A bohemian rhapsody

Thursday, July 15, 2011

9:44 PM (Vietnam Time)

Today, we enrolled our 30^th patient into the study! Hopefully, by the end of the trip, we will have around 50 – 70. On average, we get 3 patients a day by going to all the departments with stroke patients: neurology, ICU, and cardiology. Only 3 patients end up being eligible for the study because we have to exclude patients that have had strokes for longer than a week or who have had strokes before. We work at full capacity and have a routine now. We meet Ngan and Tien in the motorbike parking lot at 9 am in the morning. If it rains, like it did this morning, everyone is pretty much stuck at home until the rain stops. Scott and I bike to work, so we would get soaked. After our rendezvous, we head up to the neurology ward. All of the nurses and doctors know us by now, so we just ask if there are any new patients for us, and we head to the rooms to interview. I examine the patient first to give them the NIH Stroke Scale which gives us a measure of severity. Then, Ngan and Tien interview the patients, asking questions about smoking and drinking habits. Scott closes it up by looking through the patient’s chart and filling out CT scan results and getting the necessary information for the study. He does this with charts in Vietnamese. It’s quite impressive. Watching him, you would think Scott was fluent in Vietnamese and can read it. Then you find out that he actually has memorized certain words that he is looking for, such as blood pressure.

We then head to the ICU, where the patients’ conditions are much more severe. In fact, most of the patients are in a coma or can hardly speak or move. The families are quiet and supportive while they hope for a recovery. It is difficult to walk inside and look through the windows of the rooms and see patients hooked up to old machines. It is also difficult for me to scale the patient because they are unresponsive, and I mostly just give an estimate of how severe their stroke is. One man, who had bleeding in his brain, which is called a hemorrhagic stroke, could not blink his eyes. His eyes just stayed open, and I didn’t even know if he was focusing on me or not. There was some sort of debris building up at the bottom of his eye because he could not blink. Flies were landing on his face, hands, body, as if he had already passed, but the machine that was breathing for him was still pumping away. We interview the patient’s family, and the most we can do for them is to give them a pair of reading glasses to thank them for their time and for sharing with us.

More family member in need of reading glasses

What captures my attention most at the hospital is that patients and their families walk around everywhere with bare feet. Maybe they don’t know that blood has spilled on the tile or that microorganisms grow there. Maybe their feet are made of steel.

Tien says that Scott and I are developing a fan base. We have added one to our group, Long, now because he wants to learn English. One of the doctors in the neurology ward has also befriended us to practice English. We walk the halls of the hospital in a crew with Scott in the lead—as if we are his little minions. Today, we took Long and the neurology doctor, Bac Si Thao, to get coffee at Hai Au Restaurant to practice some English. Scott and I especially like to work on their pronunciation, especially of the sound “th”. Tien laughs as I go through the same lessons with the new guys as I did with him and Ngan. Tien immediately picks up, “They make the same exact mistakes that we did!” It’s almost as if Scott and I are letting them in on a little secret—the secret of how to pronounce the ‘th’ in “three”. In exchange, I get to improve my Vietnamese. We exchange English word for Vietnamese word. Scott has also improved on his pronunciation though we still tease him about it.

Long practicing pronunciation with Audrey

Tien enjoying coconut juice during the English lesson

For lunch, we went back to the large outdoor market to buy fruits and vegetables to cook at the guest house. The market consists of stalls and stalls with rows of bowls holding every shade of green vegetable imaginable. The leaves are overflowing their containers. Ngan and I roam from shop to shop as we pick out our produce for the day. We cook the food and share our meal together at the wooden tables and chairs. Scott and I have missed cooking at home and now we feel much more relaxed now that we can walk downstairs and whip something up.

Now, that is skill

Delicious bitter melon

The market experts

The biking experts

Fresh fruit- mang cut

Our private chaffeurs

In front of our guesthouse!

Matching outfits

That night, we went out to karaoke with Ngan at a place in Khu Lan Bien. The three of us had a room to ourselves. Ngan sang Vietnamese songs, and Scott and I sang American songs. Since we were in a private room, I was uninhibited and song my heart away. Even Scott sang. Together, we sang “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen and wondered what Ngan thought of this strange song that changed tempo every few measures. The karaoke place was filled to the brim. The building was several stories high, and each room was occupied. As you walked down the hallways, you could her all the echoes of Vietnamese songs and drunken men and women singing along to them. We all sang until our throats were sore and then headed home.

-Audrey

Audrey serenades Scott

Ngan and Audrey

Enjoying our private karaoke booth

Lucky for us they had some English songs!