The Week He Became the One Looking After Me

"Children learn more from what you are than what you teach,"

W. E. B. DuBois

There's a particular kind of vulnerability that comes with being a caregiver in a hospital. Especially when the hospital was 200 km away from home, and you were made to stay there together with the patient. You hover, you watch, you worry, and somewhere along the way, you forget entirely that you're a person too.

My son had a fever. Not a dose-of-paracetamol-and-carry-on kind of fever—a 40°C, days-on-end, nobody-is-sleeping kind of fever. He was properly unwell. And in the way that illness strips us back to our most essential selves, he asked for his mum.

So there I was.

When your child is sick—regardless of how old they are—something ancient kicks in. You stop being a person with needs and become entirely a function. Water. Temperature checks. Call the nurse. Is he comfortable? Is he worse? Is that the fever breaking or just a lull?

I wasn't eating properly. I wasn't sleeping well. The hospital room had an air conditioning system with a thermostat that was, to put it diplomatically, decorative. It either worked or it didn't, and since my son was sweating through a high fever, we kept it on. Which meant that while he burned, I froze—quietly, and without complaint, because that's what you do.

Patients in the hospital are looked after. There are nurses and doctors and meal trays and call buttons. Caregivers, on the other hand, exist in a kind of institutional blind spot. Nobody checks on you. Nobody brings you a blanket. The care system is built entirely around the patient—as it should be—but the person sitting vigil beside the bed is largely invisible.

I knew this already, of course. I'd been the patient thirteen times. I knew exactly what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that care. What I hadn't fully appreciated was how stark the contrast would feel from the other side of the bed, especially most of the time I was alone when I was the patient.

As the fever began to ease and my son started returning to himself, something changed.

He noticed I wasn't eating during meal times. Not in a passing way—he actually said something about it. Reminded me. Gently, but firmly.

Then one night, in the small hours when the ward was quiet and the air conditioning was doing its reliable best to turn the room into a refrigerator, he called the nurse. Not for himself. He asked her to bring me extra blankets.

I didn't know what to say.

This was the boy who, earlier in the week, had asked for his mum in the way children do when they feel the most rotten—instinctive, immediate, mum. And now, from that same place, he was watching out for me.

There is no single moment when a child becomes someone who looks after you. It happens in the accumulation of small things—a question asked, a need noticed, a blanket requested on your behalf at 2.00 am in the morning.

I have spent years being the one who watches and worries and anticipates. It is quietly astonishing to be on the receiving end of that same attention from someone you brought into the world.

He has grown. Not in the way you measure against a doorframe, but in the way that actually matters—into someone who pays attention. Someone who notices when the person next to him is cold, or tired, or forgetting to eat. Someone who does something about it.

I want to say this plainly, because I think it matters: caregivers need care too.

Hospitals are designed—necessarily and rightly—around patients. But the person sitting in the chair beside the bed for days on end is also running on empty. They are sleeping badly, eating irregularly, carrying a particular kind of anxious helplessness that has no formal outlet.

If you are even in the position of supporting someone through a hospital stay, please remember to eat. Please accept the blanket. Please step outside for ten minutes when you can. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and running yourself into the ground does not make you a better caregiver—it just makes you an unwell one.

And if you are a hospital patient lucky enough to be surrounded by someone who loves you, notice them. The way my son eventually noticed me.

That small act of seeing, of asking the nurse for extra blankets at 2.00 am on behalf of the person who forgot to look after herself, is one of the most loving things anyone has ever done for me.

I've written a great deal about being the patient. About thirteen hospital stays, surgical complications, and what it teaches you about advocating for yourself when the system doesn't always see you clearly. But this week reminded me that hospitals hold all kinds of stories—including the ones happening in the chair beside the bed.

If any of this resonates, my memoir is available on my website kuansiew.com.