Urine Pregnancy Test – POSITIVE!

*Gasp*

Gosh! If this happened to me currently, I’ll get myself killed by my mum in no time. But it’s equally complicated when this happened to a 40-year-old woman.

The Indian woman read the result word by word, then stared at it blankly for a moment, then walked out without an outrageous facial expression.

I observed her response behind the window in the lab I’m now posted – Biochemistry lab. I don’t know what’s going on inside her mind, but it is definitely nothing to be happy about for whatever reason, for she didn’t show any positive response.

With oil prices hiking and everything which hence follows, I guess I can understand how life can be more difficult when one has another child to raise.

***

“How is it? Is the level normalized now? Has it decreased?”

An anxious father asked without reading the result for serum bilirubin level of his newborn. Well, the digits on the thin sheet of paper don’t make any sense to him anyway. Yet I can feel his anxiety for his jaundiced, one-week-old baby.

The serum bilirubin level had been fluctuating since few days ago. Some of the time I even run the test twice to double check the result I obtained. I’m not suppose to explain to the patients of the condition or give any form of consultation. Patients should refer back to their respective doctors for these.

However, every time when I see the fathers’ faces receiving the report from me and anxiously reading it like reading their academic result slips, I felt empathy for them. They could be a first-time father, or maybe a husband to a 40-year-old woman who has just given birth to an underweight baby. From them, I can feel the whole family’s emotion for the baby’s health condition – concern.

As a father, they wish their baby to be healthy. They wish what doctor say about newborn-having-jaundice-for-the-first-few-days-of-life-is-normal is true, and that very day should be the last day of the “few days”. Some of them saw the level was dropping and mumbled “Ah, it’s getting better…”. I could only smile politely at them, because I know very well that having a 205 μmol/L of serum bilirubin is way too much from the normal level which is 17 μmol/L.

It reminds me of how our parents love us so much that they always wish we have the best things – the best education, the best piano teacher, the best baseball bat, and most importantly, the pinkest stage of health. When parents get older, we should always still wish them the same – the best doctors, the best nurses, the best medication and treatment (if we can afford it), and most importantly, the best attitude and greatest love from us as their children.