What a roller coaster evening it turned out to be.
We brought him to Parkway East Hospital, which I figured was nearer and less crowded. Indeed it was like an express queue where we had great service upfront and immediately attended to. In fact it took at most ten minutes from reaching A&E to the X-ray room. The nurse taking the X-ray was also very friendly, and with the equipment they had, the picture appeared almost immediately. The nurse also muttered that everything looked as expected, where the coin was on its way out.
Then we had to go to the doctor's room to await the consultation and diagnosis.
This was when things headed downhill extremely fast.
The night doctor has always been rumored to be more junior, and untrained. This middle aged plump unshaven lousy excuse of a junior doctor that night proceeded to give us a very solemn look from the moment we entered the room. He said that as the coin was lodged in the small intestine headed upwards, it meant that the coin had to be surgically removed. He kept emphasizing that the boy needed to fast for the rest of the night after 10pm, and he will write us a referral to Mt Elizabeth to see a pediatrician and would highly likely require surgery. Told us he didn't want to further speculate. And there were no other qualified doctors around to give a second opinion.
We were mortified. Never knew it was gonna be this serious. Suddenly from thinking it was a run of the mill case of child swallowing foreign object, it made us think of the worst possible scenarios. The really unimaginable ones. The life of my child flashed before my eyes and I had gravely solemn thoughts from here on.
Rather than wait in agony for the next day, we made the collective decision to head down to KK Children's Hospital for a second opinion. One reason I never liked KK was the obscenely long waiting times for every stage of the consultation. In total we waited more than two hours in there. Yet, KK does what KK does best, seeing children health issues systematically and accurately.
In spite of the long wait times, we saw a junior doctor who took a quick look at the X-ray and said that everything looked pretty standard and the boy would pass out the coin in a couple of days. We couldn't believe our ears, it was too good to be true! More importantly, she read the X-ray correctly, thereby indicating that the doctor at Parkway East had read the mirror image of the X-ray as he had been holding it on the wrong side! How unprofessional is that, when a trained professional cannot even read a basic X-ray properly?! And whether the coin appeared in the left or right made a whole damn world of difference!
We were still digesting the information from the junior doctor in KK, and were skeptical. So we asked for a second opinion from a senior docter. She came and saw the X-ray and confirmed that everything looked normal other than the fact that there were lots of shit still waiting to be shat out by the boy.
In the end we left KK extremely relieved, hoping that the coin will be pooped out the next day.
This is the picture of the X-ray.
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