So my overall schedule in the hospital seems to work the following way (it's basically shadowing doctors - nothing official/formal/certified, just experience): each day I have a chance to observe physicians of one or two specialties - one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Monday was just the day of introductions so today is really the first day of any hospital exposure.
Tuesday = Interventional Cardiology Day. Since this is Dr. T's department, it made sense to start off with this one. Dr. T is currently working on her PhD thesis so she's taken a more administrative role in the hospital and spends only some of her days at the hospital. She wasn't in today so my aunt dropped me off in the morning and I relied on my memory of yesterday's tour to find my way around. The hospital isn't overwhemingly big but it's still somewhat intimidating to walk around a place where you don't know the language very well. Of course, one of the first people to approach me when I walk in is a patient, asking for directions. I forgot that I was already wearing my white coat (yes, with the VCU/MCV badge and all) and she thought I was a doctor. I told her in very elementary Vietnamese that I didn't work there and that my Vietnamese was poor. She just said sorry and smiled at me.
My scheduled shadowing was with one of Dr. T's junior doctors and she was responsible for checking on about 20 patients (is this what you call "morning rounds"? I don't know my medical/hospital slang very well at all). These 20 patients are just in two rooms. The junior doc tells me that the more private rooms are more expensive - and "private rooms" include only one other patient, a tv, and air conditioning. So in these crowded rooms, all the patients and visitors know of each other's condition since they are within earshot of doc-patient conversations.
For each patient, the junior doc palpates, auscultates, and percusses around the chest and thorax and tells me to do the same for each patient and report any abnormalities that I thought I found (murmurs, enlarged livers, etc). She criticized the way I percussed - apparently I was hitting the wrong part of my finger but FCM taught me differently. We'll just have to agree to disagree. The junior doc kept asking me how to pronounce English medical terms such as "anterior axillary line" and "intercostal space"; many of the doctors here read journals and textbooks in English so they know how to read/write English decently but speaking is a problem for them. So the junior doc preferred me to speak English so she could practice, leaving me only some room to practice my Vietnamese.
Afterwards, I met up with another cardio doc who worked in the cardiac intensive care unit. Most patients were recovering from recent MI's; most were elderly and had other complications like renal failure, diabetes, pulmonary embolisms, etc.
Two of the doctors kindly invited me out to lunch (which lasted 2 hours) so we hopped into one of the doc's car (a Honda civic) and drove to a local coffee/cafe shop. They seemed really interested in the US and how things generally worked there - basically a Q and A session about America, which was fun. They asked me where my mother was from and I replied tha she was from Saigon. They seemed confused and said that they thought I was half-Vietnamese, half-American or Caucasian. I've gotten this response before, and not only in Vietnam. I'm not sure why but sometimes, people have trouble identifying my heritage or background based on my looks - my only guesses are that my eyes are a bit bigger and my hair and eye colors are lighter than normal? I have no idea. Anyway, their response partially explained why I've noticed that the people in the hospital tend to stare at me - it must be pretty obvious that I'm not a local. The two docs said that my skin color is different (as in pale?) and my body is also different (as in taller? That is one of the luxuries that I've been able to enjoy since my stay).
They asked me if I was going to the cardiology department annual holiday trip to Nha Trang (a really nice beach that's about 10 hours away via train) this upcoming weekend. Apparently each year, the hospital sponsors a trip for each department to reward them for the year - such a cool idea. I declined the invitation since my parents and I were already planning on going to Vung Tau beach with some family friends. They laughed and replied that they now believed that I was 100% Vietnamese since I chose to spend time with my parents instead of spending time away from them, which they considered to be an "American" trait.
At the end of the meal, one of the docs asked me if I liked "shrimp" and I said yes. He ordered three orders of something (sometimes, I have difficulty understanding the dialect of certain people's Vietnamese; I'm so used to my parents') and my first thought was that it was strange to order three orders of shrimp at the end of the meal. Out comes three ice cream sundaes and then I realized that he smushed the words "ice" and "cream" together, making it sound like "shrimp." Normally, the ice cream treat would have been welcomed but ironically, I'm lactose intolerant. Not wanting to seem rude, I ate it (most of it, not all). Fortunately, the ice cream was more ice than cream so I didn't have any problems later but it could have been disasterous.
One of the doctors seemed like a huge fan of the US but claimed that he had never been there. When he had paid for the check, I saw that he kept an US $5 dollar bill in the clear face of his wallet, which I found amusing.
The last pit stop of the day was to scrub in a coronary angioplasty. I had to wear this heavy lead coat/vest thing to protect me from the xray machine - I was supposed to wear 2 additional lead garments but the nurses saw how much I was struggling with just one of the vests so they just told me to face forward towards the machine since my back was exposed. I've only seen videos of the angiogram results, as the dye is injected through the arteries but it was pretty cool to see the whole procedure from start to finish. The patient receives a local anesthetic (rubbed on the skin) of where the catheter is inserted (radial artery for coronary angiogram). It was pretty skillful how the doctor navigated the catheter by using the xray equipment. Just as a sidenote observation, this hospital is pretty well equipped. They use the technology and computers programs that the US probably uses but it's probably a little outdated compared to what we have nowadays. This isn't just some rudimentary clinic - it's an impressive hospital that has a pretty big reputation in Ho Chi Minh for good health care (but only for local citizens, not international visitors; that's probably the reason why not many employees there speak English). The whole procedure took about 45 minutes and then my first real shadowing day was over.
Here's a picture of Dr. T and I heading to the hospital in the morning on the back of her moto and the front gate of the hospital:
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