June 8 2007 - Another one for Dr. Tony

Tony shi wo de yi sheng = Tony is my doctor. I can form SOME sentences in Chinese, but saying them is a completely different story.

Anyways, Tony is an orthopedic surgeon in Zhangzhou. He is the brightest surgeon at his hospital (or so he says) and he is one of the funniest people I've met here. He is always telling me about the inappropriate things he says to nurses, which means that his English vocabulary is expanding - but in a dirty way. I think it's hilarious.

A few weeks ago, my ankle was really bothering me - always sore and aching. Three years (or is it four now) ago, I broke my ankle skiing with Stefanie - what an adventure for my first time on skiis. A week later, I had surgery and have had a metal plate & four screws in there ever since. I have no problems with flexibility, but it does sometimes pain me - during cold or rainy days. So Tony invited me to the hospital for an X-Ray - this is the kind of surgery that he does. We took 2 pictures (I kept them) and it turns out that one of my screws is loose (insert clever jokes now). I could have the surgery here to have the plate removed, but I may have some pain after and the thought of climbing the 100 steps to my apartment in pain doesn't strike me as "cool". So sooner or later, I'll need to have it out. But it's not painful every day, so I can tough it out for a while longer.

Last weekend, Tony took Max into the operating room. I was out of town, so I didn't get to go (I'm not sure that I would have gone). Tony got a call at home about a man who had been cut with a knife by another man during an arguement about a woman. Max posed as a Canadian medical student - he put on the scrubs, facemask and flip flops (that's what they wear in the operating room here). The man had been cut by what sounds like some kind of knife used on a farm maybe - his right shoulder bone was damaged and he required 30 cm of stitches on that arm. On his left forearm, a number of stitches were also needed. Tony tells me all of the technical medical terms for repairing the nerves and other things inside the arm, but I don't really remember all of those details. The surgery lasted about 4 hours.

A few weeks ago, another man lost the tip of his thumb. Tony & his team made a small incision into the mans abdomen and sewed the partial thumb in there. After a few weeks, the man returned to the hospital, and Tony removed the thumb from its place inside the man. The skin had grown back - no thumbnail. Success!

A man came to the hospital and his leg was so badly infected that Tony had no choice but to cut it off. And then the hospital gave the family the leg to bury.

These are just a few of the Tony stories. I'm sure there will be more to come before I leave!