At the beginning of each shift, someone sweeps with a whisk broom, then someone follows with a wet (I tell myself disinfected) towel, and there are still hairballs and toothpicks alongside my bed. There's a blood pressure check at 5:00 AM, noon, 1700, and 2200. Food arrives at 700, 1100, and 1600. Visiting families usually bring plastic bags full of smaller plastic bags and wax-paper wrapped packets of food, and the gurney becomes a picnic table.
Westerners need chairs for such things, but three Thais can comfortably fit on one gurney, sitting cross-legged around a spread of lunch. And just as you can tell an aging skier by the knee brace, you can tell a Buddhist by the bowlegged shuffle--if it hasn't been done already, there's plenty of apparent distinction to justify a study of Asian vs Western hip joints.
Next to the bed is a little bed stand for leftovers and a measured water pitcher. Patients are to drink the water under observation and record the urine output. (Mine is extraordinary because the only amusement they've provided is the pitcher and cup, so of course I'm going to sit and drink.) For the most part, these are overflowing with boxes of juice or milk, snack packets, rolls of toilet paper, plastic cups from tea stands; alternatively, for those whose three-course meal consists of a taupe, orangish, and pink syringe, the cabinet is usually buried under monitoring equipment.
The bathrooms, as mentioned, are androgynous. And why not? I'll admit a good degree of amusement the couple of times I've been in the school's executive bathroom (which has plastic curtain doors and 2 meter dividing walls between stalls and genders) to hear remarkable noises from sweet little things, or to listen to grunts and wrinkling newspapers--that was a good one. I will say that hot water would be nice, but at least there's a shower.
As for soap, shampoo, paper towels, toilet paper, well, I don't know what I would do if I ever came across them in a restroom. And a line from Jeff Foxworthy comes to mind: a hotel maid left a cart in the hall, and his kin "were on that thing like a pack of wild dogs on a three legged cat." I guess it's the state of things here, as I'm just as predatory: show me a loose stack of napkins and they'll be in my pocket or stashed in my bag.
And there are gestures at sterility--a sink with soap next to the nurse station, a pump of sanitizer on my bed. They take temperatures via a little job by they stick in your ear, and it appears that each person has their own earpiece for it. You just don't think about when the box to hold the inserts was cleaned, when the blood pressure cuff was sterilized, when the cabinet was cleaned, whether the profusion of hairs on the sheets harbors anything, whether the pile of dust and hair is carrying anything, where the stringers of ants might have gone, when the
okay I need to stop writing about that
The funny point where I was hoping to take that is that the doctor in charge of this unit said I should stay here because it's a sterile environment. And all things considered, he's right, in Thai terms. Which really makes me wonder.
The other bizarre part is the food. As mentioned, this is Thailand and food is very, very important. When I first signed in, with each round of students, with the lead doc, with my doc, with the nurses on each shift, I've been asked if I can eat (which has a new significance in this place), followed by whether or not I can eat Thai food. Each time I've said that I love food, especially Thai food, and I'll eat anything but jok or kao tom--rice stewed to a starchy mush (kao tom) and overloaded with Knorr chicken soup mix (jok). And at each point, there is a note made in the computer, and frequently the kindly nurse tells me she'll change it from [American, Soft Food, Soft Food Low Fat, American Soft, Low Protein, Low Fat] to Thai.
The doctors okayed Thai, and I'm happy with it, but somehow a white person not eating a hotdog is unnatural, so I've ended up with jok for breakfast, boiled rice with mushy gourd and macerated chicken for lunch (and a fried chicken wing I can't reconcile with ever being edible, even fresh from the oyster-scented vat of low-temp oil), and pork with peppers and cabbage/chicken ball soup for dinner. And I've been hungry since lunch yesterday.
Were I a local, there'd be a string of people bringing through goodie bags and supplemental snacks. When I asked about it this morning, I was given the impression I could run to the 7-11 in the basement no problem.
Heh.
Those nice, sweet nurses in the starchy crisp uniforms? No starch on earth would even stand up to a sidelong glance, let alone the lunging collar grab I got.
So tomorrow I'll see about wheedling a ten minute foray out of the doc. And if that doesn't work, maybe I can convince them to give me the American meal with supplemental Thai food.
At the bottom of things, the good news is that the latest round of stuff seems to be having an effect. All my numbers are still quite low, but instead of being in the 45-55% range, they're running 55-60% of what they should be. What's great about that is that they're not putting me on an IV line, so I stand to be discharged and stay here local on bed rest until all the testing is done and the doc says I can go back to work.
Again, it's Thailand and things work differently around here, but my doc even admitted that maybe this ward isn't the best place to stay.
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