24 March 2019
[Above photo: A massive reclining Buddha near Moulmein.]
It was 101F yesterday. I got sleepy in the heat so made a cup of coffee. Then I was unpleasantly wired and actually felt ill, so I skipped supper and went to bed early. It will only be 98F today but I still may break out the air-con. My apartment is such that I can shut doors and cool just one room. It has been a matter of [stupid, I think] pride not to use it so far but these temperatures are more than this Seattle/Berkeley/Maine native can manage. My productivity just slopes off.
On Wednesday I awoke at 3:18AM. The phone alarm was set for 3:30AM but my inner alarm, which I’ve used since childhood, gently roused me. A quick shower—I’ll often shower 3x/day—, a cup of tea, and I walked up the block where I met Drs. Tin Oo and Kyi Min Tun waiting in Tin Oo’s very fast and fancy Toyota Mark X Premium. I’ve never seen a car like this before but it is comparable to a 500 series BMW, I think. We drove, or perhaps we flew, 4 ½ hours east to Moulmein (Mawlamyine) for the day. It was a holiday, the Full Moon of Tabaung. Indeed, the moon was full as we left Yangon.
The idea of driving 9 hours in one day to spend a few hours sightseeing seemed like a lot of work but these two guys are so sweet and so much fun I decided to try it. Tin Oo grew up in Moulmein and lived there until he left for university. He drove like a maniac but he knows the roads and the car is very capable. Despite patches of thick fog, we arrived intact in short order. We saw his home, his brother, his high school, and the “old Moulmein Pagoda” of Rudyard Kipling. Talk about poetic license! It looks southwestward towards the sea, not “eastward”. And the “road to Mandalay where the flying fishes play and the dawn comes up like thunder out of China ‘cross the bay” is a complete fantasy. Mandalay is hundreds of miles inland, there are no fresh-water flying fishes, and there is no bay. China is far to the east, so the sun would rise in that direction. Apparently Kipling saw the mighty Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon but never visited the other towns. How myth becomes truth! Of course, DT is a skillful negotiator who cares deeply about the Working Man.
Moulmein is on the Thanlywin River, downstream from Hpa An where I spent a few days earlier in the year. There is a lovely promenade along the river and we lunched in a restaurant there with the senior psychiatrist at the Moulmein Hospital. The food was a delicious mix of curries and seafood dishes. Salted, deep-fried lemongrass is tasty and crunchy, a fastidious person’s grasshopper, I think. Part of the day we spent cruising around the countryside, visiting rather extravagant images of the Buddha. The one in the above photo reclines on a many-story building which is honeycombed with rooms. Each room contains one or more dioramas, complete with life-size statues, from the teachings of Buddha, including his life, his enlightenment, and many grisly depictions of Hell. The entire production is rather overwhelming. Looking across the valley, there is a mirror image, partly completed, of the same Buddha reclining on a building but the funds for it have run out. It looks like your neighbor’s 50’ ferrocement yacht which he gave up building half-way along. Since you take off your flipflops—That is all I wear anymore and what a treat not to mess with socks!—whenever you enter a temple (or a house and many shops), we doffed them at the bottom of the hill and sprinted up the many flights of stairs, trying to stay just above the flamingly hot concrete. We realized that most people wore their flipflops up the stairs until they actually entered the building. It would have been smarter.
I met a guy, a retired academic photography teacher, in the Berkeley Marina 6 years ago. He was aboard a huge (65’), and beautiful, classic schooner he was restoring to sail to the S. Pacific. The amount of work required was legendary and he recently was discovered to have metastatic prostate cancer. No Polynesian cruise for him, I fear. Be careful which dreams you commit to. He did beautiful cabinet work so presumably the process of getting it together was much of the fun. I know I once built a kiln and enjoyed the building much more than I enjoyed subsequently throwing or firing the pottery.
These road trips regularly begin early in the morning so a breakfast stop is mandatory. Amazing to me, the food is generally remarkably good. There are great soups, like mohinga and pho gai, which are simple and quick to assemble but lack the artificiality of American fast-food. I think an entrepreneur could do well in the US with a chain of Thai/Vietnamese/Burmese fast-food joints. Probably they exist already.
One of my students asked me to see her 4yo austistic son. She, the boy, and her father, a retired anesthesiologist, came in. This woman is a star in the class and a lovely person. The little guy is clearly on the spectrum with no functional language, rare eye contact, difficulty with change, social deficits, and a lot of repetitive “play”. They have done a good job with him, given what’s available here. I took a Systems of Care day-long workshop on Autism at the Child Psychiatry meetings in Seattle in October. In reviewing my notes and the handout, so much of the physician’s work is to make sure the family makes the right connections with the relevant professionals. Speech Therapy, Special Education, Sensory Integration, etc. Of which, very few exist here. The emotional and financial burden of having an autistic child is unending. And we still know so very, very little about it’s cause or effective treatment.
I’ve tried to share with my students the necessity in our work of feeling the patient’s, and parents’, pain in order to be maximally helpful to them. It certainly is possible to feel swamped with patients’ misery, which isn’t useful. It’s kind of a fine line, I suppose, between feeling their pain and living their pain. It is such a treat for me not to have direct clinical care as one of my responsibilities here. The need and the work hours in Malawi seemed endless, even as seeing patients was one of the most interesting and rewarding parts of my work there.
And speaking of Malawi, there is no end to the misery. Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe have had floods with over 500 dead and counting. Thousands of houses have collapsed; crops have been washed away. There will be famine come October/November. Not easy for most, this life.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 