TADIOTO

The Obama administration is struggling to improve the American health care system.  Across the ocean, the Prime Minister of Viet Nam has announced plans to upgrade hospitals, to the tune of 2.5 billion.  It should help.

Hospital Visit

The woman across the room was going on and on, non-stop.

She sat with her arms around her knees, her filthy feet on the bed, her mouth open wide to show how vexed she was with the gods and with life, and she kept repeating her story—about how her mom had cut down a sacred tree while building her house, and three of her four uncles had died.  And the house had to be rebuilt in another spot.  And still the bad luck hadn’t stopped, and now she was in the hospital.

She wasn’t talking to anyone in particular, and no one was really listening.

It was so hot, I had trouble breathing.  We all shared one lousy ceiling fan that made a mockery of our miserable situation.

The room’s really fit for one person.  But here we have four beds, two patients per bed.  One bed had 3 girls in their late teens.  That’s 9 people – and then 10 sweating family members squatting on mats on the floor, sighing and moaning, or slurping noodle soup as if it’s their last meal.

These are tough days in Ha Noi.  There are times when even a seasoned nomad like me can’t explain why we’ve ended up in a particular spot.  And this spot is unexplainable.

The short woman – the fat one with short legs and huge toes – insisted on getting  out of her bed every five minutes to pace the room, stepping over and around the bodies while massaging her breasts and cursing out the nurses, the doctors, and her husband.

Someone would open the bathroom door, and the smell of urine and blood made you want to puke.  There were water puddles on the floor, and people would wipe their plastic sandals on a towel that looked like it’d been soaked in engine oil since 1972.

It’s shocking to see how people just carried on sitting, talking, waiting in this hell hole.  After a while, I realized I too had come to accept this whole ugly mess; you just get used to the smell, the filth, the whiny voices, and you know hospitals like this one is the only choice for these women.  Most of them come from towns and villages where there aren’t any such services – they’ve packed up and come to the capital, to have their stomachs and whatever illnesses looked after.  I’m the only man in the room, visiting a friend and sharing a little of their misery, and discovering what to them is simply normal.  Life is just the way it is.

The woman across the room has been talking non-stop for half an hour now, and the three girls were taking turns singing along to some annoying tune blaring out from a cell phone.  Two of them were actually embracing each other on the bed.  It’s as if the 40-degree heat and humidity in the room didn’t even register with them.  They were wearing short shorts and there were lots of legs between them – but don’t you boys go get excited; it was more grotesque than erotic.  Turns out all three have irregular, or dry, menstrual periods, and they were here for exams.  It just looked like they were on holiday.  Maybe that’s how they deal with a condition they don’t quite understand.

The rest of the women had some trouble inside their wombs, or were waiting for an abortion.  We were on the fourth floor, where complicated cases were kept waiting.

Fat one was bitching about not getting as many drugs as the rest, that she was a second class citizen, and the last abortion had gone smoother, and this time she wasn’t giving anyone any envelope, no more money, no more bribes.  The others began comparing the amounts they’d given to the nurses and doctors.  Some gave 500 thousand dong, some 300, one added up the amounts between the nurses and doctors and it came to a million and a half dong.  It didn’t seem she was getting any better services.

Someone was complaining about the costs of things.  Outside the hospital, there are hundreds of people selling fruits and xôi, sticky rice with fried onion, or green beans and shredded pork.  Across the street, people are spread out on sidewalks, selling congee and pillows and drugs and mats and beef noodle soup and toilet pots.  A pillow or a mat costs 30 thousand dong, less than two dollars.  A bowl of noodle, or congee, 12 thousand.  Less than a dollar.  Bottled water, 5 thousand.   Then there are phone calls to their husbands sitting at home, or out on the streets having a beer.  It all adds up, and these are miserable people, working on the fields, or perhaps eking out a living from selling incense sticks or vegetables in the morning, and some sundry items at night.  How could they afford the drugs and services, and how can they afford missing a few days of work to stay in the hospital?  And then I thought, with such a terrible life, how would they have time for sex, how could they get pregnant?

The abortion clinics were actually downstairs, and it was even more crowded.  There were women sitting along benches on the veranda, fanning themselves with medical papers and ultra sound results, or holding their stomach.  I noticed a few had a man with them, but most simply didn’t.  Once I caught a glance at one of the waiting rooms – about twelve beds, two women per bed, waiting for an abortion.  It’s no surprise that Viet Nam has one of the highest rates of abortion in the world.

I hear about a lot of international organizations coming to Viet Nam – and dealing with a multitude of social issues, from women trafficking, to corruption and HIV/AIDS prevention.  I hear of few dealing with abortion.  It is a difficult issue that the authorities, schools and parents can’t talk about and confront.

Here though in the hospital, some people on these floors are matter of fact about it.  At around 50 to 70 dollars, a stay in the hospital and an abortion would be cheaper than raising a child for 15 or 20 years.  Others simply blame fate, bad karma, or appear to suggest that pregnancy, related complications, or an abortion, are simply a part of life.

Downstairs, a mother comes out of one of the rooms, and turns to many of the dull-faced women fanning themselves on the worn wooden benches, “Next life, be sure to be a man.”

The only man around was a thin guy with a shifty expression, sneaking into the nurses’ bathroom to shower and wash his clothes.  There were people sitting on every step of the staircase, eating chips and fruits, throwing plastic bags and Styrofoam cups all over the floor.  No one seemed to be bothered, no one cared.  Rats were crawling up and down the railings and the windows, crawling into rubbish bags and sniffling banana peels.

Later, it’d rained, and it was getting dark.  The hallway was poorly lit with just a couple of short neon bulbs.  The women in the white hospital gowns floated silently past my door, their black hair unkempt, dirty.  They looked like ghosts.

These are tough days in Ha Noi.  In my home, like the American soldiers and the French before them who’d had to accept defeat in this country, my air conditioners kept giving out – they were nothing against the heat.  But still, it’s where I can breathe a little. In the hospital, you can’t breathe.  The air is like lead, and the situation for these women continue to horrify you.  Yet, they manage, they accept, and they live with it all.

After a whole day crammed into the inferno that passes for a hospital room, people were stopped being so friendly with each other.  They stopped sharing fruits and tea, and complained about the bathroom, and fought to sit or stand as close as possible to the one fan.  Still, some kind of bond was forming between them.  At least, the patients are unified against the nurses and doctors.  They are tired, and hot, and impatient with the patients.  Or maybe they don’t think they’re earning enough money to work any harder.

The patients, as frustrated as they are, manage to find a measure of friendliness with each other.  At one point one of the three girls was going home.  Her mother invited two people in the room to the daughter’s wedding at the end of the year.

You’d think, having gone through the experience, people would stay away from talk of marriage, of having a child and raising a family.

It astonished me to see how they just carried on – and seemed sincere as they said goodbye to each other.  Companions during a short sojourn in a horrid hospital room, they had kind words for each other.  “Hope it goes well.  Good luck.”

Someone joked.  “We’ll just see you again.  Here, in a few months, or next year.”

Somehow, the women managed to laugh – a dark sense of humor to get them though another tough day.

“Go home safely.  Goodbye.  We’ll miss you.”