With the skin on my shanks swollen to capacity and my feet like fat little sausages with overboiled bangers for piggie toes, I decided the solution was to have blood drawn—anything to decrease the amount of fluid. (I barked my shins a few days ago, nice little linear cuts from a plastic bin, and they oozed clear fluid, not blood, until my shoes were soaked. Talk about bizarre.)
Nakharin Hospital is new and clean, has dual language on some of the signs, and most of the staff speak much more English than I speak Thai. When I've been, my own, personal, human comfort and dignity have been paramount concerns, save for the universally atrocious waiting room chairs.
In Nakharin, Admissions runs a triage of sorts and disperses patients to the appropriate department, in my case reception. Reception takes the paperwork vitals—name, age, passport, &c. They wave you to sit in reception and there's another layer of admissions—they take pulse, b/p, weight, &c. It's all done in the open, with no exposure or invasion or anything as untoward as would upset a culture populated by archly conservative grandmothers (grandmothers, and a great many of their progeny, save rainwater in barrels as a better option than tap water, even after installing a tens-of-thousands of Baht filtration system).
For the chest X-ray, they stand you in front of a target, the guy stands behind the lead wall, tells you to take off your shirt, and fires away. A central database gets the images, along with the input of any lab work, all of which is done onsite. What's interesting is that all labs and patient interactions are recorded longhand in beautiful Thai script with characters even I can recognize; the results of labs, exams, conversations. Not to mention the nurses—after the motorbike wreck when my right arm couldn't really extend that direction, the lady bullseyed my left vein for a blood draw on the first shot. And she was one of the young ones.
But the blood bank isn't in Nakharin. It's across town in Maharat, the big, old hospital.
Were it in America, Maharat would have rusting FALLOUT SHELTER signs hanging all over. Actually, given the climate, they'd be rusted through and mainly stains on the wall, not actual signs.
What signage exists is entirely in Thai and mostly consists of stickers generally fully peeled from plastic signboards. It's just one of those things—of course everyone knows where things are; if grammaw was born with full medical supervision, it was there.
Open breezeways connect islands I'm assuming to be specialty units—the blood, kidney, pediatric &c areas. Dirt, leaves, rust, birds, geckos everywhere. People sit in the breezeways while windows occasionally pop open with shouted calls—admissions or information centers, I'm guessing. Can't tell, of course, because NOTHING is in Western script, but pick your battles, right?
Finally I come to a building that looks promising: instead of listless people sitting outside of a blank wall granting access through a streaked glass window and door with iron bars inside—it's a grocery and feel-good shop with flowers and chocolates and whatnot. And more listless piles of humanity outside in the breezeway.
Inside, I asked about blood donation. Played human pinball finding someone who understood, who wrote down what I was after in Thai, plus the window number where I should go: Window 34. Which, when I showed up, was where I signed up for a transfusion. Donation center's two doors down, the place with all the happy stickers.
Oy.
Get there and they speak as much English as I speak Thai. But they try: we get through my name, date of birth, age, weight, take my blood pressure and pulse (Thai people must be incredibly high-strung, because EVERYONE gets excited about a pulse that sometimes hits 62 and bp that's usually 95/55 or thereabouts; and the chest x-ray was thrilling: there are neither mountains nor tubas in Thailand, and the pulmonary aftereffects of the combination is freakish or something).
After about 20 minutes, slowly and painfully making progress through the a form, they get to immunizations: yes, I've been immunized for hepatitis, mmr, and typhoid.
No, I cannot donate blood.
“Mai pen rai.”
It only took an hour to get that far, once I'd found the hospital (no big green cross, no external signs of a medical facility beyond stretchers in the parking lot). “Mai pen rai.” At least I got a damn huge appreciation for sitting in the universally uncomfortable but at least nominally padded and protected within airconditioned chambers at Nakharin.
Although, well, I do have to wonder about the cute nurse who called me back once more just so she could stab me again and test the coagulation of my blood for her medical technology project. Still, despite the twice in one arm, she finished the day three for three.
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