Indelible Roots

2/06/2008

Happy Chinese New Year! Colorful posters are on the walls and store fronts. Fireworks are being lit here and there. Roasted pigs are on display. The city is quiet as many people are off for the holidays and have gone to visit family in the countryside. This marks the end of the Year of the Pig and the beginning of the Year of the Rat.

The Year of the Rat started off badly. My aunt who had been having GI problems for the past several months was at the hospital in ICU. Getting to the bottom of the story was difficult with my limited language skills and their limited medical education. I know she has had GI problems for about eight or nine months, had very little energy because she wasn’t eating well, and had recently gone to Thailand for an evaluation. She had recently returned from Thailand with a large bagful of medications and I couldn’t decipher what the diagnosis was from the family members.

Last Friday night she decided to go to a traditional healer because the one week she spent in Thailand didn’t cure her. By Sunday evening she was having tremors and what was described as fits of total body muscle contractions. It sounded like she was having seizures, but I was not made aware of the situation.

Some family members urged her to go to the hospital, but the traditional healers told them to wait. So they waited, and they waited. About 5am in the morning someone finally gets up the nerve to throw her on the back of a moto and drive her to the hospital where she was admitted into the ICU with a diagnosis of metabolic coma.

There I found her unresponsive, intubated, edematous, and her urine the color of beets. I talked to one of the doctors who spoke English and he stated that her organs were shutting down. I again asked the family what the docs told her in Thailand and strongly suggested they give him a call and explain the situation. I then talked to Chris, a medical student from Australia, but originally from the New York area, about the situation. He offered to come take a look at her.

With Chris there the family finally decided to tell us that she had been diagnosed with SLE in Thailand, Lupus. Why they didn’t mention this every other time I had asked is beyond me. We look at her blood tests and find her levels well out of whack, especially her Potassium. I’m told that this is life threatening if it should drop much further. Chris then goes to research the issue and we discuss the situation the next day.

Chris gives me a packet with drug studies on this exacerbation of Lupus. One in particular shows that after two years, those who have gone through this life threatening nephritis and not taken certain levels of a particular drug, have all died. I make a copy of this and give it to the aunt’s daughter as the English speaking doctor was not there. I also again explained to them that she needs to go to Thailand for follow up as soon as she is able.

One of my cousins states that she wants her to go to a healer in Siem Reap that she had personally gone to in the past. If she hadn’t been a family member I would have slapped her. The level of ignorance was stifling and I repeat my suggestion almost every time I see them.

I saw my aunt recently and she appears to be doing much better. Her urine is still abnormal suggestion continued kidney or liver disease and she still has edema in her legs, suggesting a protein deficit. She is now lucid though and is able to stand and walk for short periods of time. The funny thing is, the first time I saw her where she was able to recognize me, the first words out of her mouth were ‘have you eaten rice yet?’

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 3:08 am and is filed under Khmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.