Saturday was supposed to be the start of a grand roadtrip for the four day weekend, but Friday night the swelling in my feet crept up to my knees, and when I went to a pharmacist he told me to go to the hospital. (Usually, a pharmacist is familiar with all the medications and will recommend one based upon your description of symptoms.) Until now, I've slept with my feet elevated and woken with normal ankles, but that did't happen, so I went to the hospital.
When I bought the scooter, I promised myself I would not be a cautious driver because I've heard stories about people coming back from Thai jails and I've heard stories about people coming out of Thai hospitals, but while each is life-altering, the hospital stories I've heard have universally involved a lifetime of hormone suppliments and a legal name change. Not the sort of story I'm after, really, so I'll go for the glorious sort of splattered-everywhere wreck.
But there's something about not being able to walk and waking up still swollen that scares me, so I sucked it up and went in.
Good sign #1 was that the reception desk had “RECEPTION DESK” written under the squigglies—not going to get started on Thai script right now, but suffice it to say my learning curve lies between the bunny slope and a flatline DOA.
After a brief scurry, the stately dame found the young English-speaker who determined that I was there to see a doctor.
“Right this way,” and I followed the nurse's outfit to “PATIENT RECEIVING,” where they took my passport and vitals. It flashed to a memory I've buried for years—when I was young, the year Haley's Comet passed by, we were in Tahiti visiting my brother, and I had problems with the local water—ice in my drink. Mom took me to the doctor, who prescribed a sugarless powder satchet of medication—GAG--and where they used a rectal thermometer. Wonderfully civilized here, though: a nurse strapped on a BP cuff, wrapped a normal looking digital thermometer in a cellophane sleeve, and took my temp in my armpit while measuring pulse and pressure on the other arm. Stand up, step on the scale, and they'll call me when the doctor is ready.
I guess it's to be expected that the waiting is the worst part. Banks of chairs designed to completely minimize all comfort while striving to minimize spatial presence filled the open area in front of a wall with six sliding doors of heavily frosted glass. Each room had an industrial desk next to a free-standing chair that looked even less inviting than the lobby seating, an examining table, and a matching sliding door to a back corridor full of nurses and doctors enroute somewhere more pressing.
When I showed up, no lights were on and no office doors were closed; the doctor is not in but is happy to let you wait. Then a nurse snuck through the back door and closed one office. By the time a light came on in the first, the cute girl in the traditional miniskirt-plus-cap-thingy getup was closing a second door. Twenty minutes after arriving—early, on a Saturday morning—I was called in to see the doctor.
He had one of the anti-English Thai names: lots of “ng” and “aeo” and quavering vowel inflection sounds. I was relieved to hear a solid Thai accent—no Oxford or Eton, but an uneasy competence and familiarity with English. Here's hoping I can do the same for Thai.
I described the swelling, the time in country, elevating the legs, all the walking. He poked, frowned, kept asking about pain, poked more, made intricate notes with beautiful script, pushed levels of pain and discomfort.
“No, no pain, not really much discomfort, just the swelling.”
He asked me to get on the table and palpated my abdomen as awkwardly as I would approach the 60-something red light woman who exhibited all the enthusiasm of picking a used smoke from an ashtray when she asked me if I wanted sex on the way home.
“I need to have you do a blood lab. Could be kidneys, could be liver. Okay?”
“Sure,” I smiled and nodded and sat stupidly—default position, at this point.
“So. You will go outside the office and give blood sample. Maybe thirty minutes, maybe hour later, you will come back to talk with me. Okay?”
“Somebody will show me where to go?”
“Yes, she will be right outside the door.”
He rang a little buzzer and another lady in the full nursing getup slid the door open. A few sentences later, she took me across the lobby to a desk behind a cubicle wall—the blood center.
You sit in a rolling office chair and put your arm on a little cushion that was last changed... don't go there.
The nurse pulls out a packaged syringe (good sign) and ties off your arm.
“You go soft” she says.
Not much danger of going hard, but okay, relax the clenched fist.
She caresses, rubs, pokes, taps, and finally slaps at the elbow. “Hooh, you make nurse work hard this early. Hole is very small.”
Is there a suitable—or even possible—response?
“Shoulda seen it before I had the 1 oz cup of Nescafe.”
And she nailed it, first shot.
Took a good long time to get enough blood in the syringe, but instead of opening the vein and loading on half a dozen phials, she filled up one and injected the rest.
“Okay you go sit. Thirty minutes or hour. Go, go go! Sit!”
When the doc called me back in, he had a handful of forms in front of him—Western medical flowcharts with neat numerals printed in blue ink in boxes next to parenthetical ranges of acceptable/normal. He went through, reading each line—for albumin your range is X and the normal range is W-Y. For the most part, I bullseyed the norms—liver and kidneys work well—but I'm low on protein, iron, and body mass.
“You like Thai food?”
“Love Thai food.” I have yet to meet a man who has not asked me this in the first volley of sentences. As of yet, the doc is the only Thai man who has not asked about my cock--”Thai food, good for make cock grow big,” or “you have much scar and vein on arms—big cock, no?” or some close relative thereof.
“Good, you eat more. Especially meat.”
So no liver or kidney disease, just swollen ankles. He gave me some exercises, pills for the swelling, two topical analgesics, and two pain killers: one codeine-based, the other a morphine something. At least now I know how I'll spend soma weekends when I'm not supposed to be on my feet, right?
And the best news: I still pee standing up!
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