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Fractured

A day with mom at the hospital

By Kin Mun "mrbrown" Lee

March 14^th, 2014

In February this year, Mom slipped on a freshly mopped living room floor at home and fell. Hard.

It fractured her left knee and she needed to be hospitalized for two weeks so that the swelling from the internal bleeding could come down before the doctors could operate.

Mom is 72 and has more energy than an Energizer bunny. She just cannot sit still.

We, her three adult sons, were worried sick, of course. But like a trooper, she stayed in her A1 ward and made the best of things. She got upgraded because there were not enough B1 beds when she was admitted, lucky us… for the first seven days. Then we had to move her to a B1 ward mid-stay when the beds were available. We missed the nice A1 room. On hindsight, a B2 ward would have sufficed too, and would have resulted in a lower hospital bill. But it’s all good.

My youngest brother, who was the first to respond to her call for help, and who brought her to the A&E, took care of most of the admin. He even bought her a $100 portable DVD player with built-in screen so she could watch her Cantonese drama serials in bed. There was only this much free-to-air local TV, CNN and HBO my Cantonese-series-loving mother could take.

She had a steady flow of visitors. Friends and family, we all came. Mom doesn’t fall sick often. This wasn’t her first time injuring her legs though.

Ten years ago, Mom was trekking in the hills near the village of Sa Pa, Vietnam, with a group, and slipped on a slope, fracturing her RIGHT ankle. They carried her down the hills to the village hospital with a makeshift stretcher carried by six men, for X-rays treatment, and a cast.

And then she had to travel via overnight train from Sa Pa, for twelve hours with a chaperone, to Hanoi so that she could be X-rayed again at the city hospital. Then she was flown back to Singapore and the ambulance picked her up from the tarmac and whisked her to Tan Tock Seng Hospital. We wanted to fly to Hanoi to assist, she said, “Don’t bother lah, I am fine and well taken care of."

Thank God for travel insurance.

She had titanium bolts inserted into her right ankle and soon recovered. Two years later, she was on her feet again and traveling. She called me from the Himalayan mountains in India on that next trip, and laughingly told me that she was about to get on a snowmobile and take a nice pillion ride with this nice young man driving. I was somewhat worried but there is no stopping my Mom.

She still has the titanium bolts in her right ankle and it looks like there will be new metal in her left knee now. We call her Iron Woman. She laughs.

From the hospital bed, she made her calls and took care of business. Like calling the Special School bus driver friend of hers, to arrange for bus transport for my autistic daughter.

Mom drove Faith to Special School every day, for years and even though I insisted it was ok and I could do the driving in the coming weeks, she was not leaving this alone.