Yvonne Foong: Fighting NF

There is something that I hadn’t tell anyone. In late 2007 after setting a cataracts surgery date for my father at University Malaya Medical Center, I took my father to the hospital’s welfare department to get help. A young social worker interviewed my father while I sat quietly in the same room. My father did most of the talking. I did not know what my father said, but we received a letter of rejection months later.

That was why his surgery at UMMC could not proceed. When I knew the contents of that letter I quickly put the letter away and suppressed my hurt.

The social worker was a young man. Maybe he could not see anything unusual with my father’s speech pattern. But anybody who meets my father for the first time can tell that something is not quite right with him so the things he says can’t be taken too seriously.

The social worker did not even bother to talk to me and chose to rely on the information my father provided.

I did not volunteer information either because it was not nice to tell someone in the presence of my father that what he said was unreliable.

So I need to go around this issue in getting the help my father deserves as a citizen of Malaysia.

I am thinking of getting him an independent Psychiatric evaluation as proof to the Social Welfare Department. And I hope my father will not take it as an insult.