Sunday November 1, 2009
Boy, 12, goes to sleep and dies of heart failure
By ANN TAN
GEORGE TOWN: The family of a 12-year-old boy is in shock and disbelief after he died in his sleep, apparently from a rare kind of heart failure.
Edmund Khoo Teng Xuan came home from school on Friday and complained about tiredness. He then went for his usual afternoon nap on the sofa.
At about 5pm, his brother Kevin Khoo Teng Shen, 16, went to wake him – and was horrified to discover his brother had stopped breathing.
“He would usually wake up by that time and ask me for a game of badminton.
Shock and sorrow: Relatives consoling Lim at the Batu Gantong crematorium Saturday. She said the doctor told her that Teng Xuan (inset) died of an inherited heart failure. “My brother was a healthy boy. He rarely fell ill. He played basketball in school and badminton with me.
“We never noticed anything amiss about him,” said Teng Shen at the Batu Gantong crematorium yesterday.
He said Teng Xuan had been looking forward to a trip to Hong Kong Disneyland next month.
“He wanted to go last year but we were too busy so we postponed the trip,” he said.
Their mother Lim Yu Mooi, 45, said a doctor told her that Teng Xuan had died of an inherited heart failure.
However, she said no one in the family was afflicted with a heart condition.
“I was told that the size of Teng Xuan’s heart was slightly bigger than a normal child’s.
“The doctor said it was a rare disease and usually happened genetically,” she said.
The family said they had agreed for the authorities at Penang Hospital to take samples of Teng Xuan’s heart to ascertain the cause of death.
Meanwhile, a 16-year-old schoolboy survived after falling from the seventh floor of a flat in Rifle Range here.
Mohamad Rozilan Maydin had gone to his uncle’s house in Rifle Range on the sixth floor to play with a cousin at about 10pm on Friday.
He then went to an unoccupied unit on the seventh floor and, somehow, fell down.
Mohamad Rozilan suffered serious injuries and was sent to the Penang Hospital for treatment.
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