亲情:我的母亲 (1)

I'm Aaron, Cowen's dad. I think I will be hijacking my boy's blog for some time until he is ready to take over.

I would have preferred this blog to start with something light and pleasurable. But life is unpredictable. Certain parts in my post below may be too vivid for comfort, so if you don't have a strong stomach, please do consider skipping it.

14 August 2009

It was an usual Friday in office until I sensed something unusual when I called home several times around 1:15pm, my usual routine to check that Cowen is home. Cowen should have reached home by now, as his school dismisses at 12:30pm on Friday, but nobody picked up the phone. At about 1:20pm my wife Jane called me. Mom wasn't to be found at the ground floor greeting Cowen from his school bus. The boy went upstairs himself and pressed the door bell to which nobody answered. Cowen then went over to our neighbour to use their phone to call Jane, who then called me.

I called home again. Still unsuccessful. "Mom won't let this happen", an uncomfortable thought nagged me. I picked up my bag and went over to my colleague's desk and explained to her that I needed to go back, as we were to meet at 2pm to head for a meeting outside NUS together. I told her I would get to the meeting myself, though in most certainty I would be late.

I managed to flag a taxi very quickly. As I reached for its door another colleague walked past and waved at me. I waved back, showing a signal that I was in a hurry to go.

I found mom on the floor

2pm.

I went up to my neighbour's house to fetch Cowen, but without waiting for him, hurriedly got into my own and my fear materialised right before my eyes.

It wasn't a pretty sight. Lying motionlessly on the floor just outside the bathroom, mom was surrounded by what seems to be a patch of blood and vomits, with a rag nearby.

I went down to check her pulse. A thick clot of blood hung from her right nostril, carving a scarlet trail all the way across half of her face to her right ear and down onto her dress. It was a stroke of luck that she lay sideway, or she could have been choked on her own vomits. I shook her and talked to her, but she did not respond, except for some movement that appeared to be a grimace.

I could hear Cowen's footsteps behind me. "Mah-mah (paternal grandmother in Cantonese) is still breathing." I heard him. "Yes" I said crisply without turning my head. "Quick, go get changed. We have to send mah-mah to the hospital". I mopped the blood from her face and moved her slightly away from the pool of mixture, but not daring to move her too much in case she had suffered some bone injuries.

I grabbed the leaflets from the mail-holder where I keep leaflets of all sorts, found the number for calling private ambulance and dialed it. Nobody answered! Dialed again. Still nobody answered! Fed-up, I called 999.

While waiting for the ambulance, I examined mom for any sign of external injuries. I removed her ear-rings as they were rather sharp at their end. I kept talking to her, but in her semi-unconscious state all I could hear was some incoherent mumbling, or could it be just reflex actions?

"Are you crying, daddy?" came the boy's voice from behind. "No," still not turning my head to face him, I said quickly, "this is not time for tears. Go, quickly get changed. Drink some water. It is going to be a long wait in the hospital."

The police called back. The guy asked a few questions about how my mom was found and wanted to get her IC number. I rummaged her bedroom looking for her handbag, found it but her IC was nowhere to be seen. The guy at the other side of the line repeated "I need to have her IC number." I was in two minds whether to continue searching for the IC or tend to my mom. When things happen too quickly, your mind goes a bit slow. Now feeling fluttered, I spoke into the phone: "Look, I'm busy attending to my mom now. I give you *my* IC number first. Could you call back later when I've found her IC?"

I heard footsteps, several of them, outside my gate now and I knew the paramedics were here. "Open the gate for them, Cowen", I said to Cowen absent-mindedly, still without turning my head as I examined my mom. But that was unnecessary, the gate was already open. The paramedic came in and I quickly updated them, left my mom to their care and went into her bedroom again to continue searching for her IC, for I know I would need it later at the hospital. I found it eventually, in another purse of hers.

In no time, the paramedics got mom on the stretcher and made their way downstairs. As I left the house, I grabbed Cowen's medication from the table and chucked it inside my bag. He had a high fever a few days ago and was still under medication.

At the hospital

While on the ambulance I updated Jane and called my colleague to apologise that I wouldn't be able to make it for the meeting. I sat at the front seat, Cowen behind with his grandma.

We reached Tan Tock Seng hospital. They wheeled her to the emergency room, leaving my boy and me waiting outside.

"I have seen the inside of the ambulance!" Cowen declared enthusiastically. I gave him a wan smile.

The boy is pretty brave. I thought, and I hope. I just hope that it had not be too traumatic for him. He has seen death not too long ago -- his maternal grandfather, my father-in-law, passed away barely eight months ago, and today he has just witnessed the somewhat gruesome scene of his grandmother lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

It was indeed a long wait. They wheeled mom out of the emergency room past us into another room, which I later gathered was for a CT scan. Then they wheeled her past us back into the emergency room.

A doctor came out and told me that she was in a pretty serious condition, and they needed to do a scan to ascertain whether there was any damage to her head. I guessed they guess the same, that my mom might have hit her head when she collapsed.

I took out Cowen's medication and fed him. "I hope mah-mah will be all right." I told him casually. "We can pray to god" he said, rather cheerfully. For a moment, I thought he was going to utter some Christian prayer, because he has this little Children's bible which he reads from time to time. But as he opened his mouth, what came out first was a string of what sounded like Taoist chanting, which I supposed he had picked up from observing his grandfather's funeral. Then, in Mandarin, he uttered this: "Please help mah-mah to recover and be healthy... (I can only remember this part) ... you must do this... ("This sounds more like a command or a threat rather than a prayer", I thought to myself) ... thank you." ("At least you are polite", I thought to myself again.)

"I think Mah-mah will need to go for operation," I said, again casually, just to fill the silence. "Is it pain?" Cowen asked. "You should say 'Is it painful?'", I corrected him for the umpteenth time. He has this bad habit of saying "pain"instead of "painful".

A doctor, this time a different one, came over and took us to see the result of the CT scan on the monitor. Apparently her head must have been hit during the fall, which caused bleeding inside the head, as the scan showed. The danger was imminent, so immediate operation was necessary. However, as part of his job, he conveyed to me the possible outcome of the operation, which ranges from some loss of functions to being paralysed to in the worst case, vegetative state. It would unlikely be back to her old self, I was told, as the doctor surveyed me, asking me to consider it seriously.

Compared to Jane's predicament eight months ago when her family had to make the dreadful decision of whether to pull the plug off her father's life support, it wasn't a difficult decision. I opted for operation almost immediately. They brought her to the ICU, to get ready to operate on her the next moment the OT is available.

Cowen and I waited in a room at the ICU. Cowen was now too tired and drowsy -- the effect of his medicine has kicked in -- and dozed off at the table. Eventually, at about 5:30pm, I got to see mom before they took her to the operating theatre. She was still unconscious. We were told to go home and wait for news, which should be in a couple of hours' time.

The night

Cowen and I went home. I cleaned up the floor, packed up and sent Cowen to my mother-in-law's home in which he would spend the weekend. I then went back to office to make alternative work arrangements.

On my way from office to home, a call from the hospital informed me that mom had been discharged from the OT and back in the ICU, sooner than I had expected. I were to go to the hospital to meet the doctor.

The doctor assured me that the operation had gone well in general. The clotted blood had been drained. However, there was a point when her blood pressure dipped. Low blood pressure may result in insufficient blood supply to the brain, which in turn may cause some damage. The only way to tell is to wait.

It was past midnight when I reached home. I sent out a few emails to update my 'brothers' whom I had SMSed earlier. When I hit the bed, it was past 1am. The past 12 hours was like a whirl...