SINGAPORE: Looking at her three-year-old son, Ms Lau sobbed silently as she left home to save another boy’s life, fully aware that she might never get to see her own child again if the operation went awry.

Ms Lau, 32, did not hesitate at all when she saw an online appeal for a liver donor for six-month-old Jayden Chong.

All she thought of was saving him if she could. But there was a part of her that was guilty – was she being a selfish mother by not putting her son first?

None of what she felt then though compares to the overwhelming happiness she feels now, knowing it was her liver that saved Jayden, who was critically ill with acute liver failure.

Speaking to Channel NewsAsia at her home in Tampines, she related what she had told her friends just before the operation. 

“I don’t know what made me do this, but when I saw this innocent baby facing death, I knew I had to do something,” said Ms Lau.

Ms Lau, who requested to be identified only by her surname, had lost her mother to liver cancer when she was just 10 years old and knew fully the agony of watching a loved one waste away.

Her family had waited and hoped for a liver donor, but it did not materialise, and her mother died after a one-and-a-half year battle.

“I remember asking my family members every day whether there was a donor,” said Ms Lau, the youngest of four children.

“It was a very painful process to see an energetic person deteriorating slowly into someone who can’t even recognise you,” she recalled.

Ms Lau had also experienced the loss of a child and could not bear for another mother to go through the same pain.  

Four years ago, she suffered a stillbirth when she was six months pregnant.

“To be honest, at this point, I am not afraid of death anymore, and if I could save this baby, I would have lived my life without regrets,” the IT market manager told her friends in a text message before she went for the operation to donate her liver to Jayden.

ONLINE PLEA FOR HELP

Ms Lau’s journey to becoming a liver donor began with an online plea for help put up by Jayden’s mother, Ms Kelly Law, on Jun 14.

Jayden, a healthy six-month baby, and his family were visiting relatives in Malaysia on Jun 7 when they realised that his skin and the white of his eyes had a yellow tinge to them.

A week later, Jayden’s parents were told that their baby would need a liver transplant to survive.

Ms Law and her husband were found to be unsuitable matches.

“My whole world collapsed,” Ms Law said in her online plea for help on Facebook.

The night after Jayden’s mother made the post, Ms Lau came across it.

She decided to contact Ms Law and by the next morning was having a battery of tests done at the National University Hospital (NUH) to determine if she was a suitable donor.

Ms Lau knew that she was healthy enough: she ate well, exercised and did not drink.

“If it was fated to be me, I didn’t want to hold back,” Ms Lau said.

The next day, on Sunday morning, Ms Lau received a call informing her that she was a suitable donor. 

Her first reaction was to text her friends to say that she had struck the lottery, because “what are the chances?”, she said.

BECOMING A “SUPERHERO”

At the hospital, she was evaluated by an ethics committee, who made sure her reasons for wanting to donate were valid, among other checks.

The risks of being a liver donor was also conveyed to her. Even after being told that she would also lose her gall bladder and that death was one of the possible complications from of being a living donor, Ms Lau pressed on with her decision.

She was also told to prepare for the possibility that Jayden could still die even after the transplant.

A seven-and-a-half-hour operation was carried out at 7am on Tuesday morning.

Cheered on by the success of the operation, Ms Lau took a selfie and sent it to her loved ones.

She was discharged from hospital after five days – the same person, save for a 15-cm scar, and a new nickname of “superhero”. 

The liver has the ability to regenerate, but without a gall bladder, Ms Lau will have to be careful about the amount of fat in the food she consumes for the rest of her life. 

“MUMMY HASN’T CARRIED OR HUGGED YOU IN A LONG TIME”

Jayden spent eight days in the intensive care unit (ICU) following the surgery and was transferred to a general ward on Jun 27.

When Channel NewsAsia visited him at the hospital, Jayden was sound asleep with his right arm curled snugly around a small bolster.

“Previously, he couldn’t even bring his hand up when doctors inserted a plastic tube into it,” his mother, Ms Law said.

Her voice quivered and her eyes teared up as she recalled how sick he had been, saying that he “barely cried or made any sound” when the doctors at NUH drew his blood for tests.

“They said he did not have the strength to cry or react like babies do, and that was not a good sign. I felt my heart sink,” she said in Mandarin. “Thankfully, now when we show him his toys, he reaches out his hands. He’s getting better, day by day.”

The reason for Jayden’s sudden life-threatening condition remains an unknown.

To stay close to their son, Ms Law and her husband have been staying at the Ronald McDonald Family Room in NUH for the past two weeks.

The haunting prospect of losing her youngest child has been a “nightmare” for the 37-year-old, who also has another five-year-old daughter.

“I’ve cried too many times,” she said. “My husband has been putting up a strong front in front of me, but one of the social workers told me that he cried during his session with them.”

The young mother said she is grateful for the “hundreds of calls and messages” that she has received since making the appeal on social media, and is particularly thankful to Ms Lau, a “cheerful” and “selfless” woman, for doing “an act that is unimaginable for someone not related by blood”.

“When I visited her the day after the operation, all I wanted was to give her a big hug but I didn’t because I was worried it might hurt her,” said Ms Law.

“I told her that I don’t know how to thank her enough for this. She replied that this is the work of fate and we don’t have to dwell on it. All she wanted was for Jayden to grow up healthily and be a filial son.

“I said that Jayden will have to be filial to her too because she is the one who gave him a second chance at life.”

For now, Jayden will remain warded for at least one more month. His parents will be encouraging their “brave little warrior” along.

“I’ve been telling him that he needs to keep recovering because his sister misses him and that mummy hasn’t carried or hugged him in a long time” said Ms Law, pausing to dry her eyes. 

“I really want to hug you. You must get well soon.”

Also eager for Ms Lau to have a quick and smooth recovery, she has engaged a confinement nanny to cook nutritious food for her son’s saviour.

SHUTTING OUT THE NOISE

Ms Lau, on her end, is recuperating at home.

She said that she is grateful for the support given to her by her family and husband of eight years.

The company she works for also had no qualms allowing her to take five weeks off to rest at home. 

While most of her friends were 100 per cent behind her decision to donate her liver to a complete stranger, Ms Lau said that one friend had voiced his concerns.

“Why donate to someone unrelated? What if someone you know needs it?” he asked.

Ms Lau’s response? “And what if they don’t?”

Ms Lau intends to keep in touch with Jayden, and has visited him and his mother a few times since the transplant.

With all that has happened in the last two weeks, Ms Lau is still in a daze about doing something so “crazy”. 

“Thinking back, I don’t know why I did it. I surprised even myself,” she said. 

But she recommends it. 

“Anyone can do it. It’s just whether they are willing to give it a shot. We don’t only have to help people who are related to us.”

SINGAPORE: It might be passed off as a herbal drink, but Kratom is prohibited in Singapore, the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) said in a Facebook post on Friday (Jun 29).

Kratom, also known as “ketum”, “ithang”, “biak biak” or “thom”, is a controlled substance. It contains prohibited drugs Mitragynine and 7-Hydroxymitragynine. 

ICA officers foiled two attempts to bring in Kratom in liquid form through Woodlands Checkpoint earlier this week. Both cases involved Malaysian motorcyclists, who have been referred to the Central Narcotics Bureau.

If convicted, the duo may be jailed for up to 30 years and receive at least five strokes of the cane. 

ICA said that Kratom can come in the form of fresh leaves, dried leaves or as a powdered extract. The fresh leaves can be chewed on while the dried leaves and powdered extract will be made into a drink after they are boiled.

The United States based National Institute on Drug Abuse says Kratom leaves contain compounds that can produce psychoactive, or mind-altering, effects. It adds that commercial forms of kratom are sometimes laced with other compounds that have caused deaths.

SINGAPORE: It was touted as the app that presented a new way of delivering Government services to citizens – proactive, online and cutting across multiple agencies.

And for the most part, the Moments of Life (Families) app – one of five Smart Nation strategic national projects – has delivered on these promises.

The pilot app – designed for families expecting a child to those with children aged up to six – was released on both iOS and Android app stores on Friday (Jun 29) for the public, but a group of 70 families had an early peek at what the app had to offer.

Mdm Nur Sooleezaa Saadon, mother of two children aged four and two, shared with Channel NewsAsia in an interview ahead of the app’s launch that she found it “very useful”.

“As a working mum with two toddlers, the ability to register for and track the medical appointments of my children saves me time,” she said.

Another app, HealthHub, jointly developed by the Health Ministry and Health Promotion Board (HPB), offers these services too, but Mdm Sooleezaa shared that while it was easy to use for her first child, kinks started to appear for her second.

She shared that she had to manually add her second child to the HealthHub app, but repeated failure to do so due to technical issues meant she gave up using it.

With the MOL (Families) app, children’s information is automatically retrieved as these are in parents’ SingPass accounts.

Another welcomed feature was the ability to search for childcare centres around her neighbourhood, particularly the “traffic light” icons used to indicate whether the centre was full or not, Mdm Sooleezaa said.

“This was helpful in managing expectations, as I could decide whether to wait or to find alternatives, and not wait in vain for the centre to reply,” she explained.

The 27-year-old was first approached to give feedback at the early developmental stage of the app last September, before returning in February this year to undergo an eye tracker exercise for the app developers to see how people are interacting with the software.

MORE EFFICIENT USE OF TIME

Another parent who got the chance to try the app was Ms Charlene Tan, who just delivered her second child a week ago.

“Making (the process of registering my child’s birth) into an app allows us to register at our own free time,” Ms Tan told Channel NewsAsia in an interview on Friday.

She added: “Registering at the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) or the hospital requires us to go in person during the opening hours and the wait can be pretty long.

“The new dad and mum would be doing all these administrative matters instead of spending time bonding with the baby and resting at home.”

There is a designated counter at ICA for parents who register and set up an appointment via the app to collect the birth certificate, similar to how passports are collected currently.

The self-employed mother of two did point out that the app could do with more features, including the ability to apply for a passport for the child at the same time.

“Since we’re already going down to ICA, we might as well do it all at the same time,” Ms Tan explained. It would have come in handy for her first child, Aven, as they had applied for his passport and birth certificate at the same time, she revealed.

Other features on her wishlist include incorporating some of the features on other apps, like PSI reading on the myENV app by National Environment Agency and extending the loan time for books from the National Library Board.

USER-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT

Such feedback from users like Mdm Sooleezaa and Ms Tan was the foundation of how the MOL (Families) app was created.

Over a period of 12 months, a series of engagement sessions were carried out to get citizens’ inputs and find out their needs and difficulties when parenting young children, according to a fact sheet by the Public Service Division (PSD).

“This citizen-centric engagement informed the design of a user interface and inclusion of features that are relevant to families with young children,” it added.

With the eye tracker exercise, the 15-strong development team from Government Technology Agency (GovTech) had the opportunity to refine what they had in its early prototype to the version that was launched today, said Mr Lim Eyung, deputy director of Government Digital Services at GovTech.

He told Channel NewsAsia that one example is during the birth registration process. In the earlier version, one field to fill was the child’s race and the option to list two races if both parents are from different races.

However, it wasn’t intuitive enough for parents who tried it to know that they could do this, so the wording to signal that this option was available was tweaked, Mr Lim explained.

Another distinctive feature of the app was how it cut across government agencies to offer the various services. Representatives from 15 agencies like the Ministry of Social and Family Development, ICA, the Early Childhood Development Agency and HPB were involved in its development.

“We wanted to approach this project differently by putting the citizens at the centre,” said Ms Ong Toon Hui, deputy secretary at PSD and co-chairperson of the MOL (Families) committee, in the fact sheet.

“Our goal is to give Singaporeans a positive experience as they go through this moment of life, as they seamlessly access the government services and information they need, regardless of which agency delivers it.”

SINGAPORE: In the past, Benjamin Barker retail assistants who wanted to find out if an out-of-stock item at one store was available at another outlet used to have to ring each shop individually.

These days, they need only log onto an online inventory system to check if the item is available at any other outlet in Singapore. 

One year ago, the menswear brand enhanced its Point-Of-Sales (POS) system to give frontline staff access to real-time product inventory information across all stores.

“This has led to improved operational efficiency, allowing staff to spend more quality time serving customers, said Benjamin Barker’s chief operating officer Damien Tan. 

The company, which has 14 stores across Singapore, Melbourne, Cambodia and Los Angeles, was among seven pilot companies that completed a study developed by Enterprise Singapore and Workforce Singapore on the job redesign process. 

Following the study, Benjamin Barker set out to improve its “inventory calling and checking process”. 

“Customer feedback has been positive since we adopted the technology. They appreciate the convenience as most are pressed for time,” Mr Tan said. 

Speaking at the launch of the Retail Job Redesign Framework on Friday (Jun 29), Manpower Minister Josephine Teo highlighted the need for retailers to use new technologies to streamline back-end operations and store-front processes. This is important as retailers can then redeploy and redevelop their resources effectively, she said.

Amid the competitive retail landscape and the rise of e-commerce, job redesign can increase productivity while “bringing more value to customers, and ultimately, the business,” Mrs Teo explained.

Published in the form of a microsite, the Retail Job Redesign Framework guides retailers through all phases of job redesign. It also provides self-help resources and information on financial assistance. 

As part of the initiative, five consultants have been appointed by Enterprise Singapore and WSG to provide support for retailers until Jun 30, 2019. They include A.advantage Consulting, Align Group, Carrots Consulting, Solutionsatwork and Mercer Singapore.