My Funny Valentine’s Day

I’m going to try blogging shorter snippets for a while and see how that goes.

Today I rounded at Setta for the first time in 9 or 10 days, because of scheduling conflicts in my or the resident’s schedules. It was nice to be back with them. When I arrived, of course we discussed Valentines day. There were some english logistics questions around exchanging gifts, and then of course whether I had plans to celebrate. When I told them I did not, the senior resident instructed the intern to take me out dancing “all night long” he blushed and very apologetically explained that he was on duty, so he would not be able to take me dancing. It was cute. (Actually, I had a full schedule this evening, but none of it was Valentines related.) Then we got on to the patient care, where I was able to help the residents thing through a musculoskeletal problem a bit more (thought they had a pretty good differential diagnosis, and they were on the right track of investigation for the most part.) The next patient, with an alarmingly high white blood cell count of 44 and anemia, I encouraged them to get a smear (morphology here) on, and the third they were again pretty much on the right track, with maybe a few small adjustments. Khamvay, the other 3rd year resident, is a short, shy woman who actually does decent patient presentations in English, but spends a great deal of time apologizing for not having perfect English. It is a real pleasure to work with her because she is so genuinely interested and learning and doing the best thing for her patients.

This afternoon, I was luck to be able to attend part of the Oxford Tropical Network annual conference, which is in Vientiane for the first time. The OTN is a network of labs doing research in tropical disease and supported in large part by the Welcome trust, and this is their annual global meeting to make sure everyone is up to date on the research and progress taking place elsewhere. My favorite session was the “Speed dating for scientists” - 16 2 minute talks (one power point slide/presenter) with 2 minutes for questions and 1 minute in between. You could tell we were all pretty type A, rule driven, people when one woman clicked on to a second slide. There was an audible gasp of disapproval from at least 3/4 of the audience. (Including me.) However, we uncomfortably sat through that slide and the third one that followed. Miraculously, this session ended up taking less than the scheduled time, though some presenters went over their allotted 2 minutes of explanation. The highlight was Cindy, a former HF IM coordinator who gave a great, brief but coherent talk about her Malaria research on the Thai-Burma border. She managed to explain why the research was important, how it was done, and what the results were, all coherently in such a short time. I hope I grow up to be like her. . .

After the meeting finished, we all headed over to the Lane Xane hotel where we had Lao food for dinner, and a Lao music show including a man who did an imitation of several birds and then a dying pig (including miming killing the pig), followed by skits/musical numbers by lab groups from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Kenya. And then more Lao dancing. It was a good (if odd) way to spend Valentines Day; with a conference room full of people who have devoted their lives to tropical disease, though most of them could be earning more money or accumulating more prestige doing other types of research.