A series of unfortunate medical labels in this glorious country

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I always think about how complicated things like taxes and healthcare are here, and I wonder.. does it really have to take so long? When I hear of how quickly people do taxes in other western, developed countries, particularly those in Europe, I think about how they probably laugh at us when they hear that so many Americans don’t even do their own taxes, that instead, they hire tax accountants to do this for them. I also think about how other western countries laugh at the state of our healthcare system — how expensive it is and little we actually get out of it.

Let’s think about this: I made a doctor’s appointment for this morning primarily for an annual physical with a primary care physician, but because I told them I had questions about my cold, which has unfortunately included violent coughing fits, they labeled my visit an “office visit” instead of an “annual physical,” which means that I had to pay a $20 copay. All because I had a couple questions, really? Annual physicals have no copay with primary care physicians; illness/office visits do. I made sure with the office receptionist that all my blood work taken should be coded as “annual physical” and NOT as “illness” — yes, because this is something you need to verbatim say, otherwise, your insurance will bill this as reactive/medical treatment, and then I’d have to pay out of pocket expenses. Then, as the lab technician was drawing my blood, I asked her if I could find out my blood type. What was her response? “Well, evaluating your blood for blood type is not considered ‘preventive,’ so we’d need to bill your insurance for that, and then you’d have an out of pocket expense that you could apply to to your deductible.”

I don’t even get to know my own blood type and need them to charge for that, as well? Doesn’t that automatically come up when they draw my blood?!

The lab technician didn’t even give me as much of a smile. She was dead serious.

The doctor I saw today, who was pretty unengaging and didn’t seem to have the greatest bedside manner, was forgettable. She said they’d only use my blood for the bare-bones preventive tests, so this would not include vitamin levels or blood sugar, as those were considered not preventive and would be reactive.

So… if my blood sugar were super high or super low, and we identified that during a test,  that would then have negative ramifications on my health. So then, in what reasonably intelligent mind would you not call that preventive medicine? The doctor shook her head. “It’s just the way the insurance works, and we want to make sure you aren’t getting charged for anything that isn’t fully necessary. So, remember to take a vitamin D supplement.”

It’s just the way the insurance works.

Thanks for the great explanation, doc.

Now, I’m even more crystal clear about the sorry and pathetic state of healthcare in this system. And if I, a privileged white-collar professional working at a tech company, have issues with what is getting billed and not getting billed, how do others far less fortunate than me feel getting nickeled and dimed for every little test or exam? It’s no wonder some people rather just be sick and avoid the doctor at all costs. It’s because of crap like this.

 

Clean apartment

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We spent about three hours cleaning the apartment today. When I say we were cleaning,  it means that Chris tidied up all the things we brought back from our trip (mainly his Australian biscuits and our Vietnam magnets), and I deep cleaned and dusted the bedroom, living room, and hallway. We weren’t even here for nearly a month, yet somehow the apartment got so dusty and the floors seem like they have smudges all over them. Or maybe it’s like this because we hadn’t cleaned thoroughly since before Chris’s aunt and uncle’s visit in mid-November.

These are the moments when I think… these are some of the benefits of a small apartment. Having a one-bedroom apartment means that there’s really only three rooms to clean, and that’s pretty manageable for a couple and doesn’t take an entire day to finish scrubbing clean. But once the living space gets bigger, there’s more to clean, and even if you outsource it, that person may not do a thorough enough job for me to be satisfied with.

Vietnamese food coma

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I’ve always had an endless number of dishes on my to-make list, but I think it’s only gotten longer since we’ve come back from Vietnam. I’ve also joined an Instant Pot for Vietnamese food group, which is reminding me of all these delicious things I enjoyed growing up that my mom would buy and feed me from Vietnamese delis and bakeries in San Jose and Westminster.

One dish that was already on my list was a Vietnamese-inspired chicken and lemongrass meatloaf from an Asian-British chef I follow on Instagram. She loves many flavors and cuisines, and her food is both colorful and tasty looking. She said she was inspired to make this meatloaf because of her love for banh mi, one of the most glorious sandwiches that ever existed. So I pulled out my frozen organic minced turkey from the freezer, bought more lemongrass from Chinatown, and made this extremely fragrant and delicious meatloaf tonight. It pretty much puts American meatloaf to shame with how multidimensional the flavor is — it’s salty, sweet, savory, and sour at the same time from the lime. The Asian spin always makes everyday American or western food taste magical.

 

Coughing fits once again

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Nothing is worse than being sick while traveling or on vacation. But getting back from an amazing trip and then going back to work and being sick is certainly no fun at all, especially when that cold you somehow caught while on the flight back results in massive coughing fits that are reminiscent of the whooping cough I had to live through in December 2015. It’s hard to forget how miserable that was, how close to death I felt during that time.

I’ve been working from home the last three days to incubate myself. While I have colleagues joking to me over Slack that I am probably just prolonging my vacation, nothing could be further from the truth. I wish I were on vacation and not dealing with hacking up phlegm.

 

Back to the Northern Hemisphere

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I came back to the office two days ago to the usual banter, the same annoying people, and the same warm and friendly souls that I actually found myself happy to see and chat with again. Even though I may have had some very mind-boggling, thought-worthy, and even emotional moments during my three weeks away, it was as though none of that really happened once I walked through the doors of my office. I spoke briefly with a few colleagues about my trip, but that was really it. No one really wants to hear that much about anyone else’s trip anyway; it was my moments, my time to enjoy, not theirs. But I did manage to convince one of my colleagues to put Vietnam on his travel list, and not just for a quick trip, but for a planned two-week trip in the next 12-24 months. We’ll see if it really happens.

When you come back from an intense trip, everything else seems like a bit of a bore, like it’s slow and possibly too steady. Oh, reality.

 

First Class Qantas flight

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Because Chris has a lot of accumulating Qantas points that he had to use for something, and obviously the only time you can use them is when you fly Qantas, he decided to apply a healthy number of points towards upgrading our flight to First Class. We’ve been flying Business Class to and from the last couple of years, which was already incredible (it makes any business class in the U.S. seem like garbage with the level of attentiveness and service, not to mention the quality of the food), but First Class on Qantas certainly took us to another level of getting the royal and spoiled treatment. We began with getting a booked massage for him and a facial for me, 20 minutes each, and then when we boarded our flight, we each had our own little pod, which could be adjusted so that you and your partner could dine… at the same table together. I took a quick look at the menu and realized that while there were the usual a la carte options, there was actually a multi-course tasting menu… on the plane. I’d never even fathomed the idea of having a tasting menu on plane before. So we chose that option to indulge, and even enjoyed some of the best champagne and Australian shiraz that we’ve ever had on that flight to LA.

For breakfast, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could select poached eggs, as I’d never seen poached eggs on a plane before (for seemingly obvious reasons since poaching is already the most difficult egg method, but to get it right on a plane would be insanity). So I chose that over toast with avocado, and while the egg was probably more done than I would have liked, the yolk, when broken, still lightly spilled out over my toast. This was too much, I concluded as I chewed. If I had this every time I flew back and forth between Australia, I’d be ruined for every other flight.

 

Last day of summer for now

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We came back to Melbourne this morning after transiting in Kuala Lumpur again. I felt tired and like I just wanted to sleep, even though I knew it would be bad for me body-clock wise. As we’re packing our last bags after doing two loads of laundry, Chris asked if I wanted to go to the beach. But then, I thought, I’d have to go through the trouble of putting on sunblock, and I really did not want to do that.

“Well, it’s your last time to go to the beach and have this kind of weather for a long time…. we’re going back to the misery of New York winter very soon… So, it’s up to you,” he said.

Ugh.

“Fine. I’ll go get the sunscreen,” I mumbled.

And so we soaked in the last bits of a Southern Hemisphere summer in what we know as winter. I tried looking for abalone shells at Brighton Beach, but was dismayed to find not even one. I recalled the time in 2012 when I first came to Australia and roamed that beach by myself. To my total surprise and delight, that entire beach was covered in rainbow-colored gleaming abalone shells. I took only five of them then to not be so greedy. Yet in all the years since, I haven’t seen even one. Not to mention, this year, I noticed a sign I didn’t recognize that stated that visitors are not to remove any shells from the beach…. which likely means someone has been taking all of them.

 

Freshness

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The theme of food for our trip to Vietnam was freshness. As was the case when we were in Thailand two years ago, everything in Southeast Asia just screams fresh, especially since the cuisines there love to combine cooked elements with raw ingredients to lighten and refresh the palate. While I expected aspects like the mile-high plates of herbs, lettuce, and vegetables, what I did not expect were the fresh rice noodles in all the pho and other noodle soup dishes we had; for whatever reason, I just expected them to reconstitute the dried stuff, but nope. It was obvious from the chew and mouthfeel that these noodles were churned out fresh. No dried noodles here. And the one time I did see dried noodles, it was at the Danang Vietnam Airlines lounge in the dining area, where they had pho noodles that were instant pre set up in bowls for you to add your piping hot pho broth to.

When I think about aspects of Vietnamese cuisine like this, I think, no one in the modern world, or, well, New York City, who works full time could ever regularly have meals like this. Who has the time or energy to source fresh everything, whether it’s specific Vietnamese herbs or just-churned noodles, or freshly pressed tofu? I’d be running all over the city all day… which can’t work if I have a job. It’s totally intangible, though I do dream of having such ready and easy access to all these beautiful ingredients. Fresh food is really what most Americans don’t eat at all or do not get enough of. Vietnam even has me questioning the taste of chicken, as I distinctly remember having chicken three times during this trip, and while chewing, thinking, ‘Wow, this tastes… more chickeny, with a stronger, more assertive flavor that screams, hey! I’m not the bland meat! I have my own flavor, thank you!’ The piri piri chicken in Portugal last November was incredible, one of the best chicken dishes I’d had in my life, but that was because of the flavor of the marinade, the spices, the chili oil, and the charcoal grill… not the actual chicken meat itself. In Vietnam when I had chicken, I knew it was the actual flavor of the chicken flesh itself.

And sadly, I’m sure the average American would eat the chicken we had in Vietnam and say it’s gross or doesn’t taste right… because they’ve been accustomed to the bland and the boring chickens of mass-grown and produced America.

 

Da Nang

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One of the surprising places we visited on this trip was Danang. I didn’t really know what to think of it at all other than knowing that many large and fancy hotel properties and golf courses were being constructed there due to the beautiful beaches there. I knew of Marble Mountains, of My Son Sanctuary, which is a sanctuary made in a similar style to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. But other than that, I had no expectations. So when we arrived and spent an evening eating and roaming around the streets of the urban area of Danang, I was a bit shocked. It probably felt the cleanest of all the cities we’d visited, not to mention the most developed. The streets reminded me of walking through Seoul, which was also supplemented by the fact that endless signs in Korean and Korean barbecue restaurants and spas lined the streets (this is clearly a major South Korean tourist destination). Lots of bright lights adorned buildings and bridges. The one major bridge had a dragon descending upon it and was constantly changing color; I read that for special occasions, this bridge actually shoots out fire! And it’s a bridge both for cars and pedestrians!

The food we ate here was delicious, as well, as Chris declared the main meal we had on Thursday evening to be his favorite and the best meal we’d had in Vietnam, which is saying a lot considering how much we’ve eaten thus far. We found a tiny banh xeo place in the back of an alley and feasted on banh xeo and grilled beef wrapped in lalot leaves. The two surprising things about these banh xeo were that 1) the sauce accompanying it was not the usual nuoc cham (“all-purpose”) light dipping sauce that was ubiquitous and that my mom and I make at home, but rather a thick, fermented shrimp/hoisin/pig liver sauce that had a brownish-red hue. Chris gorged on that sauce. And 2) these particular banh xeo actually had scrambled eggs on the edges of them. People often mistaken banh xeo for having egg in them because they are yellow, but they’re actually yellow because of the turmeric it is spiced with and usually have no egg product in them. but these ones definitely had egg scrambled at the edges!

“Maybe you can try this at home next time you make banh xeo,” Chris said, giving a not-so-subtle hint that he wanted this.

We ended the evening at a hole-in-the-wall che spot, a Vietnamese bean, jelly, and fruit place, where we shared a bowl of assorted colored, flavored, and textured jellies, taro, jackfruit, and a huge lump of durian added in, all mixed with a pandan and coconut milk liquid base.

Definitely gaining weight by the end of this trip, but it will all be worth it.

 

 

War Remnants Museum in Saigon

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It’s a funny thing about museums covering war and conflict; at some point, someone get up in arms about how biased a museum can be, or gets angry about the the self-promoting nationalist propaganda that a city or country’s museum takes. Prior to coming to this museum today, I skimmed a number of TripAdvisor reviews, and a few very angry Americans touted this museum as “Vietnamese propaganda,” “completely biased,” and “anti-American” (to this last point, I would respond, ‘Well, the U.S. did decide to come invade Vietnam and harm then and future generations of Vietnamese people, so if you were Vietnam, wouldn’t you be anti-American, too?’) But if you think about it, every country does this. I mean, it’s not like the JFK Presidential Library and Museum reveals that he didn’t genuinely care about civil rights for black Americans, and that he was really supporting whatever would get him reelected. The Vietnam War memorials, many of them all over the U.S., but the largest one in Washington, D.C., doesn’t mention the fact that the U.S. sprayed Agent Orange, among a whole rainbow of colors of other toxic chemicals, all over the country of Vietnam in a miscalculated attempt to destroy the food crops of guerrilla warriors, when in fact they completely screwed up and instead destroyed the crops of civilians, not to mention poisoned anyone who came into content with that substance for life, plus their second, third, and now even fourth generation family members.

In my history courses in high school covering recent U.S. history (in American history classes, “recent” means 1900s and onward), the Vietnam War is a quick few paragraphs in a textbook, and then it’s done. There’s a quick mention of Agent Orange and that the U.S. retreated, and that was pretty much it. I still remember coming back from my Advanced Placement U.S. History class on the day that our very left-leaning teacher did a lesson on the Vietnam War. He said, “The U.S. lost! We actually lost! We weren’t used to losing! So we had to get the hell out of there and FAST!”

I realized in that class that I knew absolutely nothing about the Vietnam War. My brother and I were results of the Vietnam War; he and I would not exist if that war did not happen. Our dad served as a Private in radio communications on the U.S. side during the war in Qui Nhon in south central Vietnam. Our mom also somehow got a job with the U.S. Army also working in radio communications in the same city. And the rest, as they say, is history.

So, I headed home that day. And at dinner, I told my dad what my history teacher said. “Mr. Schmidt said that the U.S. lost the war,” I said naively and ignorantly. “Is that really true?”

My dad looked flabbergasted. He dropped the fork onto his plate, and he looked at me as though I was crazy. “We didn’t lose!” he exclaimed. “We retreated! There’s a difference between those two things!”

Actually, there kind of isn’t. As I read more on my own, I realized, this country really did lose. And we kind of deserved it. My dad never elaborated more than that. He rarely liked to talk about the war, and for very obvious reasons, neither did my mom. It was one of those subjects that I always wanted to ask more about, but was too afraid to upset either of them about.

Today, we went through all the exhibits one by one in the War Remnants Museum (originally called Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes, then renamed to Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression, then finally renamed to this final name in 1995 after diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnam were normalized). I noticed callouts regarding radio communications in central Vietnam and thought about my parents. I saw Qui Nhon marked as a major combat unit in South Vietnam and learned it was designated as the tiger region. And, much to my complete disgust and horror, I saw real photos of the effects of Agent Orange on innocent south Vietnamese civilians, some of whom were in the womb when their mothers were affected by this chemical. It was an entire exhibit devoted to the atrocities that fell upon these innocent people in this beautiful country all because my home country decided to recklessly spray whatever they could in an attempt to win a war. Of the bits my dad did share with me, he said that he learned of Agent Orange while he was in Qui Nhon, and he heard the officials telling everyone not to be concerned if they got it on themselves because it wouldn’t harm them; it was only meant to harm the crops and fields. My dad thought they were crazy; he didn’t trust anything that they told him, and he stayed far away from all of it as possible. And thank God he did. So many American soldiers came back to the U.S. with terrible health ramifications that the U.S. government refused to acknowledge or compensate for decades after the war ended.

There was the photo of the conjoined twins who had their own arms and legs, but shared a torso. Then, there was the baby with a massively enlarged skull that looked as though bullets had gone through it. She had been diagnosed with hydro-encephalitis, a disease in which there is a build up of fluid in the brain ventricles, and thus the pressure of the fluid ends up causing life-threatening brain damage. She died a month after the photo was taken. Then, there are the many photos of babies born who basically look like skulls with empty eye sockets. They were blind and would never be able to see. They were doomed to never properly grow into adulthood. This is just a quick snapshot of what I remember and some of which I took pictures of. But it’s not even a smidgen of all the awful health outcomes of those affected by Agent Orange.

I started sobbing while looking at these horrific photos; it was difficult to remain composed. I’ve visited a number of very tragic and moving war museums, including the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima and the Apartheid and District Six Museums in Johannesburg and Cape Town, but for me, this somehow hurt so much more and felt closer to me. It felt more real to me than the others, and maybe it’s because my parents were there that I felt so terrible. My parents could have been affected by that; my relatives on my mom’s side were affected. My mom lost many siblings during the war, and I don’t even know all the stories to this day. I know she had nine living siblings; I know only the stories of three. What happened to the other six…? The horrors of the war still stay with my mom, and very likely with my dad, which is why he doesn’t talk about it, either. But with Agent Orange specifically, I felt enraged that the country I call home could be so reckless and stupid, and worse, actually defend what they did and even lie about it, even to their own people. And when people actually were affected, they didn’t care about them and ignored them. It’s so typical of the Land of the Free to do something so cold and cruel like this. The U.S. got away with war crimes, and to this day, this country denies the impact that Agent Orange has and claims that the 4.8 million Vietnamese affected that the Vietnamese government claims is grossly over-estimated. For a country that refuses to provide their own affected soldiers who have come back from the war treatment and compensation, that is just disgusting. More and more, I felt embarrassed to be an American standing in that museum.

And then I think of the current political situation back home, with President Dipshit, the oldest child to ever run the country, and his insipid, selfish, racist, and short-sighted government shut-down, and I think, do we really have any hope of being a better place when a large chunk of this country support this moron?