Monday November 2, 2009
Heart-failure boy was making origami gifts for friend
By ANN TAN and TAN SIN CHOW
GEORGE TOWN: The 12-year-old boy who apparently died from a rare heart condition had been folding lucky stars to give as a gift to one of his schoolmates.
Edmund Khoo Teng Xuan had taken several days to fold hundreds of tiny origami stars before placing them in a bottle, according to his mother Lim Yu Mooi, 45.
Goodbye: Teng Xuan’s (inset) cousins paying their final respect to him before he was cremated at the Batu Gantong crematorium on Saturday. “He had wanted to give it to one of his female friends in school as a souvenir. They would be parting ways when the school term ended,” she said when contacted here yesterday.
On Friday, Teng Xuan came home from school and complained about tiredness. He then went for his usual afternoon nap on the sofa.
His brother Kevin Khoo Teng Shen, 16, who later went to wake him was stunned to discover that he had stopped breathing.
Teng Xuan’s body was cremated at the Batu Gantong crematorium on Saturday. His ashes will be placed at the Than Hsiang Temple in Bayan Baru here.
Lim said the family would heed the doctors’ advice to undergo a thorough medical check-up since they had been told that such heart conditions were usually genetically inherited.
Penang Adventist Hospital preventive medicine and wellness centre head Dr Vicky Ng said such cases usually happened to people suffering from cardiomiopathy, a disorder usually of unknown origin of the heart muscles.
He said this happened when the heart muscles became stretched and enlarged.
“It might be congenital or caused by viral infection. In this case, the boy’s family might not have any inherited heart problem but it could happen in-born if the mother caught any virus during pregnancy,” he said when contacted here yesterday.
Dr Ng said cardiomiopathy was an uncommon disease but there were cases nowadays with healthy young men dropping dead suddenly.
He said the best way for parents to detect the ailment was to send their children for a medical check-up if they complained of fatigue, was breathless and had a swollen face as these were the early warning signs.
Dr Ng said the best way to detect it was to go for an echocardiogram to see if the heart was enlarged.
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