Hospital by Julie Salamon

Author:Julie Salamon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.

Nakka had agreed to take me on rounds, where she would check in on the hospital cancer group’s patients and consult on patients for other doctors who saw indications of cancer or weird blood counts. I found her in the lab, where she was piecing together a diagnosis for a seventy-six-year-old Chinese man who had been admitted two weeks earlier for repair of his aorta. He was in the ICU. She had been asked to do a consult for anemia and was looking at his blood under a microscope.

“Let’s go,” she said. We walked down several hallways and took an elevator.On the way I asked her what she thought was the biggest difference between being a doctor in the United States and in India.

She smiled.

“Back home my sister works for a veterans’ hospital. When she goes shopping or to the movies, they look at her as the doctor and they bring her free sodas,” she said. “She is treated like a celebrity.”

And in the United States? I asked.

She laughed. “Here, no.”

We arrived at the ICU. A pale, bony resident with beard stubble and a Russian accent told her that someone from renal had seen the patient, but he wanted a hematology consult because the old man was anemic and had spiking fevers.

We went to see the patient. His throat was swaddled in bandages; he’d had a tracheotomy, a hole cut through the skin at the neck into the trachea (breathing tube) when someone is unable to breathe without help. His eyes were wide open but revealed nothing.

Nakka introduced herself and began to ask questions.

A young Orthodox Jewish nurse, wearing gloves as she examined the settings on machines, said, “He doesn’t speak English.” Nakka walked out to the nurses’ desk and called out, “Anyone speak Chinese?” A tall young Asian man said, “Give me a minute.”

David Kho entered the room a short time later. The patient fixed his eyes on the tall young doctor with the Asian face as the doctor interpreted Nakka’s questions: “Have you had anemia before? Have you been treated with iron tablets?”

The old man couldn’t speak because of the tubes in his throat, but he nodded and blinked.

“Did you have a transfusion before? Did you ever smoke? Any family member with anemia or cancer?”

The word “cancer” popped out from a stream of Chinese. The old man looked frightened, though interpreting emotion is even trickier than language, especially with someone breathing through a hole in his neck. Nakka made notes in the patient’s thick chart, observing that his skin was oozing, his extremities were swollen. Was he suffering? I asked. She said he was taking morphine, and then ordered several tests.

David Kho, the resident interpreting for Nakka, told me he would be glad to talk to me later. When we met, he told me he had been born in Singapore and moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco when he was nine. He had been willfully oblivious to his Chinese heritage. “You just wanted to fit in,” he said, “just to be a regular Joe.

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