Dr Lee Wei Ling took to Facebook on Thursday (3 September) to pen a painful incident that she went through two months ago when she suffered a fall and fractured her leg while taking a walk at Fort Canning Park all alone.
“I was walking alone in Fort Canning Park on the night of 5/7/2020. It was the 15th day of the 5th month in the lunar calendar. The moon was shining brightly with enough lighting to walk but not enough to prevent me from getting lost,” she said.
She added, “I made a wrong turn and ended up at a cul de sac near a cemetery next to a huge YMCA building. There was a napping sound and sharp pain in my right thigh when I took a step”.
This is when Dr Lee knew that she suffered a fracture on her right femur as she had a similar experience years ago.
“Instinctively I knew I fractured my right femur from a similar experience more than a decade ago. I feel on my back and when I tried to turn prone to crawl back to the path, bone end rubbed against bone end and all thigh muscles went into spasm in a ball around the fracture site. My ability to Ren(忍) or put up with the pain was overwhelmed,” she explained.
The daughter of Mr Lee Kuan Yew noted that this happened around 8pm, and she tried calling out to her dog Hiro and her helper Darmi as they were both quite near to where she fell. However, she said that she was only “met by dead silence”.
Despite being lost, she said she was not afraid as Singapore is a country “where no one can remain lost for long”.
Thankfully, at 2am, Dr Lee was greeted by a group of policemen who were out looking for her. The policemen found her six hours after her ordeal, and asked her which hospital she would like to be taken to. Without hesitation, Dr Lee said she wanted to go to Singapore General Hospital (SGH), as she describes it as “Singapore’s premier hospital”.
“I was delighted when a group of policemen turned up with torchlights looking for me. I have never been happier to see our men in navy blue uniforms before. They too were delighted to see me as their task was to find me.
“When they asked me which hospital I wanted to go to, I replied without hesitation SGH. Not only is SGH, Singapore’s premier hospital I have been treated at SGH over many years,” she stated.
She also praised the ambulance crew who were fast and “immobilised” her fracture immediately.
“Once that was done there was no more pain and I was strapped into a stretcher and expertly and promptly transported down the steep steps I had come up at 7 pm.”
Grateful that outcome was not very bad
Dr Lee also highlighted that instead of cursing at her back luck, she was grateful that she came out of the fall with “no more than a fractured femur (as) the outcome could have been much worse”.
She also went on to note that at SGH A&E, she was under Prof Tay Boon Keng, head of orthopaedic department, who is also her orthopaedic surgeon for years.
His son, who is the head of trauma department, was the one who operated Dr Lee’s “fractured femur and fixed it with a rod”, she said.
“That spared me many weeks on traction and months of rehabilitation. Because of the rod, I could start rehabilitation immediately,” she said.
At the end of the post, Dr Lee thanked her lucky stars, and expressed her gratitude towards the police who found her, the ambulance staff who immobilised her leg and brought her to the hospital, as well as the doctors and nurses who took care of her during her stay at SGH.
