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Papa suffered yet another sleepless night, this time due to aches throughout his body rather than the itchiness of mosquito bites. Staying awake to attend on him, Mom only managed to catch some sleep starting at 3 a.m. I woke up in the 4 o'clock hour to take over the caregiving responsibilities, except that I was at a loss to locate Papa's diabetes pill, which I had not yet administered in all my days here so far. After giving him a dose of the morphine mist, I rested in bed for another hour until called upon to help wheel him downstairs and fill out the NUS conflict of interest form in his resident fellow office.
When we got back to the apartment from this excursion, Mom was brewing a pot of tea and offering me the chance to eat a second breakfast. Little did I know when declining this offer that the first breakfast I ate at 5 a.m. would have to last almost 14 hours, as an emergency visit to the National Cancer Centre would have us sitting vigil by his bedside until space opened up in the hospital ward.
I went out for a run in West Coast Park and Clementi Woods at 8:30. When I came back at 10:15, Mom was making arrangements to have Papa transported to NCC for a walk-in consultation with Dr. Toh. The precipitating event this time, Papa's vomiting of all the solid food we prepared for him this morning, continued a trend of insufficient food intake that had been getting worse all week (at least since our last appointment with Dr. Toh). Luckily the vomiting occurred in an area easily mopped up, and not on the sofa where leakage from the rim of the urinal happened yesterday.
Arlene and Sister Geraldine teamed up to secure transportation of Papa in his wheelchair straight to the National Cancer Centre. Mom and Sister Geraldine rode with Papa in the back of a wheelchair-accessible van courtesy of St. Joseph's Home (the same eldercare facility that had donated the hospital bed for Papa's use). From the NCC lobby we wheeled Papa to the lift and then to Clinic C, where Dr. Toh had informed the staff to expect us.
We met with Dr. Toh shortly after our arrival. He quickly agreed with our assessment that Papa's condition had become too precarious to manage at home, and Papa would have to be admitted for inpatient treatment. To address Papa's shortness of breath, they hooked him up to an oxygen tank. An x-ray was taken in order to determine whether his lungs had filled up with fluid as a result of the advancing tumor. This condition might be remedied by an operation to drain the lungs.
Between the taking of X-rays and the placement of Papa in a ward of the hospital, Uncle John stopped by to offer his support. He encouraged us to keep pestering the clinic nurses about transfer to the ward, lest we be forgotten and ignored for the rest of the day.
In the 18:00 hour, we finally got word that a bed in the hospital had been allocated for Papa, and we only needed to wait for an ambulance to become available. This mode of transportation seemed overly cautious, since just yesterday Papa had enjoyed a leisurely ride in his wheelchair almost the same distance as that between NCC and SGH Block 7.
Papa got settled in Ward 74, Room 9, Bed 1, around 19:00. By then we had run out of tissue paper, and our request to the nurses for another box needed to be repeated several times before one was forthcoming. The nurses seemed to be more focused on completing the admission paperwork.
The on-call MD, Dr. Sumit, came by to introduce himself and assure us that Papa would be cared for most competently. Sumit's familiarity with the patient records and all the medications Papa was taking helped to reinforce this impression.