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.