Laundry day at the hospital. Actually, every day was laundry day - each morning you could see a different assortment of clothes hanging outside windows and on railings. With the degree of humidity in Changde, I'm surprised anything was able to dry...
In the secret elevator with Johnny and the daytime operator. He had a stool and a pack of cigarettes, so he could wait patiently until summoned. But he wasn't this friendly to everyone. When called to a floor, the operator put on his stern face, eyeballed the waiting crowd, and refused and even kicked out anyone who didn't look like they belonged in the OR.
Another day, another tube. Paul, making his work seem effortless.
This little girl was six and a half years old. She had her bilateral cleft lip and palate repaired previously, but there were some minor touchups that could be performed.
Playing in her bed after surgery. A few minor revisions, to narrow the nostrils, redo the widened scars, and line up the pink of her upper lip a little better.
Charles, focusing. He is assisted here by Heidi, who is a fourth year medical student in Colorado, applying for residency in general surgery. She was incredibly smart, hardworking, and helpful; I'm trying to convince her to come to Stanford...
The famed shoe lockers, as demonstrated by Johnny. In the bottom right hand corner of the photo, you can see a slightly askew cabinet - inside lie all those rubber slippers, arranged from smallest sizes at the bottom to largest (which, as some of the team found out, weren't all that large) at the top.
For dinner that night, most of the team went to a Western-style restaurant. The menu was vast - everything from steaks to salads to pasta to Korean rice pots to waffles.I opted for the restaurant's special steak, which was in a word, interesting. You can see Carin's reaction in the photo above; she had ordered the same thing.
The steak was a little different from what we're used to in the States; it was thin, either extremely tenderized or cobbled together from lesser parts, and drowned in a black pepper sauce. The plate was garnished with part of a corn cob (also very different from what we get here: rather than supersweet kernels, Chinese corn is very chewy and starchy) and a fancy-cut hot dog.
The drink is fresh-squeezed Chinese pear juice, which was a refreshing change from the usual breakfast-time watermelon routine.
And let's just say that the pizza was pretty different, too.
