Macau Matters | My new left hip – part II

Richard Whitfield

A week ago I talked about some of the technical issues relating to joint replacement surgery. Here I would like to talk about hospital issues.

However, there is one more technical issue to address – blood clots after surgery. I am told that the human body naturally makes your blood “stickier” for several months after surgery, which significantly raises the risk of blood clots forming. Moreover, these clots mostly form in the lower leg, especially when blood flow is restricted while you are sitting. If these clots detach and cause heart, lung, brain or other organ blockages you can be in big trouble. While in hospital after my hip surgery I wore special stockings that continually massaged my legs to reduce the risk of clotting. My sister, a former hospital intensive care registrar, is also adamant that I do not sit in a car for more than 1 hour at a time for 2-3 months after my operation. She also wants me to delay my trip back to Macau for as long a possible and to break my flight into a few legs. In my experience, doctors in Macau, Hong Kong, Thailand or Malaysia are much less nervous about blood clots after surgery.

As my surgeon said to me, “hospitals are BAD, and you need to be in and out of them as quickly as possible”. By their nature they are full of diseases and you can catch stuff. To minimize the risks, my surgeon had me shower using anti-bacterial soap 2-3 times/day for several days before my operation, so that at least I would go into hospital relatively germ free. All the hospital beds had anti-bacterial lotion that all the staff used before touching me. With my somewhat limited experience of Macau hospitals, I am not convinced that all the staff working in them have such a clear priority on limiting the spread of germs.

I have the rich people conditions – high cholesterol, high blood pressure and type II diabetes – and this makes the hospital especially nervous because they make me more susceptible to disease. They were especially concerned with my blood sugar levels. Unfortunately, even in Australia there seems to be a lack of communications between hospital departments, because the kitchen did not seem to know about my diabetes and kept offering me sugary drinks and sweet biscuits. Luckily, they knew enough to warn me which meal dishes were “diabetes friendly”. On the other hand, there were no warnings about salt levels in dishes and they gave me salt with every meal, which is a “no no” for high blood pressure sufferers. I would expect similar problems in Macau hospitals.

My existing medications brought up another issue – the drugs that I take have different names in Australia, and my blood pressure medication is not even used there. I just take the pills the doctors prescribe for me, and do not really know which pill is for what – this was embarrassing and ill-informed of me when I was questioned about my existing medications, and I am going to rectify this situation when I return to Macau and really question my doctor and not use language barriers as an excuse.

Australian medicos seem to be much more helpful in giving me copies of test and scan results and much happier explaining them than my Macau doctors. Even simple things like telling me what my blood pressure is every time they measured it and explaining if the result was high, low or good. My Macau nurses never tell me my blood pressure test results, or explain them.

My Australian experience confirms my belief that Macau hospitals need to improve, and I hope that they are regularly getting internationally respected advice on how to achieve improvements.