2015 PSLE results

小六会考今早放榜，今年考生升学率为98.3％，比去年的97.6％高。

今年小六会考（PLSE）共有3万9286名考生，其中3万8610人（98.3％）能升上中学，比去年的97.6％要高。能报读快捷源流课程的考生则有66.2％，比去年的66.4％稍低。

21.7％的考生可进入普通（学术）班，另外10.4％则可进入普通（工艺）班。无法升上中学的676名（1.7％）考生，若是首次参加会考，可选择进入圣升明径学校、北烁学校，或明年重考。已重考仍无法升学的学生，则可优先获得圣升明径学校或北烁学校学额。

Steamed eggs receipe

Steamed Egg

Prep Time: 3 minutes

Cook Time: 17 minutes

Total Time: 20 minutes

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

3 eggs

Water (same volume as eggs)

Vegetable or chicken stock (same volume as eggs)

Salt, to taste

1 teaspoon sesame oil

Chopped scallion

Crack 3 eggs in a liquid measuring cup and note the volume. Pour the eggs into a large bowl, add salt, and beat for at least 1 minute. Now measure out water at the same volume as the eggs, and add it to the bowl. Do the same with the broth. Whisk in the sesame oil, and make sure everything's well combined.

Place 4 empty ramekins in a steamer over high heat. Be sure the water will not bubble and touch the ramekins during steaming. Once the water boils, turn the heat down to a slow simmer. Then, divide the egg mixture into the ramekins, pouring it through a fine mesh strainer.

Cover the steamer, turn up the heat to high, and steam for 3 minutes. After 3 minutes have elapsed, shut off the heat but keep the steamer covered. Let stand for 14 minutes with the lid firmly covered. Remove from the steamer, sprinkle with scallions, and serve.

Foods on Liquid Diet

There a number of foods and beverages your doctor will allow you to consume while on a liquid diet. Items on a clear liquid diet include plain water, chicken broth, beef broth, clear sports drinks, fruit juice without pulp, clear sodas, ice pops without fruit pieces, plain gelatin and coffee and tea without milk or creamer. 

On a full liquid diet, you can consume all of the items recommended for a clear liquid diet. You can also eat pudding, plain ice cream, strained meat, yogurt, sherbet, custard, honey, syrups, sugar, instant breakfast shakes, smoothies, milkshakes, protein supplements, cream and oatmeal. Talk to your doctor if you have any questions regarding the foods and beverages you can and cannot consume.

What is sample menu for a clear liquid diet?

• Breakfast: 1 cup of juice, ¾ cup of clear broth, ½ cup of lemon gelatin, and 1 cup of coffee with sugar
  
  
• Morning snack: 1 cup of a clear sports drink
  
  
• Lunch: ½ cup of juice, ¾ cup of clear broth, ¾ cup of lemon-lime soda, and 1 popsicle (equals about 2 ounces of liquid)
  
  
• Afternoon snack: 1 popsicle
  
  
• Evening meal: ½ cup of juice, ¾ cup of clear broth, ¾ cup of ginger ale, ½ cup of flavored gelatin, and 1 cup of herbal tea with honey or sugar
  
  
• Evening snack: 1 cup of flavored gelatin

What are the risks of a clear liquid diet?

The clear liquid diet does not provide all the nutrients you need. You may need to drink a nutrition supplement if you have to follow this diet for more than 3 days. If you do not follow this diet, you may continue to have diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting if you were asked to follow this diet because of these problems.

Care Agreement

Are you ready for death?

Buñuel died of pancreatic cancer in Mexico City in 1983. He spent his last week discussing theology with a Jesuit brother.

His long time friend and collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrière, wrote: “Luis waited for death for a long time, like a good Spaniard, and when he died he was ready. His relationship with death was like that one has with a woman. He felt the love, hate, tenderness, ironical detachment of a long relationship, and he didn’t want to miss the last encounter, the moment of union. ‘I hope I will die alive,’ he told me. At the end it was as he had wished. His last words were ‘I’m dying’.”

Will you be ready? Will I be ready?

There are, as I endlessly repeat, essentially four ways to die: sudden death; the long, slow death of dementia; the up and down death of organ failure, where it’s hard to identify the final going down, tempting doctors to go on treating too long; and death from cancer, where you may bang along for a long time but go down usually in weeks. Suicide, assisted or otherwise, is a fifth, but I’m leaving that on one side for now.

I often ask audiences how they want to die, and most people chose sudden death. “That may be OK for you,” I say, “but it may be very tough on those around you, particularly if you leave an important relationship wounded and unhealed. If you want to die suddenly, live every day as your last, making sure that all important relationships are in good shape, your affairs are in order, and instructions for your funeral neatly typed and in a top draw—or perhaps better on Facebook.”

The long, slow death from dementia may be the most awful as you are slowly erased, but then again when death comes it may be just a light kiss.

Death from organ failure—respiratory, cardiac, or kidney—will have you far too much in hospital and in the hands of doctors.

So death from cancer is the best, the closest to the death that Buñuel wanted and had. You can say goodbye, reflect on your life, leave last messages, perhaps visit special places for a last time, listen to favourite pieces of music, read loved poems, and prepare, according to your beliefs, to meet your maker or enjoy eternal oblivion.

This is, I recognise, a romantic view of dying, but it is achievable with love, morphine, and whisky. But stay away from overambitious oncologists, and let’s stop wasting billions trying to cure cancer, potentially leaving us to die a much more horrible death.

Cancer patients die from clots instead of from cancer

Doctors are increasingly realising that many cancer patients do not die from the cancer itself but from clots that may have been preventable. 

Shocking figures from the charity Lifeblood show that for every seven cancer patients who die in hospital, one will succumb not to the disease itself, but to pulmonary embolism, one of the main causes of death linked to blood clots. 

Campaigners are now calling for better awareness among medics and patients. 

‘If you have cancer, you’re seven times more likely to have a blood clot. For some cancers the risk is increased 28-fold,’ says Dr Simon Noble, clinical reader in palliative medicine at Cardiff University and Lifeblood’s authority on cancer-related blood clots.

Foods rich in Vitamin B17

Foods rich in vitamin B17 are*: "Apple seeds, apricot kernels bamboo shoots, barley, beet tops, bitter almond, blackberries, boysenberries, brewers yeast, brown rice, buckwheat, cashews, cherry kernels, cranberries, eucalyptus leaves, currants, fava beans, flax seeds, garbanzo beans, gooseberries, huckleberries, lentils, lima beans, linseed meat, loganberries, macadamia nuts, millet, millet seed, peach kernels, pecans, plum kernels, quince, raspberries, sorghum cane syrup, spinach and sprouts."

Read more: http://www.rejoiceinlife.com/recipes/vitaminB17.php#ixzz3qmHbmMeU

Palliative procedures for small intestine cancer

• Palliative procedures: In advanced cases of small intestine cancer, surgery to remove the cancer may not be an option because the disease is too widespread. To relieve symptoms such as pain and nausea caused because a tumor is blocking the small intestine, palliative surgery may be performed to help patients feel more comfortable. 

For example, if a tumor blocks a passage in the small intestine, surgery can be performed to insert a small tube that bypasses the tumor, creating an opening from the stomach to the other end of the small intestine or to the large intestine. This enables you to continue to eat by normal means and digest food.

A letter to NUH cancer hotline

Hi, 

My mum Wan Soo Ha is a stage 4 rectum cancer patient. She was operated on in year 2013 to remove the tumor but the surgeon didn't do a good job in removing all the affected cancerous lymph nodes.

 She is 77 this year. Her doctor is currently Dr Ho Jing Shan from NUH cancer center. She has undergone 6 chemo sessions on folfiri last year.

This year in May, she encountered pain in her pelvis area and Dr Ho suggested to use an expensive targeted therapy drug cetuximab combined with old drug folfiri. She was asked to do 12 sessions of the chemo from July 2015. She did 5 rounds and suffered severe side effects of ulcer and rashes. She lost massive weight and weighed only 35 kg recently. Dr Ho suggested her to use the old drug folfiri for the 6th session. The old drug made her worse. She felt pain again in the stomach and pelvic area shortly 1 week after the CT scan for her 6th chemo. 

Dr Ho has suggested new chemo drugs and immunotherapy. It seems like a trial and error kind of cancer treatment. Can't the oncologist doctor in NUH make sensible decisions based on the patient's condition? It is very frustrating to see loved ones suffering from side effects of trial and error chemotherapy drugs and to know there is not much patient support being received on this advanced cancer. I still remember Dr Ho told my mum : 'What do you want me to do?' when my mum complained to her about her pain. 

My friend who was a breast cancer patient of Dr Ho. She died last year in November 2014. I have seen her lost drastic weight in August 2014 till her last days in November 2014. She went through a newly fully-sponsored chemo treatment which made her condition worse. She suffered from terrible side effects and she stopped the treatment. She went through radiation therapy when the cancer cells spread to the skull in her brain. When I last saw her last September 2014, she was still having chemotherapy. 

I am not against chemotherapy. I only hope oncologist knows when his/her patient should stop the cancer treatment and focus more on providing better patient support. If the oncologist is not sure, shouldn't there be a professor oncologist who can provide more expert advice?

I appreciate your attention to this email. It's saddening to know advanced cancer has no cure and there is no end to chemotherapy until the patient dies.