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@Brooklyn
Memoir (29)@
Dr. Hang was a program Director of Family Medicine at a hospital in Queens.
He was Korean and in his 50s then. Therefore, he received Japanese education and spoke fluent Japanese.
I was introduced to him by our program director. Dr. Hang took me to a gorgeous Korean restaurant in Manhattan several times, and told me his painful experience during his residency days. Here is one of his episodes.
When he was
on call as an intern, he fell down the stairs. He was transporting patients'blood
test tubes in the middle of the night.
He fell and hit his head, and worst of all broke the test tubes. He was
exhausted from more than 30 hours work in stretch every third day.
He talked to himself panicking, "What am I doing? A well-educated
adult like myself running up and down the stairs in the middle of the
night, and ruining the blood samples. I donft take it any more. "
He
was lying there for some time and crying silently. I myself was a first
year resident (former intern) at that time and enduring the same ordeal
everyday. I cried in sympathy while listening to his story.
Several years after my residency I revisited Downstate Medical Center
to meet with my successor, a Japanese resident named Suminobu.
Dr. Hang accepted my sudden call and invited Suminobu and me to a Korean
restaurant. We two Japanese were small eaters. Dr. Hang advised us, smiling,
"You two have to eat more, otherwise you cannot survive. "
I heard Dr. Hang died in NYC in the mid 90s.
E-mail:kidot@momo.so-net.ne.jp