Everywhere
there were volunteers who came in from Bangkok on a day-to-day basis.
The American Embassy sent a daily bus; others came by car. Some
volunteers took over the job of keeping the diarrhea patients clean
(There were new clothes and blankets now); Some spoon-fed the weak.
Others ran errands, or helped discharged patients get settled out in
the camp, or passed out food. One afternoon I found each patient
holding a hard-boiled egg (which not all stomachs were up to
handling); another day each had an orange or a loaf of French bread.
One elderly European man, with whom I could speak only in Thai,
stayed in the tent next to ours all night watching over an especially
sick Khmer whom he had sort of adopted.
A
few came only to sight-see. The French ward got a group who wanted to
feed patients lunch. The doctor explained that they had already had
their lunch but some were badly in need of a bath. The visitors said
they didn't come to do that kind of work, they just wanted to feed
people. We had a couple of Thai student volunteers who mostly just
drank our pop. But another Thai girl student stayed with an old lady
who was too listless to eat, and kept gently spooning gruel into her.
“She's not going to die is she?” the girl kept asking me
nervously, “I don't want to see anyone die!” But three or four
days later when another patient died, it was the student who rounded
up stretcher bearers and escorted the body over to the morgue tent,
where a group of Buddhist monks took care of burials. The Khmer
refugees themselves had teams of girls (Khmer army medics, we were
told) who helped bathe and feed people. Like the volunteers from
Bangkok, some were very good, and others not very useful.
As
time went on, CAMA sought other temporary help. A Brazilian doctor
and his nurse wife arrived, a couple of doctors from USA, and a young
Khmer girl now living in New Zealand (who was at first terrified that
the Khmer Rouge would murder her.) We now had at least two doctors in
tent number 8, and sometimes three. We still received about ten new
patients per day, but many others were getting well enough for
discharge out into the camp, so our patients no longer had to lie
shoulder-to-shoulder.
Cameras
and reporters were everywhere. As I worked with an unconscious kid a
man with a microphone squatted down beside me and asked me to
describe the case. I'm told I was on Voice
of America that
night. Another night I was on NBC-TV all over both America and Europe
as a “malnutrition expert”. I tried to send them to the camp's
nutrition doc, but it turned out I was the only doctor in camp that
day who had been in Asia a while and who had an American accent.
Probably my audience in the next 24 hours totaled around one hundred
million. I remember struggling to explain how starvation of the
degree seen after six months in the jungle was like being isolated in
a blizzard. When the firewood was used up, you will burn the
furniture to keep life alive, and finally you burn the house walls
themselves. And I remember that my main concern was to keep the TV
cameras from showing the folks back home how swollen my own legs had
become after a week of twelve to fourteen hour shifts.
Not
everyone realizes that Lois was also on TV, her back to the camera as
President Carter's wife, Rosalyn, walked through our tent and talked
with her briefly. Lois' most memorable utterance was about the horde
of reporters, who kept shouting “Get down! Get down” at her while
they tried to get the First Lady's picture. Lois finally said, “If
they just moved back a little, they wouldn't be standing in the
patient's latrine ditch.” And a Secret Service man in the group
grinned to Lois, “Say it louder. We're being recorded.”
That
second week,we were still dog-tired but felt we could probably make
it till more help arrived. Lois and I, with another nurse and Tann,
our interpreter, even took our turn at night duty – fourteen hours
watching over the whole hospital. There's not much you can do for a
thousand unfamiliar patients. Most of the ward aides were sound
asleep. We toured all the wards every three hours, restarting a few
IV's, carried out a couple of dead bodies (whose beds were shared
with other patients) cleaned up one teen-age boy covered with bloody
diarrhea from the waist down, watched over a couple of women in
labor. Took a 2 am break to visit with the Israeli doctor in the
emergency tent – the only other doctor permitted to stay through
curfew. He
and I watched a Thai construction crew digging a deep-water well and
erecting tall poles to light the area. I looked up at the poles and
said meditatively “Haman built a gallows, fifty cubits high . . .”
The startled Israeli looked at me; “How did you know what I was
thinking? Where did you hear that story?”
“Hey,
the story of Queen Esther is in the Christian scriptures too.”
We
left ward 8 in the hands of a Dutch lady, Eva Hartog, a TV
personality who brought a team of eight Dutch nurses to work with the
three American doctors who would inherit our tent. A letter from our
Brazilian doctor friend several weeks later said the whole hospital
is now in more permanent buildings, and there had been a day when
there had not been even one death in the whole hospital. New waves of
refugees were coming in then, some with war wounds on top of their
starvation and diseases. Sa Kaew now had a small surgical unit, he
wrote.
The
day we left, several cases of epidemic meningitis (meningococcemia)
threatened the camp, but I guess it did not develop. Most of the
patients were visiting back and forth. Kids were playing games, or
standing in line for milk, wearing their tin bowls on their heads as
helmets. The girl on the TV spot who couldn't walk squealed in
pretend terror and ran, when her sister told her I was coming to give
her a shot. It's good to know we made a difference, but I don't mind
admitting that all of us were glad to get away and rest.
A
week or two later, my colleague at Maesariang, Dr. Bina Sawyer and
two more nurses went down to another refugee camp. Even being the
only doctor there, in her absence, seemed leisurely in contrast to Sa
Kaew.
But
once in a while I still reflect on how much difference a single piece of
mail can make when it carries the right offer.
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