A curious tale of coincidence
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The thing about being a politician is that politics follows you around all the time, any hour of the day, and we're not talking about getting phone calls late at night from constituents in need.
Pheu Thai MP Korkaew Pikulthong, one of the leaders of the red-shirt movement, got a shock not too long ago when his wife Kulrat was giving birth to their new son. He shared the tale last week with The Nation.
Kulrat went into labour on October 5 ahead of schedule and, predictably enough, when she got to Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital, she discovered that her doctor was not only unavailable, he was out of the country!
Her husband was meanwhile tied up in a meeting at Parliament.
So the hospital summoned an emergency backup baby doctor. When Korkaew finally arrived, his wife told him the new gynaecologist in charge was named Dr Tul.
Dr Tul! It couldn’t be. But it was.
It was Dr Tul sittisomwong, leader of the multicoloured shirts, whose purpose in life is to make life miserable for the red shirts.
Korkaew immediately asked for another doctor to be assigned. But no, he said – laughing as he told us – it wasn’t because of their differing ideologies or any lack of trust. He just figured they’d better do a switch because it would have been awkward for both him and Tul.
“It something had happened to either my baby or my wife, it would have seemed to some people far worse because he was the doctor in charge.”
That sounds reasonable but, on the other hand, Soopsip the Cynic reckons no one would want his baby brought to the world by his enemy.
Thankfully the birthing drama was resolved without further incident. Tul stepped aside and another doctor presided at the arrival of the couple’s second child, Kawin, nicknamed Gut.
And when the boy grows up, Korkaew might well tell him the story of how he almost landed his dad deep in political debt the day he was born.
