Back and forth Changi Hospital

The next night, on Sunday evening, my mom called me again and said that dad wasn’t improving. You never know, and the condition could be far worse than what we think, especially for old folks. So it was down to the hospital again, because my sister felt it was better since his medical records are all with them (including the recent prostate cancer diagnosis and appointments). The same procedure, the same wait, and a young female doctor attended to my dad. ECG was done yet again, which turned out normal yet again. And this time round X-rays were done on his stomach instead of his chest (why wasn’t it done the previous night beats the hell out of me), which only show that there were no foreign objects in there.

So, we were given the explanation that in order to really see what is wrong in the stomach (presumably at this point it was a gastric problem), and endoscopy may be in order by a gastroenterology specialist. That was fine, since we really wanted to find out the cause of all this, and really I could tell that the doctors in A&E could do nothing further. What followed then was a slightly unhappy scene where we were told by the admin person in charge of appointments, that the earliest appointment was more than a month down the road. We were stunned. How does the hospital evaluate that a case is serious enough to be allocated an earlier slot? Or do they expect the patient to wait out until the condition worsens so that it becomes so obvious that the patient is in pain, before they deem it an emergency? Questions were racing through my mind, but apparently they had already been processed in my sister’s mind, because the next moment I knew, she was creating a small scene at the desk.

A bunch of reasoning and arguing ensued, as well as a some lame excuses by the admin lady that they could only check one other hospital’s schedule (and not the whole range of hospitals under MOH) for us and get back to us the next day (see, back to the doctors shagging again at that time of the night). Questions, questions again. Aren’t computers supposed to be linked up and schedules for appointments shared easily these days? Do computers need rest or sex? Apparently so.

My sister then pulled out her trump card somewhere in her arguments, without realizing it herself. Somewhere between sentences, she spewed out the words, “don’t worry about the money”, which caused my heart to race and my eyebrows raised as high as the Singapore Flyer. Apparently that rang a bell with the admin lady, and she finally relented and said something along the lines of, “Well since you said you do not mind paying more, we can refer you to a private specialist, but you cannot use Medisave…”. That did the trick and after getting a new signed referral letter from the doctor, we collected more medication for gastric, as well as an appointment to see the gastro doctor at the end of the week, instead of a month down. The power of money (or misplaced belief that we have it) works anywhere, even in “corrupt-free” Singapore. Pffffttttt….