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By Mihar Dias January 2026
Dean lives in Kedah. He is 67, unemployed, paralysed from the waist down, and his fingers have curled into claws no longer fully under his control. After years of medical uncertainty, doctors finally put a name to his condition: demyelinating neuropathy, a disease that slowly strips nerves of their function. What they cannot offer him is certainty — not of treatment, not of recovery, not even of hope. For that, his blood sample must be sent to the United States, at a cost exceeding RM3,000 — just to find out whether anything can still be done.
This is where the story should begin to embarrass us.
During an online interview, Dean asks a question that sounds almost naïve, except it isn’t. It is the kind of question only someone who has lived honestly within the system would ask.
Don’t we have laboratories in Malaysia that can do this?
His attending physician was candid. A government hospital in Alor Setar does not provide this service. It would have to be done privately. That is why it costs so much. And even then, the results may not lead to a cure. They may not even lead to treatment. They may simply confirm what everyone already suspects — that medicine has limits.
So let us be honest. RM3,000 is not the price of healing. It is the price of knowing. Knowledge, in this case, is outsourced. Answers must be air-freighted.
Dean believes in science anyway. He has little choice. Local doctors have reached the edge of what they can do. Traditional practitioners have long stopped offering comfort dressed up as cures. Faith alone cannot remyelinate damaged nerves. Science, at least, deals honestly with uncertainty.
The more disturbing question is not whether Dean can be cured. It is whether a 67-year-old, unemployed, physically handicapped man is expected to quietly accept that answers are a luxury item.
So how does he raise the money?
Not by begging. Not by viral videos. Not by hoping a politician might stumble upon his story and pose for a photograph.
He works.
One option is to sell 30 paintings at RM100 each. With fingers curled into claws and pain as a constant companion, he can paint one every three days. His wife helps him mix colours. In three months, if strangers are willing to pay a fair price for honest work, he reaches the target.
Another option is Ramadan. His wife prepares acar buah, a Kedah favourite. Using Bantuan Rahmah as seed capital, she produces 300 bottles and sells them at RM10 each. No drama. No slogans. Just labour, discipline and dignity.
Between the two, he believes he can make it.
This is not romantic resilience. It is necessity dressed as determination.
Dean did not suddenly discover entrepreneurship in illness. He spent three decades running his own advertising company. He built a business, sustained it, and contributed quietly to the economy long before his nerves began to betray him. Then fate arrived, indifferent and efficient, and shut his body down from the waist below.
What it did not shut down was his refusal to be reduced to a charity case.
This is what true grit looks like — not the cinematic kind celebrated in speeches, but the unglamorous version where dignity must be defended daily against systems that function perfectly well for those who do not fall through their gaps.
For that alone, Dean deserves recognition.
And perhaps that is where we should pause and reconsider our national obsessions. We are generous with honours for politicians whose achievements fade by the next news cycle. We distribute titles — Bintang this, Dato’ that — for performances that rarely survive the footnotes of history.
Meanwhile, men like Dean paint with clawed fingers so their blood can cross an ocean in search of answers.
If honour still means anything, it should not be reserved for those who grace stages. It should be extended to those who endure quietly, work stubbornly, and refuse to surrender their dignity even when the system looks the other way.
Silent heroes don’t get Datuks.
They just get on with surviving.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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