Compiled by BEH YUEN HUI and CHARLES RAMENDRAN
SMOKING up to 80 cigarettes a day, retired civil servant Ismail Mahmud, 68, gave little thought of the ill-effects of the unhealthy habit until he woke up one day and found he had lost his voice.
He sought treatment at a clinic and when his condition persisted, doctors referred him to a hospital, only to be told that he was afflicted with stage four thyroid cancer, Harian Metro reported.
“I felt really down that day. The doctors told me that it was a result of my chain smoking,” said the widower, who has been smoking since he was a teenager.
To save his life, doctors quickly operated on Ismail, performing a laryngectomy that left him permanently without his voice.
The surgery also saw him with a stoma on his neck to enable him to breathe.
“Now, I feel lonely as I can no longer hear my own voice. I speak with a special device. It makes me sound funny, but at least I can speak,” said Ismail.
> A brief moment of fun playing firecrackers led to a lifetime of regret for Muhammad Isyraf Firdaus Zulrisham from Pekan, Pahang, when a freak accident seven years ago made him partially blind.
He was just 10 when the incident occurred during the fasting month in 2019, when he and several friends were setting off marble-sized firecrackers in an empty sardine can, Harian Metro reported.
“Placing it in a can amplified the explosion and made it louder. But on one occasion, the can blew up in shreds and a shrapnel hit my right eye and damaged the cornea. There was no pain, but I felt blood running down my face.
“In a split second, I lost an eye and became an OKU (disabled person),” he said.
Now aged 17, Muhammad Isyraf, who uses a prosthetic eye, said he is still learning to live with his disability and hopes his case serves as a lesson to others to refrain from playing with firecrackers.
The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.
