Meeting the Healers

I was woken up at 6 am again. After breakfast, I laid down and rest.

A group of men and women in white gowns appeared at my bed. “Mrs Chong, we are here to see you.”

“Call me Ms Chong.”  They read the admission papers written by the doctor at the emergency room. Then they discussed intensely.

The doctors are like angels

One of them, a nice smiling woman said, “So you came from Damansara Specialist?”

“Yes, I need a second opinion because the private hospital couldn’t find the cure.UM is highly recommended to me by several people. Your reputation is very good.”

The doctors smiled.

Then began a list of queries, what I do, what happened?

One of them wrote down things I said. The smiling woman said to me, “I am Dr W, I head the medical team here. We will discuss your case and do our best.”

“Oh ya, I have on disks all my tests results, surgeries results for you to download to your computer to build my case!’

“Excellent!” she smiled genuinely.  She also listened to my appeal of needing sleep, so I was transferred to a room with only one roommate. She came back, “I’ve called the dietician, she will come to see you to make sure you eat well.”

The dietician, a gentle lady, had a nice conversation with me. “If a large amount of protein is removed from you through the peritoneal fluid, you have to get a high protein diet. Also low salt, so that your body is not retaining water. But you have to be careful not to have too low salt, so that you don’t have electrolyte imbalance. Try eating banana every day for potassium.”

She gave me a pamphlet about sodium in foods. Wow, the normal tamarind has high sodium, but not the tamarind skin for assam laksa! There are many things I have to refrain from if I were to follow the low sodium diet!

I finally felt good after two days of neglect by the nurses.

That afternoon, I finally got some relieve of the tension in my tummy. A trainee doctor came to see why the tapping wasn’t draining. She injected some water and ‘flushed ‘ it back to the tummy, “Ooops, it is cold!”My body jerked up suddenly.

“So sorry, now it should flow again. There must be some dead skin cells stuck in the tube as you have had this for about two weeks now without flushing.”

Ascites tummy -- more than being pregnant!

                                                      

I spent the afternoon, letting the draining worked.  And I read, taking my mind off from the noises around me. In the midst of this, some trainee nurses came to take my temperature and pulse. Some were serious while the rest didn’t care much. Several of them came behind my curtain to do SMS on their handphones.

“How are you going to learn if you keep doing handphone?” I had to voice out the unfairness of it all.

They didn’t answer, walked away. 

                                  

The food trolley that is so part of hospital life.

At 7.pm, the food tray came. A man in the fifty was the food bearer.  My ward mate, an Indian woman

named Sara, said to me, “They give me cake for dessert and fried chicken. I am a diabetic with high blood pressure, I thought I am not supposed to eat these?”

Upon checking her tray, I found that she got my foods and I got hers－ steam chicken, fruits and vege. I told the food man about the wrong food. He showed me the list he was given. Mine said I was on ‘low salt high protein diet’, Sara’s was on ‘low fat, low sugar, high fibre diet’ but the food delivery list switched the diet requirement for us.

“How can a hospital kitchen look at ‘low salt high protein diet’ and then give me something else? It is ok for me, but it is dangerous for patients like Sara!”

“I can’t do anything, you have to ask the lady who comes around to get your menu daily,” he said, walked away. DON”T CARE.

I'm flabbergasted.

By Ching Ching