Health
On 13 September 2008, Lee, then 84, underwent successful treatment for abnormal heart rhythm (atrial flutter) at Singapore General Hospital, but he was still able to address a philanthropy forum via video link from hospital. On 28 September 2010, he was hospitalised for a chest infection, cancelling plans to attend the wake of Senior Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Balaji Sadasivan.
On a Sunday Times column on 6 November 2011, Lee's daughter Wei Ling revealed that Lee, 88, suffers from peripheral neuropathy. In the column, she recounted how she first noticed her father's ailments when she accompanied her father to meet former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Connecticut in October 2009. Wei Ling, a neurologist, "did a few simple neurological tests and decided the nerves to his legs were not working as they should". A day later, when interviewed at a constituency event, Lee stated "I have no doubt at all that this has not affected my mind, my will nor my resolve" and "People in wheel chairs can make a contribution. I've still got two legs, I make a contribution."
Read more about this topic: Lee Kuan Yew
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)
“Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upwards towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)