Hot Doctor and Rolls of Tissue

You're staring at a limitless blue sky with your back on the ground because you fell down. But isn't it wonderful that, despite your lack of balance, you can still see beauty?

Worse things could have happened, yet you're still alive, right?


I know this doesn't contain my usual dose of sarcasm, but right now I'm sitting on my bed with a pile of wet pieces of tissue beside me (the trash can is three meters away and I refuse to get up otherwise I shall lose the drive to write this post). Two years ago, I got to watch a movie entitled Taiyou no Uta. It was about an unfortunate girl, Kaoru Amane, a teenager with xeroderma pigmentosum. It's a rare skin disease that held severe consequences if the patient were exposed to UV radiation. Thus, Kaoru can't go out during daytime…and she had until she was twenty years old to live. I was interested in the movie because of two reasons: one, I want to be a doctor (badly) so anything related to medicine fascinates me (an explicit exaggeration), and two, my favorite JPop singer-slash-composer, Yui Yoshioka, played the lead role. So I researched a little bit on the movie and found out it was actually an adaptation of the series with the same title. Erika Sawajiri played the role of Kaoru in the series, and being the alien stalker that I am, I looked up her filmography which eventually led me to…*dun dun duuuun*


The 2005 series, A Liter of Tears—

—which, amusingly, elicited a liter of tears from me too.


(I bought the DVD a long time ago but only decided to finish it now.)

Sawajiri-san's character, Aya Ikeuchi, is a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore who excels not only in academics but also in sports (I sound like a commercial). Her life was perfect: she was friends with everyone, she was class president, and she was going out with the hot basketball team captain (who happens to be a senior. Gah. Typical. I honestly think the hottest male character there was the doctor.) She had a promising future until she was diagnosed with spinocerebellar ataxia, a neurological disease in which the peripheral nerves slowly degenerate. Although the patient's thought processes remain normal, her movements are impaired. She doesn't have full control of the body and will eventually be immobile. Despite all these, Aya was optimistic. She saw things differently in a good way. She was aware of the existence of a future—her future.

And she thanked everyone when she could have floundered in a pool of self-pity, as most of us usually do.

People like Aya are the real heroes of this generation. They inspire us. They are constant reminders of the purpose of life, of how beautiful it really is, and that we are ignorant enough not to notice that. We get into small, meaningless accidents everyday and we cuss and get pissy, but we never pause to think, What if something worse happened to me?

Be thankful you're healthy and safe. Be thankful you're alive.

I remember one line: "Doctors should be the ones who encourage the patients. Instead, for some reason, they encourage us."

(Dr. Mizuno: Now I can say I have a reason to be inspired to go into neurology.)