New House! (in retrospect)

So my lovely friend Nat had been generously letting me stay in her apartment with her, and then she moved out and so I am now living in the apartment! It is beautiful and quirky, and I love it. It has a huge bedroom/living room with a little balcony and about 30mhigh pitched ceiling, and then a little outside balcony type section to get to the other side of the house and down the rather low stairs to the bathroom kitchen bit, which opens into the lane.

I unpacked all my stuff (in about ten minutes) and put up my new fairly lights (which subsequently broke) and made myself at home.  One of my favourite things is the acoustics in this room are great so I sing a bit.

The lane I live down is pretty dirty, mossy, and there is a fellow who seems to live and poop in it, as well as rats, cats, cockroaches, a rooster and at least one scorpion L It teaches me to walk slowly because many times I’ve almost ended up head to toe covered in poop/mud/general refuse and I’m always a little scared of stepping on a scorpion…

Virtual house tours have been requested so here are a few pictures (sorry they aren’t the best..);

 

 

 

 

 

 

Working on my thong tan...

So yesterday I was riding to the post office but It was closed and I was on a bit of a roll ;) So I just kept riding. I rode down by the river for a while checking out all the beautiful temples and the riverside shacks, It was lovely and I rode out along the highway for a bit through the rice paddies with the strangely bony cows and people working on skeletal bamboo frames around the cement foundations of new buildings. It was really nice to be going along at my snails pace and just seeing Cambodia, and providing a source of amusements for a lot of locals :P

This morning I woke up feeling a bit funny so I decided to go to the markets, get some food, do some life chores etc. As I passed the markets I thought, ‘I’ll just go for a quick ride along this road first…’. I rode until I got out to the rice paddies and rural houses and it was so lovely, quieter than the highway and one of the first times I’v felt almost alone in ‘ the nature’ since I got here there was a lovely breeze and it was really peaceful and I felt heaps better. As I kept cycling I got to the rubbish dump, which was on fire and really stinky, I decided to go back cause I’m pretty sure the fumes would have been carcinogenic as well as just really unpleasant. As I was passing the building that I thought would be the ‘waste management centre’ or some Cambodian version of this, A small boy with full face makeup rides out on a little pink unicycle….    That was a little surprising and I wanted to use my little bit of khmer so I went to say ‘la-or nah’ (very good). As I rode over a tree started saying enthusiastically ‘Hello!’ and I noticed it was full of children, and then about four more extremely made up kids came out of the building and started chatting to me, turns out it is an English, circus and cosmetics school! Of course! Don’t know why I didn’t recognise that straight away! I chatted to them for a while and then headed off wondering about how they work all day in that smell and with all the burning chemicals etc.

I followed what I thought was the road back to Battambang and rode happily for another 40 minutes or so before the lack of breakfast and water started to get to me and I decided I really needed to figure out where Battambang was and go there, It was fairly embarrassing having to point both ways down the road and say ‘Battambang!?’ and I think it was pretty funny, my go-to for any situation where it’s a bit awkward and I can’t explain myself is to grin and laugh a little and sometimes say ‘have no brain’ cause it’s one of the few things I know in Khmer, it seems to have gone down quite well so far… got a few laughs and smiles at least.

I arrived back in Battambang sweaty, very sunburnt and shaky with low blood sugar, but happy to have made It back. I really want to try this again with water and food and maybe even a map or vague plan cause Its really fun. I also found some lovely picnic spots that I would like to get back to if I can.

And my thong tan slowly improves.

First moment of homesickness

So last week I had my first feeling of homesickness…  It was the day Nat moved out and therefore I started living alone and I was trying to sleep because I had a nightshift that night. It was hot and I couldn’t sleep and I had just been beginning to realise that I live in a different country now to a lot of my friends and family. I woke up in the middle of the day lonely overheated (the power had gone out) and just missed home and the support network that I have there.

I went in for my night shift and realised that I had looked at the roster on so usually I work a night shift with one of the khmer nursing supervisors so that I can communicate as my Khmer is barely existent yet. I called my boss and told her and asked her what she wanted me to do and she asked me to check on a COPD patient who had been a bit sick when she left, and then either stay or go home depending on whether I felt comfortable. So I walked into the ICU and went to see the patient… Who I couldn’t rouse at all, I got the nurses to tell me what his GCS had been because to me it looked like it was a 3/15 now, I gave him a sternal rub but got no reaction, one of the nurses managed to get a 7/15 but this was down from a 12/15 and obviously he was pretty  unwell, I listened to his lungs which sounded super wheezy/crackly and noticed he had pitting oedema… I also noticed an audible wheeze from his airway just sitting next to him. We have to real option to intubate or use NIV here yet, and I wouldn’t have liked his chances of getting off a ventilator even f I had so I called my boss to update her and she and then her husband (the head medical Dr) came in and had a look. We had started the guy on new antibiotics and Dr wanted to keep him in to see if the second dose would improve anything, but the family wanted to take him home if he was going to die. As this was happening the Dr was called to see another patient, and it turns out this patient had angina, and ?MI so needed to be transferred to the ICU for a nitroglyceride drip and “cardiac monitoring” Which in this case involved me hooking up the archaic defibrillator as a monitor… We continued to monitor him overnight, with on and off chest pain etc, but he stabilised which was good.

About 5am I came into the ICU to find one of our severe head trauma patients (GCS 7/15) sounding like she was breathing underwater and looked to see her O2 mask had traces of vomit and although she had been suctioned her airway was obviously threatened and she had aspirated on her vomit. She had a guedels in and I suctioned her but with little effect, I could tell she was in respiratory distress due to the fact that she had just aspirated, and I also knew that her quality of life was not going to be great if she did survive, I didn’t know what else we could do apart from saline nebs, chest physio, suctioning and starting antibiotics, I suctioned her again and managed to get her airway sounding a bit clearer, but when I left in the morning I was still worried about her and later on I found out that she had died during the day.

It is so frustrating in those situations, not to be able to speak to the nurse’s doctors and family with any degree of clarity, to be unsure if these patients are getting a high quality of nursing care, to be unsure if the family member has been properly informed that their loved one may die. I was feeling pretty overwhelmed and unsure of what I could do, if I could have done anything better that night and what I could do in the future to make sure that the standard of nursing care is high and that families are informed of what’s going on.

I was also really tired as I hadn’t slept the day before, and as I rode home I bumped into a car on my bike, It wasn’t very hard and I didn’t fall or anything It was just very shocking and I couldn’t understand what they said when they wound down the window to yell at me, but I was already feeling a bit fragile and it just scared me.

I didn’t get to sleep for a while that day, and in my usual stubbornness I was determined not to let anyone see that I was feeling teary, but also just missing the ease of being able to call a friend to hang out or cry to someone who knows me and whom I am not shy in front of. I woke up that day and had a little cry to myself and was starting to feel really awful and so hot so I decided to go into work to at least be cool and be around people, I got in there and it was nice and I ended up skyping Liz for a few hours (thanks Liz :p ) and then going to dinner with most of the Battambang CCT crew who are super lovely for Nat’s B’day. After that I felt so much happier and appreciative and realised that I do have support both from home and here and I don’t need to be so stubborn.

This weekend we went to Siem Reap and had a lovely weekend J and now I am in Battambang ready to sleep and go back to work tomorrow. I feel so glad to be making friends here, the weekend in Siem reap was really lovely, and I really appreciated the luxury of nice food and a foot scrub and dancing and drinking and company of great people J Also staying in touch with people back home, I feel so lucky to have the support and love that I do, and I often find myself smiling or chatting away in my head to someone from Australia, and it means the world to be thought of by people so busy with life and so far away J

 (also sorry for all the unexplained medical stuff, I’v just written how I would talk and it’s just in there for anyone who’s interested but if you want to know more or it’s annoying just let me know.)

Xx