And it was just another day when she took the 8.20pm train at the KLCC LRT station on Monday. But not for long – in just minutes, it turned into a nightmare.
The 54-year-old office administrator entered train number 81 on the first car of the coach. She was standing with her back on the plexiglas separators near the doors.
Lee did not know that she was inches away from where the maximum impact would be when another train coming in the wrong direction crashed into the train she was in.
She suffered a broken hip and will need at least six months to recover.
Lee said she was reading the news on her phone when the train hit.
“I heard a bang and in a split second, I passed out,” she told FMT.
Lee woke up seconds later to a horrific sight – smoke and debris, people strewn all over and blood splattered all over the floor, with some passengers lying on one another. The mobile phone she was holding earlier was flung far away.
There was excruciating pain from her left hip, she said, with blood oozing from her pelvis and also from a gash above her eye. She was not able to move; the pain was unbearable. Doctors told her later her bone had almost come out of her thigh.
Around her, there were screams and cries of pain. A woman who had sat near her was on the floor, but flung towards the floor near the door.
“I wanted to help her but I could not move. It was so painful when I moved even slightly,” she said in an interview from her hospital bed in Kota Damansara, Petaling Jaya.
The crash that took place on the Kelana Jaya line left 213 people injured, 47 of them seriously. Two have had brain surgery while a third needed cerebral resuscitation treatment. The incident has been blamed on an hostler (train driver) who had taken the other train in the wrong direction.
Recalling what happened moments before the incident, Lee said the train had stopped a short distance away after departing the KLCC station and remained still for about 15 seconds. She paid no mind to it, as the trains had behaved that way before.
Then, the crash happened. Lee said that she and six others, who were classified as seriously injured, were brought by paramedics to Hospital Kuala Lumpur (HKL).
The rescue workers had arrived in 30 minutes and were brought through the tunnel’s emergency escape to the train’s location, she said.
Lee’s husband Gabriel Dukes, 57, said the doctors diagnosed her with a broken hip, bruising on the eye which required 10 stitches, with other abrasions on her back.
Dukes said he decided to transfer his wife out of HKL to a private hospital after an orthopaedic doctor said it would take “another week or two” before she could be operated on. HKL emergency doctors had stitched up the gash above her eye in the four hours Lee was there, he said.
He said doctors have found Lee to have bled a lot, with the broken bone almost piercing through her thigh.
At the private hospital, Lee was operated on immediately at 4pm on Wednesday, in a two-hour operation to carry out an intramedullary nailing to reattach her broken bone.
Dukes said doctors have given her six months to recover and she would have to be on crutches and a walker before a full recovery.
“My wife is an active person and runs at least 10km every weekend. I’m not sure if she will be able to do so in the future,” he said.
Asked if she would take the train again, Lee said: “I am not sure I will.”
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