Our Hero

We'd spent every morning for a week at the hospital in Takmao, futilely trying to keep track of the physicians we'd been informally assigned to each morning. They seemed to have advanced training in evading intruders like us, because they all knew how to lose us in a matter of minutes. We'd usually hang around their offices or the nearby hallways for an hour or two, looking sad and trying to impose ourselves on them, before giving up and heading across the Japanese American Friendship Bridget to the eye clinic. The physicians there were stuck in the small OR all afternoon and couldn't escape us even if they tried. We weren't at all impatient; we'd seen dozens of amazing eye surgeries, and recognized the difficulty of fitting into a doctor's busy schedule, especially with a language barrier present. But we were beginning to feel awkward hanging out in the hospital halls giggling to ourselves while families of patients eyed us warily, no doubt hoping we had nothing to do with the care of their loved ones.

With Dr. Sarom's help we had finally made it to the surgical ward to see a hernia repair surgery, an incredible thing to watch. The kind anesthesiologist had gone out of his way to help us understand the surgery, walking us through the process of injecting the anesthesia between L3 and L4, showing us the monitors and explaining the patients history of hypertension, and shepherding us into a space at the head of the bed where we had a full view of what was going on. He even invited us back the next day for a "tibia repair", although I got suddenly and severely dizzy as they were finishing the last stitches and didn't have time to clarify the details.

All dressed up in our borrowed scrubs

We returned at 9 a.m. the next day in our blue and green scrubs ready to see more. We confidently walked through the door to the surgical office and made our presence known, only to find more doctors who didn't seem to understand why we were there or what to do with us. We were directed to wait on the bench in the hall. We'd been through this before, so we settled in and prepared for a long day of people watching. We made faces at a few children who passed by, and watched in amazement as a medical team carried a young girl with an IV drip out to a waiting moto, set her down behind the driver and in front of a woman who appeared to be her mother, and handed a bottle of liquid to the mother to hold up as the moto took off down the bumpy road. For the millionth time I thought about what my mom's appalled face would look like if she had been in Cambodia with me.

Suddenly the kind anesthesiologist rounded the corner and saw us. In my mind we were saved. We told him we were here to observe more surgeries and he started to invite us into the OR, but after talking briefly with the other doctors asked us to wait on the bench again.

Danielle had accepted that we were about to be ditched and moved on to a task on her ipod, but I kept saying that this anesthesiologist was different. I had faith in him. He'd been our hero the day before, our advocate and champion, and I wouldn't let go of my hope that he'd do the same today.

We waited for an hour and nothing happened. Danielle turned to me to gloat. "Where's your hero now?" she said jokingly, but at that exact instant he returned in all of his anasthesiological glory to usher us into the OR. He came back for us! Danielle and I started giggling (our response to everything) and I beamed at him as he led us to the room, where we observed the world's most confusing tibia repair (turned out to be a hysterectomy, but it took us a few minutes to figure out why they were cutting into her abdomen, and then a good half hour to guess which organ they were removing once we'd gotten tibias out of our heads).

When the hysterectomy was over we watched an appendectomy. We enjoyed watching the anesthesiologist. He was gentle with his patients, often pausing to put his hands on their heads in a comforting gesture and respectfully making sure they were draped and covered as much as possible. After the appendectomy he tapped the patient (an 8 year old girl) on the cheek while repeating her name. After she was awake he gingerly lifted her up and carried her to the recovery room in his arms. In my imagination he's a superhero.