Summer (part 3)

[continued from Summer (part 2)]

…oh wait no I couldn’t, because Chuuk State doesn’t have any Peace Corps approved medical providers. In fact if you read the Lonely Planet entry on medical care in Chuuk, you will get one simple sentence: “Don’t go to Chuuk State Hospital.”

This is the general wisdom that we follow as well, so Peace Corps bought me a plane ticket to Pohnpei where they at least have one clinic run by Filipino doctors. I was excited to go to Pohnpei because I would get to hang out with some Peace Corps friends who I hadn’t seen since last year and get to go out a bit in the big town (yay). But I was also a bit disappointed because I had to miss the Chuuk Department of Education Symposium and, more importantly, some quality time hanging out with my Chuuk friends (boo). But it wasn’t my decision—my ticket had already been bought so I was going there like it or not.

As soon as I landed I went to the clinic with the Peace Corps doctor, Koch. The doctor at the clinic looked at my toe for approximately 6 seconds before concluding that I had severed the middle tendon on my left foot and would need surgery to repair it. Wonderful. The doctor claimed that he could do the surgery there in Pohnpei, but Peace Corps generally doesn’t mess around with things like surgery and decided to send me somewhere where I could get pretty good medical care: the Philippines. Not Guam, not Hawaii, not Australia—the Philippines. But hey, free trip to Manila for me! So I packed up my bag and flew business class to Manila (because that was the only ticket left—thank you American tax payers for paying for my free wine and Jack and Coke!).

To give you some perspective, Manila is a city of 10 million people whereas the entire country of the FSM has slightly over 100 thousand. The only way I could have felt more like Dorothy landing in Oz even is if the world suddenly changed from black and white to color. [Insert any number of jokes concerning Munchkins and my relative height compared to that of most Filipinos] I changed my money at the airport and took a taxi from the airport to my hotel. Aside from having about 8 heart attacks during the drive because of the speed and craziness of the driving, I made it to the hotel fine. The hotel (which would be my home for the next three weeks) was simple but nice. It was really a hostel, but I had my own room with air conditioning and wireless internet access in the main lobby, so I was happy.

The next morning, a Peace Corps doctor picked me up and took me to the Philippine Orthopedic Group for my first appointment with the doctor. The office was very clean and it looked like any other American hospital or doctor’s clinic. My surgeon confirmed the diagnosis of a severed tendon and said he would do the surgery in about 10 days (to let the original wound heal) Heseemed knowledgeable so I was feeling pretty comfortable until I had this little exchange with him:

Doctor: So what kind of anesthesia are we going to use on you?
Me: Umm, what?
Doctor: Are we going to use local anesthesia or a spinal tap?
Me: Umm, I don’t really know. You’re the doctor, what do you normally use?
Doctor: Well, what’s your pain tolerance like?
Me: Umm, what?
Doctor: Your pain tolerance—is it high or low?

Yea, that made me feel a little less confortable, but whatever. Just another story…

So I had 10 days to kill in Manila. What did I do? Just about everything that I couldn’t do in Chuuk. I went out to bars, went to the movies, went bowling, went to a hookah bar, used the internet ceaselessly, skyped with a bunch of friends, ate Mexican food, ate Greek food, ate Italian food, ate Thai food, etc. The highlight was probably going to a transvestite karaoke bar and singing in front of a bunch of amused Filipinos (Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby and Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA—yea, I’m that cool).

Well the fun times finally came to an end and I had to check in to Makati Medical Center the afternoon before my scheduled morning surgery. The surgery went fine (they used a local nerve block as well as sedation, if you were wondering) but I stayed in the hospital for a couple more nights just so that they could check on me. Considering all that I had was toe surgery, I was given an excessively large plastic boot that went almost all the way up to my knee and would be the bane of my existence for the next four weeks.

The week after the surgery was one of the worst weeks I have had in a long time. I was sick, my foot was sore, and my back was killing me because I was not used to the weight of the boot. I slept terribly that whole week and essentially couldn’t leave the hotel because I was on crutches and just generally felt like crap. I was homesick for Chuuk, wanted to be able to communicate with the people around me, and more than anything I missed my friends.

I was finally cleared to go back to Chuuk about 10 days after the surgery. I had made it abundantly clear to everyone in Peace Corps that I wanted to be on the first plane I possibly could back to Chuuk, so I was scheduled to fly out the same day I was cleared. After another business class flight (this time because I had a boot and “needed the extra legroom”), more wine and Jack and Cokes, and a bad movie, I was finally back in Chuuk and I couldn’t have been happier.

My little sojourn to the Philippines was a nice little break and an interesting adventure, but it really made me realize how happy I am to be in Chuuk. While it was nice to go out to bars and go bowling and stuff like that, that’s not what I imagined when I signed up for the Peace Corps. I imagined living in a tiny rural community and being hundreds of miles from any sort of development—and that’s exactly what I got. To be fair to the Peace Corps Volunteers in the Philippines, none of them are in Manila, but they still live a vastly different life than I do. All it took was a freak injury, a droopy toe, and a couple of weeks of being Dorothy in Munchkinland (seriously, I was at least at 8 inches taller than everyone!) for me to realize that I really am happy in Chuuk!

Endnote: my foot is healind well. I have a giant L-shaped scar on the top of my foot, but other than that everything seems to be pretty much fine.