Singapore:A cancer-stricken woman's dying wish to meet her two children in India was fulfilled by a Singapore medical team that pulled out all the stops and arranged her travel from a hospital here to Tiruchirappalli at the height of the pandemic, according to a media report on Monday.
Ramamoorthy Rajeswari, a Singapore permanent resident, suffering from throat cancer, wanted to meet her two children- aged 12 and nine- who were dispatched to their home near Tiruchirappalli (Trichy) in Tamil Nadu in January 2019 to be taken care by their relatives after her cancer progressed, Channel News Asia (CNA) reported in an interview with her husband Rajagopalan Kolanchimani.
On Jun 27, 2020, about two weeks after the couple arrived in India, Rajeswari died. She was 44. She said if she doesn't see her children, she won't leave the world, she will stay, Kolanchimani said. She was so happy (on seeing the children). She wrote that she is okay, that she would be back and we could live together again," he said, adding that she was unable to speak but communicated with them using an app.
Rajeswari was taken to a hospital so that her condition could be stabilised on arriving at Trichy. The hospital was arranged by her medical team at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) in Singapore through the Asia Pacific Palliative Care Network. I didn't believe it would happen. They told us that we could go on June 10, a day before that, but we didn't believe it at all. Because the COVID-19 situation was bad, and so was hers," said Kolanchimani.
Rajeswari was discharged a few days later to make her final journey home, about 50-km away from Trichy. Suddenly, she lost consciousness When I checked, she had no pulse. The doctors had advised not to resuscitate her, he said. She had already defied her doctors' assessment on how long she had to live. There was no guarantee she would even make it to India cancer had wrecked her body and it was starting to fail, he said. From a medical perspective, we didn't think that it was going to happen," said Dr Tricia Yung, one of Rajeswari's palliative doctors from TTSH.