On Saturday I had dinner with Tina, who was in town for a couple of weeks. One of her high school friends was also in town, so she set up a big dinner at South Beauty. Lydia and I braved the massive lightning storm and were a little surprised to see so many people at the table. Turns out her friend, Chris, had just completed a one-month internship at a hospital in Taizhou, about a 6 hour train ride away from Shanghai. He brought with him four of his fellow interns, who like him were coming off their first years as med students at Chicago Medical school.
It wasn’t until we trekked over to Abbey Road for post-dinner drinks that I was able to actually start engaging in conversation with them. Given that one of my recent projects has been on IT investments in the PRC healthcare industy, the first question out of my mouth was how advanced the Taizhou hospital’s IT infrastructure was. Soon, however, it became clear that they had much more interesting things to talk about.
Chris got things going by asking his fellow classmates: “What was the most f**ked up thing you guys saw?” Apparently, this was one topic of conversation that escaped the one month they lived together and the 6 hours on the train it took to get here.
Robert made a gesture with both his arms so it looked like he was cradling an invisible baby. “Remember the tumor that they removed from that one dude’s pancreas? It was seriously THIS big!”
Brian started talking about how many of the patients they saw had lung cancer from smoking too much. He recounted one man who was spitting up blood and had a week to leave, but kept smiling because neither the doctors or his family were willing to give him the news. Chris talked about his stint in the orthopedics department, which regularly treated patients with damaged bones who would scream when the local anesthesia began to wear off. Sadir mentioned how surprised he was to see how much the human body could take, and described how the Chinese doctor had asked him to vice the ribcage apart so they could perform open-heart surgery.
It was amazing, hearing these med students talk about all the crazy shit they saw in the hospital. They shared more interesting stories about Chinese peasants who just never bothered to get themselves checked out, like the 80 year-old man whose leg had been decaying for the past 20 years but never thought to have it fixed. Or how men had their pants down in the corridor getting their hernias checked because there wasn’t enough space or he didn’t have enough money to get a private examination room. Both Lydia and I were impressed and had a ton of questions, but being the gentleman that I am I let her go first.
“Which one of the characters on Grey’s Anatomy do you like the best?”
I have to admit I was a little nervous that Chris and his friends would think we were both stupid for asking this question after they had spent so much time talking about life and death situations, so like the asshole that I am I interrupted.
“You’re probably interested in talking about the serious medical issues, so just ignore Lydia’s question because I have an important one that I’ve been dying to know the answer to.”
“Sure, go ahead,” one of them said.
“So…how many of the nurses do you think actually shaved their armpits?”
I’m positive they were impressed with the depth of my inquisitiveness. Just as I’m sure they were impressed when, in response to their question of what it was like working at the company that I do, I told them: “My office building now has free Diet Coke. And I take naps under my desk.”
I’m so special.
