Please help, I'm going to die'

In the lead-up to World Stroke Day on Oct 29, stroke survivors talk about their condition and recovery journey

- Stephanie Yeo

When Ms Lem Sok Fang's father was involved in a hit-and-run accident in Batu Pahat, Malaysia, she rushed across the Causeway to his bedside on Nov 26, 2023.

Little did she know she would find herself in the hospital bed next to his, fighting for her life the very next day.

That morning, the Singaporean, then aged 40, had been working remotely as a corporate secretary services provider, typing on her laptop at her father's bedside. She ate a bit of his spicy hospital lunch as he was unable to eat solid food.

Right after her meal, she felt dizzy and vomited thrice. She lost control of her body and could not reach the call button at her father's bed.

Desperate, she called her older brother and one of her younger sisters who lived in Malaysia, but they were too far away to come immediately. As her vision faded, she punched the keypad blindly and managed to reach her brother again, telling him: "Please help, I'm going to die."

"Shout, just shout," he urged her, even as he raced to drive to the hospital from his home in Melaka.

The nurses rushed in after she yelled for help. It was only then that she let her body relax and fall to the ground, she recalls.

The hospital's experts initially thought she had vertigo, but later diagnosed her condition as a stroke, although they could not figure out why. Ms Lem, the second of six siblings who had moved to Singapore to work in 2006 when she was 23, was young for a stroke patient and did not have high blood pressure or other risk factors.

Meanwhile, she could not sit up for a few days without falling and spent her nights vomiting, so much so that her 66-year-old father complained about the noise. He was unaware that his daughter was in the next bed until her second day of hospitalization, as the family wanted to spare him the stress.