CathyXZhao: she got poo in second day, when she wrote first e-mail.
...updates with my family members scattered around the world.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
scrubbing in
July 4, 2007
Happy 4th of July! I suppose everyone is off celebrating at a cook out or watching fireworks somewhere with their respective significant others. I could care less about the fireworks, but it’d be nice to see stinker. It’s Wednesday, which means I have 2 more days here and then out of Lhasa for a long time. This week turned out a lot better than I had imagined. I thought I would just be going to new departments in the hospital and getting an overview since I have this mentality that I’m leaving soon. But I have done and will be doing some of the stuff that I had envisioned doing before I came here. On Monday my two friends left for Everest base camp, which I regretfully am not going to have to time to go to. I went shopping on Tuesday and got seriously harassed on the street, which hasn’t happened to me ever in Asia. Not fun.
On Monday I went to optho in the morning and then in the afternoon I went to the train station with the chief of optho. I mentioned this before, but the train station is where the Lifeline Express train is, donated by corporations and the people of Hong Kong to give free cataract surgeries on the train. After Lhasa, the train will be going to XinJiong, which another minority tribe of China live. It’s also very rural I believe. The base is about 30 minutes outside of Lhasa, in the middle of nowhere. When you look around there are just mountains and small villages in the distance. The base looks like a 12 car garage that’s divided by walls with a door just like a garage door that slides up. Some of the garages are make shift doctors offices, regular offices, and the rest are living quarters plus one cooking area. The doctors office just has an eye chart and the machines they use at the optometrists’ office with the chin piece to rest your head on. People come from 400-500 km away, which is about 250 miles, I guess a little shorter than the distance between New York and DC. But there aren’t paved roads for a lot of it, and some don’t have cars, so they take horses, then tractors, then buses where they can. There are buses from certain bigger towns that bring them over to the base. Each day there are about 50 patients that need to be evaluated and they perform about 20 surgeries a day on the train. It’s pretty intense since these people came here to be able to see again. It’s very sad if they don’t have cataracts and are losing their vision because of something else because they are not eligible for the surgery. Everyone around them is getting their vision back and they have to be sent home.
The patients are all Tibetan farmers around the age of 64-75 so they are dirt poor. They pretty much wear all their clothes on their back all seasons and bring all the rest of their belongings. I saw a man pull out a dried leg of ham from his bag. Needless to say, they aren’t the most hygienic so on the train and in the garages where they stay, the smell is to say the least unpleasant, but you can use your imagination. They also eat a lot of yak butter, so that smell is also coming out of their pores. It’s not just me that thought it was smelly, the Tibetan doctors complained a lot. Plus it’s just not good for their eyes, they all have a little bit of conjunctivitis which isn’t good for eye surgery. Pictures to come.
Monday was pretty exhausting since we were there till about 8pm, so I didn’t do much on Tuesday. But today, Wednesday, I went back to ortho to just check on a patient I had already seen, and luckily got to go to surgery with the Chief and another doctor. It was an about 8 year old boy who broke his humerus 15 days ago. His family lived near the border of India as rice farmers since the altitude is lower and the weather less dry. So they had gone to a closer doctor, but he couldn’t set it without surgery and it became very swollen. They traveled to the next hospital, but there was no orthopedics department, so they ended up coming to Lhasa where they had family. This hospital is considered the best in Tibet and most advanced and the people value their expertise. But when you speak to the doctors in Lhasa, they feel like they are very behind compared to the main hospital in Beijing, Xie He.
The other doctor who was performing the surgery has worked in Rome, Italy and spoke pretty good English. She took an interest to me and said I could scrub in tomorrow!!! Literally help her. How nuts is that. She gave me two cases to do some research on and report back to her tomorrow morning. One is a 30 some year old man with a massive tumor on his right femur and a guy who had broke his humerus. She’s very much a professor and loves to teach, so I’m glad I got to meet her even if it’s the last few days. I also saw a young girl in her early 20s who suffered an accident where her hand got injured in a noodle making machine, leaving her with a claw hand because she damaged her radial nerve.
Enough medical stuff, I’m so excited to get back to Beijing, 3 weeks in Lhasa is more than enough. I’m sick of bargaining for stuff, which doesn’t really end in Beijing, but at least I won’t be alone. Shopping alone can be quite lonely. Considering that’s all I do in my free time. Today I was actually so exhausted I took a 3 hour nap. I don’t know why I was so tired. I gotta do some more research and sleep some more cause I got an early morning.
Happy 4th of July! I suppose everyone is off celebrating at a cook out or watching fireworks somewhere with their respective significant others. I could care less about the fireworks, but it’d be nice to see stinker. It’s Wednesday, which means I have 2 more days here and then out of Lhasa for a long time. This week turned out a lot better than I had imagined. I thought I would just be going to new departments in the hospital and getting an overview since I have this mentality that I’m leaving soon. But I have done and will be doing some of the stuff that I had envisioned doing before I came here. On Monday my two friends left for Everest base camp, which I regretfully am not going to have to time to go to. I went shopping on Tuesday and got seriously harassed on the street, which hasn’t happened to me ever in Asia. Not fun.
On Monday I went to optho in the morning and then in the afternoon I went to the train station with the chief of optho. I mentioned this before, but the train station is where the Lifeline Express train is, donated by corporations and the people of Hong Kong to give free cataract surgeries on the train. After Lhasa, the train will be going to XinJiong, which another minority tribe of China live. It’s also very rural I believe. The base is about 30 minutes outside of Lhasa, in the middle of nowhere. When you look around there are just mountains and small villages in the distance. The base looks like a 12 car garage that’s divided by walls with a door just like a garage door that slides up. Some of the garages are make shift doctors offices, regular offices, and the rest are living quarters plus one cooking area. The doctors office just has an eye chart and the machines they use at the optometrists’ office with the chin piece to rest your head on. People come from 400-500 km away, which is about 250 miles, I guess a little shorter than the distance between New York and DC. But there aren’t paved roads for a lot of it, and some don’t have cars, so they take horses, then tractors, then buses where they can. There are buses from certain bigger towns that bring them over to the base. Each day there are about 50 patients that need to be evaluated and they perform about 20 surgeries a day on the train. It’s pretty intense since these people came here to be able to see again. It’s very sad if they don’t have cataracts and are losing their vision because of something else because they are not eligible for the surgery. Everyone around them is getting their vision back and they have to be sent home.
The patients are all Tibetan farmers around the age of 64-75 so they are dirt poor. They pretty much wear all their clothes on their back all seasons and bring all the rest of their belongings. I saw a man pull out a dried leg of ham from his bag. Needless to say, they aren’t the most hygienic so on the train and in the garages where they stay, the smell is to say the least unpleasant, but you can use your imagination. They also eat a lot of yak butter, so that smell is also coming out of their pores. It’s not just me that thought it was smelly, the Tibetan doctors complained a lot. Plus it’s just not good for their eyes, they all have a little bit of conjunctivitis which isn’t good for eye surgery. Pictures to come.
Monday was pretty exhausting since we were there till about 8pm, so I didn’t do much on Tuesday. But today, Wednesday, I went back to ortho to just check on a patient I had already seen, and luckily got to go to surgery with the Chief and another doctor. It was an about 8 year old boy who broke his humerus 15 days ago. His family lived near the border of India as rice farmers since the altitude is lower and the weather less dry. So they had gone to a closer doctor, but he couldn’t set it without surgery and it became very swollen. They traveled to the next hospital, but there was no orthopedics department, so they ended up coming to Lhasa where they had family. This hospital is considered the best in Tibet and most advanced and the people value their expertise. But when you speak to the doctors in Lhasa, they feel like they are very behind compared to the main hospital in Beijing, Xie He.
The other doctor who was performing the surgery has worked in Rome, Italy and spoke pretty good English. She took an interest to me and said I could scrub in tomorrow!!! Literally help her. How nuts is that. She gave me two cases to do some research on and report back to her tomorrow morning. One is a 30 some year old man with a massive tumor on his right femur and a guy who had broke his humerus. She’s very much a professor and loves to teach, so I’m glad I got to meet her even if it’s the last few days. I also saw a young girl in her early 20s who suffered an accident where her hand got injured in a noodle making machine, leaving her with a claw hand because she damaged her radial nerve.
Enough medical stuff, I’m so excited to get back to Beijing, 3 weeks in Lhasa is more than enough. I’m sick of bargaining for stuff, which doesn’t really end in Beijing, but at least I won’t be alone. Shopping alone can be quite lonely. Considering that’s all I do in my free time. Today I was actually so exhausted I took a 3 hour nap. I don’t know why I was so tired. I gotta do some more research and sleep some more cause I got an early morning.
Sunday, July 1, 2007
long chest hairs
July 1, 2007
On Friday I went to Optho again and helped with the yearly checkups. I saw a few interesting cases, but nothing with gore or anything that was an emergency. One guy in his late 20s had a small sand particle lodged in his cornea, which needed to be removed with local anesthesia. Saw several older men with bleeding in the conjunctiva. One older man, about 72, was an alcoholic but hasn’t had a drink in a year. His right eye was extremely red, but luckily no bleeding in the eyeball itself. His blood vessels were extremely enlarged in the conjunctiva which is indicative of high blood pressure. The doctor told him cold towel compresses for 5 minutes 3 times a day, and then sent him to internal to get his blood pressure checked. I wrote up some history taking questions for the nurse in English because she wanted to learn, which made me feel useful. They see a lot of foreigners because of altitude sickness so it’s good for them to know some English. Although two British tourists came in and I asked if they needed a translator, but they were fine. Sad to say I didn’t get to help. Most Tibetans speak some English, whether they are selling goods in the street market or they work in the hospital. It’s actually quite good because the pronunciations in Tibetan are closer to English than Chinese, so it’s much easier for them than Chinese people to get the pronunciations correct.
Friday night I met this Canadian kid from North Vancouver who was traveling alone and has been backpacking Asia for the past 6 months. He had got some great stories from his travels in Cambodia and Laos, like crossing the Chinese border by accident and being chased down by military men with AK47s. We went out to a bar a few blocks down from the hostel and coincidentally bumped into my tour guide from last week, who’s a super nice guy. So I figured it must be where the locals hang out. We chatted about traveling and China and the cultural differences. There is quite a difference between China and Tibet, that even I have to adjust to. People are slower, lazier, extremely money hungry. At the bar, we had a few beers but they gave us shot glasses for them because they didn’t have an bigger ones. So we were basically having a power hour, which can be a little dangerous, especially at high altitudes. After the bar, we took a taxi to the local disco, aka club, where we bumped into my tour guide again. He was on his way out because he said there is a lot of fighting at this club, but we would be fine cause we were foreign. Vince, the Canadian, and I were a bit skeptical, which was only emphasized by a guy wearing a bullet proof vest. Luckily we had no problems and saw a bunch of European kids there. The funniest part were the guys who would dance with each other. In China, I think guys dance with guys and girls with girls, but that doesn’t mean they are gay. However, every few minutes a guy would come up to Vince, grab his hand, and whisper sweet nothings in his ear. It was hilarious that for once the girls didn’t need help, but the guys did! I felt pretty good no one was harassing me, and laughing at my squirming friend. At one point, this little man wearing a mesh tank was dancing using his friend like a pole, it was so weird. Then there was this guy on stage doing a striptease performance the whole time, down to his underwear, which were like colored tighty whities hahaha. And on top of it all, they played backstreet boys and other house mixes. Unforgettable. Only the pictures I took can describe it accurately.
With the altitude and extreme dryness here, I was pretty hungover on Saturday morning where I had to get up early and go on an outing with the hospital. July 1st is the communist parties birthday, and every year the hospital pays for an outing for the employees which they invited me to. It was at a local resort in the suburbs about a 30 minute drive away. When I got there around 11am, I sat in the back on this big comfortable couch, which immediately made me pass out. In the morning, there were performances by different departments singing songs in celebration of the communist party. For instance, they sang country pride songs, songs about my communist party my country, and other stuff I didn’t quite understand. Can you imagine, I have no connections with this aspect of China, and I’m exhausted, add these up and you get me passed out through the entire performance until 12:30. Since it wasn’t professional performers, the singing was pretty difficult to listen to. Lunch was served buffet style, but even though it was all people from the same work place, everyone was still soooo pushy. I was on the verge of giving up and not standing in this massive line for lunch. People here only want to get ahead for themselves, I feel like there’s no sense of camaraderie at all. Since there was no bus from the resort back to the hospital until 6pm, a few of us hiked through the suburbs until we got to a main road and hopped on a bus. Most of the employees stayed in the afternoon to play cards and mahjong. The suburbs aren’t what you imagine to be, green with houses spread apart. It’s farmland, extremely dusty, random cows wandering around, small cinder block huts with single rooms and single beds, garbage on the side of the street, extreme poverty, and the smell is different every 10 feet. It probably took us about 1.5 hours to get back to the city of Lhasa. An experience, how many people can say they went to a communist party party? I was a little nervous going into it since my coordinator at the office told me not to take pictures and not to tell anyone I’m from the States. That pretty much slipped out of my mouth the 2nd question they asked me…oops. There’s really no hiding where I’m from.
Saturday night I went to get handmade noodles in the Islamic part of town. You walk down this narrow alley with little stores selling meat and vegetables for the locals, and all of a sudden you come to the end and every man is wearing a little white hat to symbolize their religion and most women have their heads covered. Quite a change from the Tibetan side of town. Vince and I found a noodle place and ate for 14rmb for the two of us, which converts to about $1.80. Amazing!
Today, I went shopping for a little and had an early dinner with my friends Vince and Matt. Matt is a 35 year old British guy who’s on his second month of a year tour of the world, except I think he’s skipping Europe, which he’s been to already. After his year long backpacking trip, he’s going home and marrying his girlfriend who’s sorting out a divorce. He’s a super cool guy who’s always done crazy partying on the weekends and during the week he’s a helicopter engineer which definitely requires him to be drug free, which is not always the case. Very chill dude. Unfortunately, the meal wasn’t as pleasant as my day. Vince found a piece of hair in his noodles, which was absolutely appalling, so we asked for a different dish instead. Of course they brought a new plate of noodles, claiming it was new, but it was completely cold, obviously they had done nothing for us except throw the hair out. So we told them we weren’t paying for his plate, which inevitably turned into a huge argument. Another girl brought back the noodles and tells me it’s not cold and puts her hand on it telling me to feel it. So I said, what the hell am I going to do with this plate now that you’ve touched it, even if it was warm, I don’t want this crap anymore. Ugh, this would never happen anywhere else in the world. We left, leaving money for the other two dishes, guess I’m never going back there again. They were pissed we didn’t pay for the hairy dish and told me she’d never met anyone like me before. Oh well! We joked that it was a long chest hair from one of the girls….gross!
I picked up a few pretty awesome things for great deals. I drive a hard bargain, there’s no other way here or else you just get screwed. The end.
On Friday I went to Optho again and helped with the yearly checkups. I saw a few interesting cases, but nothing with gore or anything that was an emergency. One guy in his late 20s had a small sand particle lodged in his cornea, which needed to be removed with local anesthesia. Saw several older men with bleeding in the conjunctiva. One older man, about 72, was an alcoholic but hasn’t had a drink in a year. His right eye was extremely red, but luckily no bleeding in the eyeball itself. His blood vessels were extremely enlarged in the conjunctiva which is indicative of high blood pressure. The doctor told him cold towel compresses for 5 minutes 3 times a day, and then sent him to internal to get his blood pressure checked. I wrote up some history taking questions for the nurse in English because she wanted to learn, which made me feel useful. They see a lot of foreigners because of altitude sickness so it’s good for them to know some English. Although two British tourists came in and I asked if they needed a translator, but they were fine. Sad to say I didn’t get to help. Most Tibetans speak some English, whether they are selling goods in the street market or they work in the hospital. It’s actually quite good because the pronunciations in Tibetan are closer to English than Chinese, so it’s much easier for them than Chinese people to get the pronunciations correct.
Friday night I met this Canadian kid from North Vancouver who was traveling alone and has been backpacking Asia for the past 6 months. He had got some great stories from his travels in Cambodia and Laos, like crossing the Chinese border by accident and being chased down by military men with AK47s. We went out to a bar a few blocks down from the hostel and coincidentally bumped into my tour guide from last week, who’s a super nice guy. So I figured it must be where the locals hang out. We chatted about traveling and China and the cultural differences. There is quite a difference between China and Tibet, that even I have to adjust to. People are slower, lazier, extremely money hungry. At the bar, we had a few beers but they gave us shot glasses for them because they didn’t have an bigger ones. So we were basically having a power hour, which can be a little dangerous, especially at high altitudes. After the bar, we took a taxi to the local disco, aka club, where we bumped into my tour guide again. He was on his way out because he said there is a lot of fighting at this club, but we would be fine cause we were foreign. Vince, the Canadian, and I were a bit skeptical, which was only emphasized by a guy wearing a bullet proof vest. Luckily we had no problems and saw a bunch of European kids there. The funniest part were the guys who would dance with each other. In China, I think guys dance with guys and girls with girls, but that doesn’t mean they are gay. However, every few minutes a guy would come up to Vince, grab his hand, and whisper sweet nothings in his ear. It was hilarious that for once the girls didn’t need help, but the guys did! I felt pretty good no one was harassing me, and laughing at my squirming friend. At one point, this little man wearing a mesh tank was dancing using his friend like a pole, it was so weird. Then there was this guy on stage doing a striptease performance the whole time, down to his underwear, which were like colored tighty whities hahaha. And on top of it all, they played backstreet boys and other house mixes. Unforgettable. Only the pictures I took can describe it accurately.
With the altitude and extreme dryness here, I was pretty hungover on Saturday morning where I had to get up early and go on an outing with the hospital. July 1st is the communist parties birthday, and every year the hospital pays for an outing for the employees which they invited me to. It was at a local resort in the suburbs about a 30 minute drive away. When I got there around 11am, I sat in the back on this big comfortable couch, which immediately made me pass out. In the morning, there were performances by different departments singing songs in celebration of the communist party. For instance, they sang country pride songs, songs about my communist party my country, and other stuff I didn’t quite understand. Can you imagine, I have no connections with this aspect of China, and I’m exhausted, add these up and you get me passed out through the entire performance until 12:30. Since it wasn’t professional performers, the singing was pretty difficult to listen to. Lunch was served buffet style, but even though it was all people from the same work place, everyone was still soooo pushy. I was on the verge of giving up and not standing in this massive line for lunch. People here only want to get ahead for themselves, I feel like there’s no sense of camaraderie at all. Since there was no bus from the resort back to the hospital until 6pm, a few of us hiked through the suburbs until we got to a main road and hopped on a bus. Most of the employees stayed in the afternoon to play cards and mahjong. The suburbs aren’t what you imagine to be, green with houses spread apart. It’s farmland, extremely dusty, random cows wandering around, small cinder block huts with single rooms and single beds, garbage on the side of the street, extreme poverty, and the smell is different every 10 feet. It probably took us about 1.5 hours to get back to the city of Lhasa. An experience, how many people can say they went to a communist party party? I was a little nervous going into it since my coordinator at the office told me not to take pictures and not to tell anyone I’m from the States. That pretty much slipped out of my mouth the 2nd question they asked me…oops. There’s really no hiding where I’m from.
Saturday night I went to get handmade noodles in the Islamic part of town. You walk down this narrow alley with little stores selling meat and vegetables for the locals, and all of a sudden you come to the end and every man is wearing a little white hat to symbolize their religion and most women have their heads covered. Quite a change from the Tibetan side of town. Vince and I found a noodle place and ate for 14rmb for the two of us, which converts to about $1.80. Amazing!
Today, I went shopping for a little and had an early dinner with my friends Vince and Matt. Matt is a 35 year old British guy who’s on his second month of a year tour of the world, except I think he’s skipping Europe, which he’s been to already. After his year long backpacking trip, he’s going home and marrying his girlfriend who’s sorting out a divorce. He’s a super cool guy who’s always done crazy partying on the weekends and during the week he’s a helicopter engineer which definitely requires him to be drug free, which is not always the case. Very chill dude. Unfortunately, the meal wasn’t as pleasant as my day. Vince found a piece of hair in his noodles, which was absolutely appalling, so we asked for a different dish instead. Of course they brought a new plate of noodles, claiming it was new, but it was completely cold, obviously they had done nothing for us except throw the hair out. So we told them we weren’t paying for his plate, which inevitably turned into a huge argument. Another girl brought back the noodles and tells me it’s not cold and puts her hand on it telling me to feel it. So I said, what the hell am I going to do with this plate now that you’ve touched it, even if it was warm, I don’t want this crap anymore. Ugh, this would never happen anywhere else in the world. We left, leaving money for the other two dishes, guess I’m never going back there again. They were pissed we didn’t pay for the hairy dish and told me she’d never met anyone like me before. Oh well! We joked that it was a long chest hair from one of the girls….gross!
I picked up a few pretty awesome things for great deals. I drive a hard bargain, there’s no other way here or else you just get screwed. The end.
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