Mum's in the Hospital

I have not posted for almost a week. I was actually away from office since last Wednesday, on a long awaited time-out away from work. I was outstation for several days and Monday was supposed to be my first day at work and all things routine.. which included blogging. But at 12:30am on Monday morning, my mum complained that she didn’t well at all, in fact she was feeling rather nauseous. Went to the toilet and in a minute, she found herself retching out blood. Fresh blood. The second bout of retching came at 1:30am but this time, the blood has started to clot. Initially she didn’t want to let us know as she thought that she’ll wait until morning but I think the discomfort was too great and it must have been rather unnerving to be retching blood. She finally told us at about 3:30am in the morning and immediately we rushed her to the Emergency Ward at University Malaya Medical Centre (previously known as University Hospital) in Petaling Jaya.

Once we arrived at the hospital, she was feeling slightly woozy, since she did throw up quire a fair bit of blood. She was immediately placed in a wheel chair and was wheeled into the ER. The nurse there took her blood pressure and heartbeat and I think her blood pressure did appear low. They placed her onto a bed and we waited for the medical assistant to arrive. After asking and much prodding, they threaded her with tubes all over, up her two arms, in the back of her left hand, up her nose.

The service there was quite satisfactory and nobody asked us to pay any money upfront or check our ability to pay. Their immediate objective was to do all that was necessary to find the cause of my mum’s bleeding. Apparently, she was already bleeding a fair bit as her stools had turned black (a sign of internal bleeding) at the same time she started vomiting earlier.

However, at 4am in the morning, perhaps there were insufficient staffs as we found our mum on her bed in the middle of the hallway. We left her in the emergency ward to rest and when we returned after 5 minutes, we found that her bed was not there. When we asked the nurse, she informed us that mum has been wheeled in for an Xray. Later, we found her in the bed in the middle of the hallway. Apparently she has finished the Xray and the Xray staff just pushed her out from the Xray room as it was the nurse’s duty to wheel her back into the Emergency Ward. In the end, my brother and I wheeled her back.

Anyway, today is already Wednesday. Mum has been in there for 2 ½ days and has been pricked, prodded and went through 2 rounds of endoscopies and what I believed was endoscopic clippings. The doctor tried to make the explanations as layman as possible to us when he told us that he was going to place some rubber bands in the area where my mum was bleeding. My brother say the little “rubber caps” that was to be inserted into the gut to be placed over the bleeding area. Anyway, I returned to work today and at lunch time, I made some checks on the internet to find out what could possibly be wrong with mum and I found out that what she had could possibly be Obscure Gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding. And the 1^st case discussed in that article was like they were describing mum.. a female diabetic, hypertensive patient with a history of a stroke……

Mum's bleeding is just at the gut about an inch before the stomach

I am not sure what could be the exact cause of mum’s bleeding but so far, according to her doctor’s diagnosis, the bleeding could be due to her long term medication, especially the medication for high blood pressure, and her recent muscular discomfort, where she was prescribed pain killers plus the fact that she has recently partaken in fiery meals of chillies and sambal belacans over the weekend could caused the lesions to occur at the gastrointestinal tract. She will have to be in the hospital for several more days for observations and to see if the procedure which they did has stemmed the bleeding. However, mum’s blood pressure has shot up rather alarmingly yesterday. It was 210/90 for at least half a day. The doctor was putting in a series of medication into her last night. This morning, the pressure has come down to 160/80.

One other thing here is that if one craves for unending activities, you will surely get it. Mum is in a ward with 3 other ladies and between the 4 of them, you will have nurses, doctors, medical students, janitors, food caterers and visitors walking in and out of the ward every minute of the day. No wonder mum didn’t seem to be complaining as she has this awful fear of being alone and where she is, you will never have anytime for yourself .

My mum is being taken care of by a Doctor Ng, whom we have never met or spoken to. The only time I have seen him is when he came along on the first morning after mum was admitted with his team of medical students. The team was easily 7 members strong. One of the students, a young Chinese man has been attending my mother since. I do not know his name and when I asked one of my brothers if he knew, my brother said… “Don’t ask for his name… ask for his number”. Ah?? Oh.. HOUSE, the series. Apparently in Season 4 of House, his new batch of interns only have numbers… no names. Trust my brother to try to lighten the tension that we have all been feeling J.