I used the hospital for the first time today, and was quite impressed with the service and care I received there.
Late this afternoon, I got a splinter in my left middle finger. Once I discovered it, I pulled out my handy-dandy first-aid kit from REI, which contained a set of blunt tweezers. I tried to remove the splinter on my own for a few minutes, and then I remembered that I was at a hospital, where they do this kind of stuff all the time. I took my tweezers to the ward in case I had trouble communicating the problem, and showed one of them my finger. She promptly stood up, took me into a room with more light, and removed the splinter with her fingers. It was quick, easy, and painless.
I tell this story not because I think it’s important for all of you to hear about my splinter, but because I think the way it was removed is indicative of the way patients are generally treated here. First, although you can find hundreds if not thousands of medical tools and devices in most hospitals, very few of such tools are used here. They certainly have tweezers, but the nurse wasn’t going to use them if she didn’t need them. Second, she didn’t bother with anything extra – no extensive medical history, no unnecessary band-aid, and nothing else you can think of that might accompany a splinter removal. Perhaps most importantly, I was treated quickly, and cheerfully, by a smiling nurse who seemed eager to help.
This last point is especially relevant to some of the reading I’ve been doing recently about the importance of quality nursing care. Just yesterday, I finished Norman Cousins’ Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by a Patient. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it, as he tells compelling stories. One of the points Cousins makes is about the role quality nursing care played in his recovery from a serious illness, and how poor nursing care made it that much more difficult to be in a hospital. Similarly, I read recently about a study which demonstrated that patients were more likely to recover when they experienced good nursing care. (I can’t remember where I read this, but if you happen to know what study I’m talking about, feel free to chime in so that I can give credit to my sources.) Fortunately, I haven’t had to receive much nursing care in my time here, but my impression from spending time in the hospital is that the nurses here – all of whom have been trained by Gi and Tha – are excellent at performing their professional duties. Further, they are warm and kind and often smiling, helping to make the hospital a better place.
I thought about ending there, but instead I’m going to tell another short finger story. We had dosas for dinner tonight (which are the big pancake/crepe things made out of fermented rice flour) and I was particularly excited to eat mine because I had managed to communicate to the cook that I preferred the larger ones rather than the smaller ones, so she made one for me that was nearly as big as the pan. As I was enjoying my first few bites of the thin, crunchy dosa, I accidentally took a bit of my finger as well. Oops! I didn’t break the skin, and I don’t think I’ll have a bruise or anything, but I did feel awfully ridiculous. I don’t think anybody saw me do it, so I decided I’d write about it on my blog for the whole world to know. After all, if I’m going to keep a blog, I might as well write about the embarrassing stuff, too.
Filed under: Uncategorized
