Back Home From Myanmar

I came back to work on Monday morning 4/14, still jet-lagged from the trip.  My staff was so happy to see me.  Everyone was worried about me being sick or being “stuck” in Myanmar.  They were fascinated by the tales I told or by the photos I took.  Some of my staff have never been out of the United States even to Canada, let alone Myanmar.  They all thought the photos of the cicadas looked “gross” before they found out that I ate three of them!  We had quite a conversation about how I had my exotic protein in Myanmar.

I was on call Wednesday night.  It was odd walking into the Labor and Delivery Suite.  The lights were too bright, the corridors too wide, the rooms too sterile.  I performed my first delivery of the night around 10 p.m., with the patient mourning and hollering at her mother who was on one side of the bed holding her hand and hollering at the patient at the same time.

“You talk too much, mom, I can’t concentrate.”  She repeatedly said to her mom, who constantly assured her how she was going to be “OK.”

The patient’s husband, a young slim man with dark mustache, stood silently like a shadow on the other side, holding her other hand.

As she stopped pushing, she started complaining how she would rate her pain a “ten out of ten” again.  Her younger sister, who was standing at the door, behind the curtain, screamed out to her:

“Just pray, sis, just pray!  Say Jesus help take away my pain. Just say it, say Jesus’ name.”

As you might guess, calling Jesus was not enough.  She constantly hit the epidural button.  Maybe, just maybe, Jesus was guiding her to keep hitting the epidural button.  I was grateful for anything or anybody who could help eliminate all this screaming, as my ears were about to explode with all these noises.  What would this patient have done in Myanmar?  Had she been alone, I told myself, she probably would have done well.

At 5:30 a.m., the morning after my call night, I was pushing with a second patient, a Tibetan woman who’s married to an American.  They were so happy to see me back in the U.S. from Myanmar, as we have had a strong doctor-patient bond for nine months.

She was pushing with Tibetan Buddhist chanting in the background coming from their Bose player.  It was such a peaceful chanting which made me pause in between the pushing, thinking of the narrow winding mountainous path in Myanmar where the bus was traveling to Taunggyi.  The sun was setting above the mountains that day as we passed bananas groves along the way.  It is such a long distance from Myanmar to this delivery room.

As I had predicted and told the couple, their beautiful daughter came at sunrise.  It was such a gorgeous sunrise outside their hospital window.  Another new day, another new life, that’s how the world should be.  The Russian-American nurse Larissa and I cheered at the baby’s arrival.  The couple was beaming with joy.  The new baby looked like her handsome father, with bright eyes and full lips.

I looked at all of us in the room and marveled at the sense of freedom I felt at that moment.  Except for the baby’s father, the rest of us had come to America from another part of the world.  Larissa fled from Russia, me from Vietnam, and the baby’s mother from Tibet and India.  All of us had our lives interrupted in the name of freedom and safety.  We somehow were united in that room, on that day, at sunrise, for a happier occasion, to welcome the beginning of a new life.  

On Friday, I made rounds and the Tibetan patient’s husband gave me a hug and handed me a gift, the two CDs they had been playing on the Bose while she was pushing.  He told me how I should play the red CD in the morning, as it was called “The awakening,” and the green one at night, as it marks the end of the day, a peaceful time. 

I went back to the gym at the end of the day and had a tough workout with Troy.  It was tough because I had not had time to exercise much while in Myanmar.  I did several 3-mile runs and tried to do pushups in my room at night but there was so little time.  I felt like a floppy string of rice noodles when I came back from Myanmar. 

For dinner, we went over to my friend and bootcamp fellow Kim, a radiologist who lives only three blocks away from me, for sushi.  Remember the ophthalmologist who had to see 110 patients on his first day of clinic in Myanmar?  He was one of Kim’s good friends years ago when he was a fellow at Johns Hopkins.  See how small the world is?  Somehow, he and I met in Myanmar, being fellow missionaries, although he now lives and practices in Seattle, WA.  We all are connected even more closely than the so-called six degrees of separation.

A week after I came back, my dad sent me and my siblings an email in the middle of my office hours (when I was already an hour behind): 

“Yahoo news today: Three American doctors were killed by a security man, a police officer guarding the hospital.  Two victims were father and son.  They belonged to CURE international, based in PA. The hospital is one of the prominent Afghan Hospitals located in Kabul, partly because of its specialized offerings for women and children, including OBGYN surgery (Thu’s field).  These doctors helped poor patients like what Thu did in Myanmar.  I feel sorry for their families.  I hope this case is a lesson for Thu.  

Ba “

I showed the email to my nurse Roxanne who chuckled:

“I’m sure he didn’t have the last words.”  

How did Roxanne know me so well?  Already I had replied to my father: 

“Ba, 

Things happen. I could have been in Sandy Hook school in Connecticut and gunned down.  Can’t live life being scared all the time.  Always grateful for your concern. 

Thu”

I could see my father laugh and shake his head as he read my email.  “She is as stubborn as her mom used to be,” he probably said to himself.  I did inherit my mom’s sense of adventure and passion for living.  Nobody is immortal, why worry all the time? That said, I am not so sure I would have gone on a medical mission in Kabul right now. Remember, unlike what my father believes, I am a cautious activist.

Will I do more missions?  I definitely will.  I would love someday to return to Myanmar and see the forgotten, the truly forgotten ethnic groups who are suffering with poor health because of the government not allowing them to access good care like the rest of the Burmese.   By oppressing these poor and sick people, members of the Myanmar government have created an artificial human barrier, like the broken glasses I saw on the wall in front of a Buddhist temple in Taunggyi, or a Buddha sitting behind a closed screen in the Aranda temple in Bagan, almost as if he was sitting in a jail.

Humans, if not careful, can misunderstand their God.  There is no “false God,” just false preachers who boast they understand the truth of their religions.  Their God is in captivity and cannot explain or speak out to tell these men how wrong they are and how God has been misunderstood. 

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

                                                         Mother Teresa