A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
PART 4: Your Mother Was Right -- Always Wear Clean Underwear

Columbia Asia Hospital was like no other hospital I've ever been in. For one thing, it's a sprawling one story building in which you get from one room to the next by being wheeled along covered walkways next to large open-air courtyard gardens. Since it was dark, I'm not sure how healthy the gardens were, but they gave sort of a creepy jungly feeling at night. The corridors are dimly lit and made of either cement or tile, depending on whether the tile in that area has disintegrated and been replaced more cheaply.

The x-ray room was like something out of the 1960's. The equipment was from G.E. or some other US manufacturer, but there's no way it was less than 40 years old, and the non-english-speaking x-ray attendant clearly had no time for such frivolities as the lead apron. I think I got about 3 years worth of radiation in one fell swoop. After the painful manipulation of my arm on the x-ray table, I was wheeled back to the ER, this time by The Armwrecker's girlfriend, who didn't have the expertise that the nurse had. Consequently we were continually knocking into doorways and pillars, much to her embarassment and my pain.

Long wait.

Any pain medication?

Waiting.

Sure there isn't any pain medication?

Waiting.

Time to set your arm!

By this time I was no longer dreading the arm-setting process, because I was pretty sure it would mean that pain medication was going to be on the way. So they told me that they would wheel me over to the broken bone room, but I wanted to walk -- at least I could avoid any collisions that way. But they were unusually adamant about my using the wheelchair, and I wasn't really in a position to argue at this point, so I conceded and we were on our way down more long open-air corridors.

We arrived, I stood up, and I realized why everyone wanted me to take the wheelchair. A cool breeze wafting across my backside made me instantly aware that there was something seriously wrong with my pants. You know how your mom, or at least fictional moms, always told you to wear clean underwear in case of an accident? It's absolutely true! When that motorbike hit me in the posterior, it did noticeable damage to my pants, resulting in the rather more generous view of my person than I would normally have allowed strangers in a foreign country. Fortunately I was wearing some very cute lavender underwear with little white flowers -- I'm sure the sight was as soothing as a garden in spring to all those ER people who I thought were just staring at me because I was bloody and foreign.

But my underwear isn't the real issue here -- my arm is. After lounging for a while on a table in a dirty room with dusty, waterstained diagrams of skeletons and an industrial sink, the doctors finally arrived. I think I got two of them because the bone expert didn't speak a word of English and needed a translator. By this time The Armwrecker had been taken off by the police. The policeman actually came into the bone-setting room and tried to talk to me, but I was not exactly in the mood and I'm afraid I wasn't as polite as I should have been to a Vietnamese officer. So he decided to cut his losses with me and had The Armwrecker take him out to the Scene of the Crime to do a report and no doubt shake him down for money.

The doctors finally injected me with some kind of painkiller, but frankly it wasn't strong enough for my taste. Setting a bone is a really revolting process, which included hanging my arm from a metal pole using this weird little piece of bamboo mesh (you sure don't see that medical device in Seattle) and sort of scrunching my bones together in a modified version of Vietnamese foot massage. However, since they had also given me the option of being put completely under and having pins inserted in my arm, I was willing to endure. There was absolutely no way I was spending the night in there, and I did not want to be unconscious for even one minute. So we completed the setting process, got an absolutely gigantic heavy plaster cast, and arranged to have the doctor do some field repairs on my pants by attaching the pieces together with long strips of white medical tape. Of course, this meant I had to sit very gingerly and not stretch too much, lest the tape come unstuck.

The rest of the evening (after getting stitches in my chin -- weak anaesthetic, no fun) was a bit surreal. Since The Armwrecker had been taken off, he called his parents to come down and provide support. Since they had no English and I needed medical information that nobody in the hospital was capable of relating, I agreed to go home with them and wait for their son to return from his foray with the policeman to do all the explaining.

So we walked outside, and I got aboard the back of a motorbike to take me who knows where.

How else would we get around?

© 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 12:55 AM