The Land Where It's Already Tomorrow, Chapter 41 BTCGH Fiasco

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The wrath of all Gods fall on the misbegotten forgotten-the-eight-virtues turtle-egg of a neurosurgeon at Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital, and all his generations! Chinese swearing is quite a bit different in style from our own, and completely called for in this instance.

Lao-puo was ready for her procedure yesterday afternoon; after the resident had assured her that she would be sedated. Then the Flemish Mare of a surgical assistant told her, in no uncertain frank terms, that the surgeon had made no such preparation. After a week or so of virtually-unrelenting pain, controlled only with morphine, Lao-puo still had the strength to take issue with the old cow. Then His Imperial Majesty sawbones waltzed in, announced that Suzanne was “too emotional”, for the procedure, and cancelled it on the spot! He referred her to Dr. Lee, and retired to his office to pick his nose or pull the wings off flies or whatever else insensitive clots do between bouts of inflicting unnecessary suffering on people.

Dr. Lee is a fine surgeon with an international reputation, but he’s at Chung Kang Hospital in Taipei. Lao-puo had to get up at 0500 this morning, to take a taxi to the airport to fly out. God alone knows what she would have done if she were here alone, were it not for Nancy who accompanied her, or for the church ladies who will make sure she’s OK in hospital in Taipei for a couple of days. Mercifully, Chung Kang is very close to Song Shan Airport.

The resident was most apologetic when he spoke to me, but the swine who caused all the trouble refused to meet with me. I'm not a doctor, but discharging a patient in severe pain and sending her by air at her own expense to another city is totally off-the-wall. A similar thing happened in Taipei a few ago when we lived there. A little girl suffered a severe head trauma when her drunken father threw her into a concrete wall, and one hospital after another in Taipei sent her away—asserting that they did not have adequate pediatric intensive care facilities. The ambulance took the poor little soul to Taichung—two hours away, where she died a little while thereafter. Half a dozen doctors and hospital administrators got fired over that.

Usually medical and dental care in Taiwan is top-drawer, but BTCGH is the giddy limit of imcompetence, ego, and negligence.

Enough. I’m too physically and emotionally and mentally exhausted from this week to write any more.

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