I went to a doctor’s clinic the other day in Chiang Mai to try and sort out a tummy bug that just wasn’t going away. We went to a private clinic as the cost makes little difference out here, but unlike Michael’s drip in Koh Chang experience (where he was treated like a king by a nurse from his dreams and in the cleanest of places), this clinic left a little to be desired. In fact the whole experience made the NHS feel like number one for outstanding customer care!
After a pretty long wait we went through to the doctor’s room- a dark little place with a tiny frosted window and a dead cockroach on the floor. The doctor was friendly and explained I needed to do a urine, stool and blood test and led me out of the room. I sort of stood in the narrow dark corridor, wondering where to go for these tests. Eventually a nurse came up, shoved a (worryingly flimsy) plastic cup in my hand and showed me to a bathroom. It was a squat loo but clean enough and after some pretty adept balancing I proudly emerged with my pot of pee.
Annoyingly the nurse has disappeared so yet again I hovered uncertainly in the corridor wondering where to go next. After a while a different nurse saw me and gestured at some stairs. Up I went, trying hard not to spill my cup and at the top the stairs opened out into a room that reminded me a bit of my school chemistry lab (only this place was smaller with more test tubes (mainly filled with blood) and no charming Mr Mills). The first person I saw was an old male patient just putting his shirt back on and making his way towards the stairs. He stared at my pee pot while I felt embarrassed.
Yet another nurse appeared and told me to take a seat on the only chair I could see, at a desk piled high with papers. Next she produced a thin grey piece of paper with some photocopied script on it where I was asked to tick my preferred choices as to who I would want told if my blood test proved to be HIV positive. This ‘confidential’ piece of paper was then put onto the high pile on the desk and nurse number 4 turned up with a syringe. She tried my left arm first but gave up when it took about 5 minutes to fill ¼ of the vial, so then moved onto the right. She got the needle in after a fair few attempts and all went fine. I tend to look away as this sort of stuff happens but found the sight of many different machines steaming over tubes and tubes of blood elsewhere in the room a little disconcerting. I am normally fine with needles but somehow today was a little different. Once she’d finished nurse 4 gestured back down the stairs so down I went and by the time I got to the bottom I felt really pretty dizzy and sick. I found the squat loo again but couldn’t see the light switch so had to leave the door open while practically fainting on the floor. Probably a good thing as yet another nurse walked by and took some interest, hauled me up and called to her friend who appeared with some cotton wool that I was told to inhale deeply as it would make me feel better. Inhale deeply I did, only to find it was soaked in ammonia. No amount of mucking out the horses at home had prepared me and the inside of my nose for a whiff as powerful as that!
Next thing they led me to a small room and told me to lie on the bed but I wasn’t to mess up or touch the pillows. I lay down and consoled myself with the knowledge that my good school friend fainted in front of a first year when she got her flu jab in the sixth form and my good teacher friend fainted in the middle of Claire’s Accessories in central Oxford when she got her ears pierced, so I cant be that much of a wuss!! (sorry L and B!!)
Eventually the initial doctor came into the room and said I could go now, he joked a bit and asked if I usually had trouble with needles. “Not at all!” I said. “Perhaps it was because they used both arms” he said. Hmmm. Perhaps. Or perhaps it was a combination of the dead cockroach, squat loo, bloody test tubes, hot dark rooms and general confusion as to where I should be going I though. Sometimes in Thailand things you think are best left unsaid. At least he was friendly. (and the tummy bug has gone!)
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