des told me about being stationed in a thai military outpost for six months as doctor to our troops. he was in charge of a small clinic in a military base in a rural area, where he not only saw our ownsoliders but also, as a courtesy to the locals, treated without charges thai civilians - villagers and children from the surrounding area. in between he was learning thai, and taking nature rambles in the forest, and learning to take things slow, and live simply, and it changed his outlook greatly. at the start of his third month he fractured his ankle and got sent back to singapore. (me: what, can't you see patients sitting down? him: yes, but you need to be able to race out to an emergency case.) i thought he might have been hurt during training. m.o.'s these days have to do combat training don't they? i feel that must be a direct contravention of primum non nocere? you shoot them yourself and then you save the same fellow, bah!) but it turns out that during songkran he was thrown into a pond and that's how he broke his ankle.

he also told of how, during the height of the shin corp furore, they brought in a soldier who was shot in the face. the rural clinic did not have the facilities for him to perform sophisticated surgery, but they simply dared not send him to a thai hospital because anti-singapore sentiments were so high then and the chap was military personnel (and in fact, suspected the soldier might have been shot by a civilian.) so all he could do was to extract the bullet and do the best he could for his face and administer basic care and arrange for a plane to send the soldier back to singapore.

i think whenever i hear of min-yin or desmond's work - and many other doctors - and i know so many - six out of ten doctors in this country would have gone to rjc - i am always astonished at the level of responsibility that even junior doctors like them have - and the power they have - and their resourcefulness. it makes me feel rather sad all over again, that other people have real jobs - and important ones - and have the ability and inclination to do them, and are trained to them, and are fully qualified to perform them. but i have to keep reminding myself - that i should scrub floors badly, and i write rather good papers, so why should proper feeling enter into it?