Vietnamese Emergency Rooms.

This post was originally published on 28 Jan, 2023, and moved here, to my new blog.

We had the distinct pleasure of visiting a couple of emergency rooms here in Vietnam on Wednesday. It was a bit of a scary story, and at this time, everything is okay. I walked into a bathroom at the kite place where we are staying. Very suddenly, my left eye was looking at the left wall, and my right eye was still just where I had left it, looking straight ahead. I can tell you, this is terribly disorienting. And nauseating. It was a couple of minutes before I could figure out whether to close one eye, or both eyes, but I did eventually get out of the bathroom. On looking in the mirror I had a scare. My left eye was rotated outward all the way, and my right eye, always the better behaved one, was still looking ahead, wondering what his life partner was finding so interesting on the left. The good news is that I never lost any of my visual field, I was able to focus, and with one or the other eye covered, I was able to use either eye normally, they just wouldn’t synch up together. Very strange. This all lasted about a half an hour before both eyes agreed on what to look at, and then all was back to normal. Except… there were two episodes of slurred speech, each lasting about 1 minute, the first occurring at about 15 minutes, and the other at about 45 minutes. It was like trying to form words after those unfortunate nights out with friends when you drink waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy too much.

So, enter the Vietnamese ER experience. 
This was the first hospital, a half-hour drive from where we are staying (thank you to Phi for taking time out of his day to drive us there and wait for us). They did a great job there. It is a rural hospital, primitive, but they did have a CT scanner, which was our hope. Nobody there spoke English, and Phi was able to translate some of what we needed. The rest was sign language. I did take a pretty heavy wipeout on a wave three days before this, and smacked the left side of my head soundly, but not so badly as to worry at the time. This did come back to me when everything went sideways (haha), so CT scan for head bleed was important. That was negative, and we felt we needed the MRI for the possibility of a stroke or TIA, which was unlikely, but, well, slurred speech and all…

So, with no available MRI, we drove back up to the room, packed up a bunch of stuff, ate, took a nap, and then took a two hour taxi North to Nha Trang, to an international hospital. This one was much more modern, and they spoke a bit of English (my Vietnamese, while improving, is still completely useless for conversation). They hustled me into the ER directly, then into a nice, clean, modern MRI.

We did go back to that ER again the next day to have labs checked, so that was a third visit in 2 days. 

So, I guess I should finish the story. The CT was negative for a brain bleed. The MRI was negative for stroke or tumor (yes, this is the place you do that Arnold Scwarzenegger line from Kindergarten Cop, “It’s not a tumor”. I certainly did), and negative for anything obvious by the ER doctor that night. We will be getting the official read in English emailed to us in the next couple of days. We have to suspect TIA. I have been just fine since then, maybe a bit fuzzy-brained, with no other symptoms returning. So we are relaxing in the city of Nha Trang for a few days before we return to MY Hoa and some more kiteboarding (Tam says I can’t go kiteboarding). All told, we have had 3 ER visits, a CT, MRI, an EKG, CBC and chemistry labs, and been seen by an MD in 3 different visits.

Our total bill for all of that:

$350.00.

total.