Neurosurgery in Nam

Sorry I haven’t written for a while…

I started at Viet Duc hospital on Tuesday, and I’ve been quite busy. Although I can’t quite believe it, I’ve somehow ended up in the Neurosurgery department at Viet Duc! I was meant to be doing general surgery and emergency medicine, but the doctor (Dr Ha) that Hanoi Medical University contacted is actually a neurosurgeon! I’m not complaining though… I would never have though this is what I would be doing on my elective, but I’m really enjoying it. Plus, Dr Ha is great, and I’m getting proper teaching, so I’m staying put.

The reason I never thought this is what I would end up doing on elective is because I’ve always been more of a medic than a surgeon… People who know me at med school know that I enjoy a good old chit-chat with patients! I like talking about feelings and all that, whereas the future surgeons detest chit-chat and like to get on with the practical side of things. Out here in Hanoi, since I can’t chat with patients anyway because of language barriers, I may as well get some surgical experience in! 

The word neurosurgery makes it sound as if it’s all really complex, uber-complicated surgery… and some of it is (this morning I saw three patients in theatre having various different brain tumours being removed), but the bulk of their work seems to be head traumas from motorbike accidents. I’m certainly going to be able to talk about subdural and extradural haemorrhages after this, and I know how to make burr holes in the skull!

Anyway, I’m also going to shadow Dr Ha when he is on-call, so I’ll get to spend some time in the emergency department. It’s easy for me to go and see general cases in theatre too. Viet Duc hospital seems more slick than the O&G hospital, and it seems more geared up for foreign students. They take a lot of Australian students. In fact, there are two Aussie girls (Paula adnd Tamara) who started at the same time as me (but in a different department). We all met at English Club, which is held every Thursday for Vietnamese doctors and students to get together and chat in English (they loved having us at English Club).

I’m quite glad that I met the two Aussie girls because I was missing the company of Emma, Anna and Matilda (the Swedes). Paula and Tamara have been in Vietnam for the same amount of time as me, but they’ve been doing O&G in a hospital down south in HCMC. They only arrived in Hanoi on Monday, so it’ll be nice to show them all the great restaurants and shops that I’ve discovered in my time here. They’re actually moving into my hotel (they weren’t very happy with their current hotel, so I showed them mine… it’s hard not to like my hotel, the girls who work here are so friendly, and it feels so homely…)

Last night we went out to an Irish Pub for Quiz Night! I seem to be going to a fair few Irish Pubs (this one was also called Finnegans)! The quiz was run by an Irish guy (the owner perhaps?), who in true Irish fashion was pretty drunk by the time the quiz began. It was a really fun atmosphere though, and good hearty food too. We didn’t get off to good start with the quiz questions. The first round was titled Disasters… and we got 3.5/10… One question was name the only astronaut to die on a space mission… No clue! The second round was Who Said It, and we did even worse in that round! We only managed to identify two quotes, one was a Bushism, the other was a Homer Simpson quote! So the two that we got correct doesn’t say much about our intellectual capacities! We did not manage to identify the great words of Churchill, Mark Twain, Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara… We improved in the third round, which was (sadly) Sci-Fi! I’m not sure why we were so good at this round, it made us look like sad sci-fi nerds!! And the final round was a Bits & Bobs round, which was our best round, and we ended up coming third overall! It was a lot of fun…

Here’s a photo of us at the quiz: