Textick

Tuesday, 3rd January, Namsok Guest House, Luang Prabang, Laos, 11pm

This is a “Memento” entry. It starts here, tonight, and then maybe, soberness permitting, heads backwards. For now, I just have to talk about tonight. An experience. With new friends, Jen and Kareem. Well, it was all to do with Jen, really, but Kareem was told all about our experience later in the night , since he couldn’t come to the hospital with us. Wait, this isn’t at all the beginning. There were the four of us, all determined not to pay the full $1 each for a tuk-tuk from the bus station into Luang Prabang. We started to chat at this point. We hooked two other girls into our cheapskate determination, girls who were considering walking. We got the tuk-tuk down to 5000 kip each (fifty cents), and, to simplify matters, jumped out at the same guesthouse. The girls went off on their own, and Jen (Canada), Kareem (Texas, but he’s aliberal), James and I became a foursome mad for a bargain room. We hunted at about ten or so guest houses, and Jen eventually fell for an $8 single with ensuite, Kareem for a $5 single with shared bathroom, and James and I paid the $10 that was being asked everywhere, but got a room that was twice the size of everything else I’d seen. Nothing else, still a double and an ensuite, but the room we got was just double the size and felt far better value for money.
As we left Jen, who had succumbed first, she asked if we wanted to meet for dinner. And so it was on. We ate Indian and chatted lightly, and then Jen, James and I wandered the night market (it was occurred to me that this story is not “memento-like”. It is involving a lot of back story. But it must be, and so it must be), where James and I bought these awesome cushion covers, and Jen got a bargain skirt. But then James and I had to go to “mass” (meaning the Liverpool/Bolton game being shown at the only pub on the main street), and so we departed from Jen saying we’d probably see her around. Cue tonight.
Tonight. We’re walking through the market, and James and Kareem spot each other. I’m too in my own world, and James yells at me to stop. Kareem generously offers us the opportunity to steal music from his mp3 player, which we can’t help but gush at. So the three of us head toward an internet place. Then, as fate would have it, we bump into Jen! Jen is walking out of a clinic with a slight limp. She explains that she went trekking that day, on paths that hadn’t been traversed for years (the guide had claimed that he hadn’t done the trek in years, and didn’t know the paths were longer in use), and along the way she had fallen and gashed her knee, and is now apparently needing stitches. She is perky, smiling constantly, and not seeming to be in the slightest pain. We offer to go to the hospital with her, and she acts blaise and really, really calm about it all. I wonder if she’s had stitches before, to act so nonchalant about the procedure. I haven’t, and neither has James. I went with her to her hotel room, while James and Kareem organised mp3 swapping. The whole time, Jen continued to downplay the injury. And I say “downplay” in hindsight. At the time, I was considering a minor cut, a bit of blood and tissue, but nothing (and I mean nothing) like what it ended up being. Kareem had a movie to see, so it was just James, Jen and myself in a tuk-tuk to the Chinese hospital 10 minutes out of town.
The tuk-tuk was rough. The road quickly went from bitumen to crazy dirt, rocks throwing us from side-to-side and a couple of “whoa Nelly!” angles. After five minutes or so, we all started to wonder about the actually existence of this hospital, it was soooo far away. Finally we turned across a wooden bridge and saw a white building that looked distinctly hospital-like, complete with dozens of motorbikes.
“What’s with all the bikes?” Jen asked.
“Those are the ambulances,” I said, only half-joking. As we pulled up to the emergency entrance, we realised that the whole building was completely deserted of patients. A girl greeted us, a girl who looked about fourteen (but was possibly older), with a nurses uniform and a name-badge. I thought to myself that she needed to turn that one eyebrow into two.
The girl led us into a room, which was relatively clean (cleaner than I was expecting for a hospital in SE Asia), and proceeded to giggle about the fact that the bed was still dirty from the last person. The floor was similarly unclean, but not overwhelmingly so. The girl asked Jen to remove her bandages.
“…are you doing the stitches?” Jen asked, trying to keep her voice strong. Again the girl laughed, in that nervous way Asians have, and explained that the doctor would. Eventually Jen peeled back the bandages, and I bit back my scream. It wasn’t a cut. It was a total hole. It was a gaping, bloody hole in her knee. I just said,
“Oh God, yeah, you neeeeeed stitches!!”
Later I told her that somewhere in the Laos jungle, there was a little piece of herself left behind. There was no doubt that something (probably just a stick) and really gouged out a chunk of her body. I just couldn’t believe she’d been so calm when we’d seen her earlier! I’d have been screaming, crying, begging to be saved.
The next person into the room was the lady I fondly refer to as “Prostitute Nurse,” who was wearing so much make-up she looked like a cheap night out. Her eyebrows were pencilled, and her foundation was white as a geisha’s. She proceeded to get equipment ready. Jen was still sitting at this stage, but as she became aware that she should lie down, we searched for something to cover the mess of the previous patient. The whole time she laughed, most likely a bewildered, terrified laugh, aimed to disempower the craziness of the whole situation. At least, that’s why I was laughing. We eventually used Jen’s jacket to cover where her head was to lie.
Then the room filled up, with who knows who. Anyone in the hospital who had nothing better to do. My favourite was some woman in a pink jumper and a floral skirt, who did nothing the whole time but watch. She was like the cleaner, or someone’s mum, who had just come along for the ride. There were five woman in total, but the fourteen-year-old nurse was the only one who spoke, but even then her Engrish wasn’t the best. She said “What Laos do you know?” and we said “Saibadee. Cop Chai. Beer Lao.” She laughed at the latter.
The doctor was a stern woman, with a lined face and permanent frown. And she began to dig. I held Jen’s hand and tried to prepare her for things as they were about to happen.
“Oh,” I’d say, “um…” (the nurse would be coming at her wound with forceps and a bottle of disinfectant) “…this might hurt a little.”
And Jen would gasp, squeeze my hand, and then giggle a little, or just bite her lip in agony. And the nurses giggled. They actually giggled.
“Oh my God,” Jen would say, with an hysterical giggle, “this hurts so much! I have never experienced pain like this in my life!!”
The doctor just dug, and gouged, and poked, and jabbed, and was so harsh and insensitive. She pulled open the gash and jammed gauze in, she dripped liquids in and pulled at flesh and bits that shouldn’t be pulled at. At one stage, they dripped in something that foamed up out of the wound.
And then there was a mobile ringing! And it was the doctor! And she took the call!!! A nurse scooped the phone out of her pocket and held it up to the doctors ear.
“Hello?”
And the worst part was that she had a bit of Jen’s flesh in the forceps, and as she spoke, she pulled away from her work, and Jen almost screamed in pain but the woman didn’t even notice. Finally she dropped the flesh and just chatted. Sorry to interrupt your social life, doc!
And Jen was amazing. She asked James to take photos, so that became his job, and I held her hand, but I think I was squeezing harder than she was!! She was so amazingly brave. The pain she must have been going through…I don’t know that I can do it justice. My stomach was churning just witnessing it, and I am so amazed that she didn’t pass out. Just the way the doctor toyed with the wound so carelessly…fuck…I just have so much admiration and respect for how strong and brave Jen was through it all. She was absolutely incredible. James and I told her afterwards how hard it had been just to watch, so to have actually felt it…! You know what it was like? It was exactly like when the “good guy” in a movie has a bullet-wound, and the “bad guy” shoves his thumb into it. Jen’s wound was big enough to be a bullet hole, come to think of it. That was one nasty fall!!
Finally the stitches were being put in, with wire. And the doctor pulled the stitches from high, jerking the stitches up, rather than horizontal, and Jen’s lower lip trembled as she covered her eyes (she covered her eyes with one hand for most of the op) and squeezed my hand, and I told her how many more she had to do (I told her three more, but it was only one, four or so in total, so what do I know?), and then the doctor was slamming cotton balls onto it, pressing harshly on the wound, but then, finally it was over.
And in swanned “Tha Man,” a male doctor who spoke fairly good English, was fairly handsome and who had all the nurses giggling. They gathered around him and hung off him like he was The Fonz, Mr. Smooth, Mr. Slick. He made jokes, they giggled, he wrote out the scrips (which came to Jen in very official looking, unmarked placcie-bags), but Jen had to ask when they needed to be taken, and what with. A nurse held his mobile up to his ear, and he chatted as he filled in the info, and the doctor who had been stern the whole time giggled into the phone, yelling something that was either a running joke from last night’s party (“hey! Don’t go too near the monkey!!”) or a joke about what was going on (“hey! Just stitched up a Canadian!!”).
And then we left our swag of fans behind, the five or so staff that had nothing better to do that night than watch Jen got prodded and bruised by a vindictive, masochistic doctor (and whether she even was a doctor remains highly debatable, she was more likely a senior nurse, which is fine, but just a principle thing that she isn’t officially a doctor and shouldn’t call herself one when she possibly isn’t, etc). We laughed is disbelief the whole way back, and then we immediately went for drinks.
We met Kareem at 9, and the four of us headed of for dinner, entertaining Kareem with the joy that was our SE Asia hospital experience. Tomorrow we’re all meeting up again, to go to Pak Ou cave. Hopefully I’ll be less tired and less drunk to be able to write more in this journal, since I still haven’t written about the rest of Vang Vieng yet! But too tired now. Too exhausted from random, dodgy hospital experiences! And cheap whiskey.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Travel, Laos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.