide them into visual, emotional, cognitive, hearing and muscular problems. We came up with a very long and woeful list.
We discussed the best ways to interact with people suffering from these problems, and what can be done to make their lives a little easier.
A care coordinator related how she deliberately wears bright 'wayang' make-up and floral 'auntie' clothes to work. Old people have poor eyesight, and if she is a colourful presence, they can see her better, she said.
A nurse pointed out that a person's vision in dim lighting and his perception of depth deteriorates with age.
To prevent him from tripping, steps should be clearly delineated, and the walls and floors of a room should be of different colours.
The next segment of the workshop involved morphing - sort of - into an old, sick person.
To see what it was like to suffer from cataracts, we put on goggles which were pasted over with translucent tape.
To experience hearing loss, we stuffed our ears with plugs, and to experience stiff joints we taped our fingers together with surgical tape.
We then took turns to move around the hospital on a wheelchair or walking frame. We had to fulfil a series of everyday tasks - take a lift up and down, collect and read a brochure, go to the canteen to buy a drink, and use a toilet.
It was depressing work.
It's tough wheeling yourself around on a wheelchair, especially when your fingers are stiff. Corners are difficult to manoeuvre, slopes are a nightmare and it was frustrating buying a drink. You feel bad because you're in everyone's way and it was near impossible to reach up and pay because the counter was so high.
It was horrible not being able to read faraway signs as well as the brochures and price tags you hold close to your eyes. Even the going-up and going-down arrow buttons next to the lifts were hard to decipher.
But I must say I didn't mind that much the muffled hearing. It wasn't so bad being shut off from all the noise and nonsense around you.
Going in and out of the toilet in a wheelchair was an exercise in willpower and dexterity, even though it was a wheelchair- friendly toilet I was testing.
The normal-sized door was a tight squeeze for the wheelchair, which meant you had to gingerly ease yourself in or risk your fingers being squashed between the chair and door.
There was no way I could have entered the toilet unless someone was there to help me hold open the door. And once inside, there was no ramp to allow me to heave myself from wheelchair to toilet seat, and back.
Going around the hospital, we met the real elderly in wheelchairs and walking frames who were there to seek treatment. Many were accompanied by equally old companions.
Looking at them, I told myself that this is me, and H, in just two decades' time, if we are lucky (or is it unlucky) to be still alive then.
Ageing sucks.
It's not as if I were a young chick experiencing the amazing, eye-opening stages of ageing at the workshop. I'm already 48 and every year, every decade, has already brought a decline in bodily functions, not to mention physical appearance, and it's only going to get worse.
The skin dulls, the hair loses its shine, the metabolism slows, the heart becomes less efficient, the bones shrink, the muscles weaken, digestion slows, kidneys take a longer time to remove waste, bladder becomes loose, brain cells die, memory fades, retina thins, hearing goes, teeth rot, sex drive diminishes and, baby, it's really the beginning of the end.
One can try to cling on to youth by exercising like crazy, eating healthily, breathing slowly, driving fast cars, chasing after young women, or men, wearing sexy clothes, designer shoes, whatever.
But there's no escaping the clutches of time and sooner than you think, you find yourself with cataracts, blindly manoeuvring hospital corridors in a wheelchair, the bottoms of your trousers rolled.
Is it any wonder, then, that the old man in the nursing home behind my house screams an anguished Missy?
I shouldn't be impatient with him, really, for in time, it could well be me.
sumiko@sph.com.sg
