Friday, 20-Feb-2004 11:46 AM

Quack, quack, quack

I never did like duck meat. I prefer chicken. To be honest, Donald Duck used to be one of my favourite Walt Disney characters but my dislike for duck meat has nothing to do with my penchant for the cartoon character.

I admit Donald Duck is rather cute, going “quack, quack, quack” across the TV screen. However, while a quacking duck is cute, a quack doctor is certainly not.

A couple of days ago, my son came down with a strange sickness. His chest was throbbing with pain, his face sunken, he was shivering, and his mouth was bleeding. On Tuesday, he drove to Dr Shamsuddin’s clinic down the road in Bandar Baru Sungai Buloh and the doctor, who did an examination on him including a blood test, sent him home with a couple of tablets.

“The doctor said there is nothing wrong with me,” said my son.

How can that be? Anyone could see there is something wrong. You need not be a doctor to tell. How can you be bleeding all over your mouth, suffer excruciating pain in the chest, look like the walking dead, yet be as fit as a fiddle?

My wife sent my son to another doctor in Sungai Buloh who did a chest X-Ray and found that he had a serious lung infection, probably pneumonia. The doctor referred him to the Selayang Hospital, that “famous” hospital that refused to hand over Anwar Ibrahim’s MRI scans, saying they had destroyed them.

My wife drove to the Selayang Hospital at 2.00pm yesterday. By dinnertime, my son was still in the emergency ward and the doctor had not attended to him yet. Some emergency!

After dinner, I joined my wife at the hospital and raised hell. Around midnight, the doctor, who finally attended to my son, said my son would need to be warded. He not only could be suffering from a lung infection, but they suspect he may even be suffering a mild heart attack.

“Is there a history of heart problems in the family?” the doctor asked my wife. (The doctor had asked to see my wife and said she only wanted to meet my wife and not me. Maybe they were pissed because I had raised hell earlier).

“Yes,” my wife said. “Both my husband’s parents had died of heart problems in their mid-40s.”

My son is not yet 30, but if this is our family history there is certainly cause for alarm.

It took ten hours of loitering around the emergency ward before alarms bells were rung. And what’s this “take two aspirins because there is nothing wrong with you” crap?

“Quack, quack, quack,” is all I have to say.

As I write this piece, my son sleeps in the ward on the ninth floor of the Selayang Hospital, that famous hospital that burnt Anwar Ibrahim’s medical records.

While this family drama was unfolding, another drama was simultaneously being played out also in Sungai Buloh; the Sungai Buloh Prison to be exact.

Anwar Ibrahim too is suffering excruciating pain, but in his spine. And the doctor, Dr. Jeyaindran Sinnadurai, refused to see Anwar and, just like Dr Shamduddin, instructed the hospital assistant (HA) to instead give him two tablets.

Yesterday, Anwar’s lawyer, Sankara Nair, wrote a stinking letter to complain about this. Anwar is not so fortunate in that his wife cannot drive him to the Selayang Hospital and hang around ten hours waiting to be attended to. Anwar will have to remain in prison without any doctor’s examination and just take those two tablets twice a day like a good boy.

Anwar is, after all, a convicted criminal and convicted criminals have no right to medical treatment. Or do they?

Well, to Dr Jeyaindran, I have one thing to say to you too, “Quack, quack, quack”.