Published on Aug 11, 2013
Sick civil servant was counting his last days when cabby responded to an appeal for help
By Radha Basu Senior Correspondent
Mr Tong Ming Ming, 34, was on a tea break during reservist training in early March when an SMS and a Facebook post by his secondary school friend Regina Lim caught his eye.
She wrote that a mutual friend's colleague was likely to die within days if he did not receive a liver transplant. The family was urgently looking for a living donor who, among other things, had to weigh 80kg or more. Could anyone please help?
Mr Tong, a big, burly cabby and former police officer, messaged his old friend immediately to find out more.
The patient, civil servant Toh Lai Keng, 43, from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), was a colleague of their mutual friend from their Peicai Secondary School days, Ms Leow Shee Yin.
Within minutes, Mr Tong was on the line with Ms Leow. "She was in tears, saying the illness was very sudden and that he had a very young son," recalled Mr Tong.
By then, Mr Toh's wife, Samantha, 40, and brother, Jeffrey, 42, had failed the tests to be donors.
"Time was running out. I just knew that I had to help," Mr Tong recalled.
He made that decision on March 11. After four days of tests, checks and interviews, he underwent a nine-hour operation at the National University Hospital (NUH) to donate most of his liver to Mr Toh on March 15.
Today, nearly five months on, both donor and recipient are doing well.
The Ministry of Health confirmed that this was the first altruistic liver donation here by an unrelated living donor - someone with no blood or emotional ties to the patient.
To most people, including the man who received the gift of life, the genial, soft-spoken bachelor's generosity is beyond comprehension.
"What can I say? He's a great man," said Mr Toh, his voice tinged with emotion. "Human beings are selfish. I can't think of anyone else who would do this for a stranger."
Sudden illness
Before his brush with death in March, Mr Toh, a food-loving father of a three-year-old son, had no history of liver problems. In fact, when he first fell ill with high fever and was hospitalised at Tan Tock Seng Hospital in early March, he thought he had dengue fever.
But tests showed his liver was failing rapidly. By March 7 - a Thursday evening - he was transferred to NUH which has liver transplant facilities. By the following Tuesday, he was in a coma.
The cause of his liver failure remains unknown. "They told my wife I had a week to live," said Mr Toh.
It was serendipitous that his colleague, Ms Leow, confided in her friend Ms Lim about his desperate situation, and that Ms Lim in turn went on Facebook, and her post touched Mr Tong.
The cabby needed extensive tests and interviews, including one with an independent ethics committee, to ensure he was psychologically sound, not coerced and no money had changed hands, before the operation on March 15. The risks of the procedure were also explained to him.
"Things just fell in place when Ming Ming came on the scene," said Mr Toh, a deputy director at MHA. "I guess it was a miracle."
Both men hope their experience will show others that much-needed organs can come from people who are not friends or family. "With his kindness and generosity, Ming Ming has shown that even strangers can step forward to save lives," said Mr Toh.
Since the operation, the men have visited each other at home, shared meals and are now friends.
They also discovered a long-lost kampung connection - the extended Toh and Tong families used to live near each other in the Braddell area when they were children. "It's really unbelievable," marvelled Mr Toh.
Ask Mr Tong why he stepped forward and he points heavenwards. "It's a calling," he said with a laugh, referring to his Christian faith.
But dig deeper and other reasons pour forth.
Having grown up with an absent father, he kept thinking of Mr Toh's wife and young son, Terence, who could have lost his dad before even getting to know him.
Also, he was satisfied that the procedure would be safe. "The liver can grow back, so I will be fine," he said.
"As a cabby, there is probably a greater chance of dying in a road accident," he added with a laugh.
Friends like Ms Lim and Ms Leow, both 34-year-old mothers who met Mr Tong in school more than two decades ago, are not surprised by his large-heartedness.
"When we were urgently looking for a donor, I did not think of Ming Ming," said Ms Leow. "But in hindsight, if anyone could have done this, it was him."
She remembers his zeal to help others during the compulsory community involvement programmes of their schooldays. "Most of us stopped volunteering after secondary school, but Ming Ming never gave up. He really, really wants to help others," she said.
A graduate of Temasek Polytechnic, Mr Tong has long been hooked on helping. As a taxi driver since January, he has ferried amputees for medical appointments, kidney patients for dialysis and poor older folk to church.
He said he usually waives the fare, but some regular passengers pay a token sum.
He has donated blood in response to urgent appeals, helps to clean homes of the elderly in one- room rental flats in Upper Boon Keng, and leaves food packets for immobile old people in Chinatown.
"There is a lot of need in Singapore if you know where to look," he said. "I do what I can to help."
His choice of jobs so far also reflects his passion to do good. As a boy, he saw police officers coming to his family's three-room Hougang home when they were harassed by loan sharks. His cabby father, a gambler, would chalk up huge debts.
"The officers were kind and would protect us. From then on, I always wanted to be an officer," he said.
He joined the police force after graduation in 1998. He has also worked in the social service sector, looking after abandoned, abused and delinquent children.
The youngest of three sons also recalled how his parents and grandparents were forced to sell their adjacent HDB flats to settle his father's gambling debts.
His role model is his mother, Madam Neo Teng Huay, 63, who raised her sons by working 12 hours a day selling curry puffs in a coffee shop. "She has faced hardship, but is never bitter. She always helps others."
Mr Tong said that although the family always had food on the table, his hardscrabble childhood has helped him form lasting bonds with some of the bruised and broken boys he encountered while working in youth homes.
Many may think that with so much hardship and suffering, it is impossible to change the world, but Mr Tong said: "If you can help even one person in need, you would have done just that."
radhab@sph.com.sg
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The Straits Times, Razor TV
Transcript from RazorTV:
Cabby donates liver to stranger
Liver donor, Mr Tong Ming Ming, 34:
I'm a taxi driver. I used to be a police officer for 10 years. I decided to drive a taxi because I needed the free time. I need to juggle between earning a decent income and also to do my volunteer work.
So what I do, when I have the time, is to pick and send amputees to Tan Tock Seng Hospital. I would send and pick retirees to and from church, and I also organise meet-ups, as I mentor a group of boys who are ex-probationers. When I cover my (taxi) rental and my petrol, I would go and do my volunteer work.
I got to know the amputees from Chinatown when they play mahjong. The retirees are also from Chinatown, Lavender and Jalan Minyak who live in the one-room rental flats. The kids, they are my boys from Gracehaven Children's Home and also the Singapore Boys' Hostel.
As and when they need me to ferry them, I will go, regardless of distance. Usually, I don't collect a fare from them.
I was doing my reservist, and I saw this post on Facebook. Somebody needed an urgent liver transplant, and I don't even know that somebody. Later, I found out it was a friend's friend's friend. Quite complicated. But somehow, I felt a prompting in my heart that I needed to respond to this call for donation, this appeal for donation.
I think it's not easy for the family, especially when it's declared that he has only 7 days left (to live). So there was this prompting, this heavy burden on me that I needed to respond, even though it is a stranger.
When I went for the briefing thing by the surgeons, they told me the risk that I had to take out 70 per cent of my liver, (and) my gall bladder will be removed. That means I cannot store bile juice. Bile is needed to digest fats, so post-op, I will somehow put on weight, because the gall bladder is removed. And then, there's a 1 per cent mortality rate. That means one person out a hundred will die on the operating table.
There are also side effects with medication. Some people will become bald - botak, and then, some people will also have diabetes and high blood pressure.
'I wanted to help someone'
But I went with the peace of God. But I had to bring my mum down, because I needed to next-of-kin's consent to this. My mum was ok, she knows that since young, I wanted to help someone. I told when I was very young, if I died, to donate all my organs. So she knows that I had to do this. So I got the full support from my mum.
It was very tiring for my mum. She had to be grilled by the interviewers, because according to the ethics committee, according to the HOTA - the Human Organ Transplant Act - there shouldn't be any money involved in this. So they were very careful in the selection process, that I'm not selling my liver for profit.
There wasn't any fear, because 1 per cent is not very high. To me, I needed to do what was more important, to save a life, and not be so concerned about the side effects and the mortality rate.
The operation itself was on Friday. Mine was about 9 hours. They had to open me up, take out my liver and then, while I'm being stitched back, operate on Mr Toh (the liver recipient), so it was side-by-side.
The whole operation lasted about 20 hours.
After that, post-op, I became good friends with Mr Toh. I was invited to his home a few times, and then we became quite close. I think naturally, because a part of me is in him.
He started sharing about his family, and coincidentally, before the operation, I found out - my mum found out - that my mum and his dad - they used to stay in the same kampung. So it's a very small world.
And for Mr Toh, it was very urgent. He needed a transplant in 7 days, if not, he will be gone.
I came from a broken family, so I can imagine a 3-year-old boy (Mr Toh's son) growing up without his dad. Maybe that was what prompted me to respond to this.
Since secondary school days, my form teacher - Miss Yap - she was very active in volunteer work. So she will bring us to children's homes, to old folks' homes. That's where I learnt about helping others.
I came from a very broken family. My dad, because of his own problems, we had to sell 2 flats to help him settle his problems.
I don't want other people to go through what I went through. I know I cannot help a lot of people, I cannot help the entire world, but if I can just help one, make a difference in one, to me, that's enough.
A lot of people think I had a good job in police force, why did I leave to become a social worker, to become a volunteer? I think the priorities are different in my life. It's not about getting cash and cars and everything. I think it's beyond that. There's a purpose in all our lives
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