Guest Contribution: Emily Statler
I fell in love with Dr Ngo on a harried Tuesday afternoon. It was one of those whirlwind romances that you read about, just the two of us and an emergency room full of people.
We were introduced by a colleague of mine who had driven me to the hospital for emergency surgery following from a traffic collision between a scooter (me) and an SUV (the winner of that round). I did not speak much Mandarin. My paltry vocabulary would allow me to order food, apologize profusely, direct a cab and explain that I was a foreigner. I had spent the last half-hour apologizing mindlessly to everyone around me.
The room was full of people. I'd heard, read and used (though never accurately) the expression before. It's a good idiom: full of people. Until Taiwan I'd never really thought about it, never tried to picture it. It is terrifying. This room was full of people. More people than the population of my hometown were milling around one room. Most of them were in some form of distress.
My colleague Steve, by virtue of being one of the few people in our building who had a car was asked/ordered to take me to the hospital. His English was light-years ahead of my Mandarin, but still somewhat inadequate to explain to me what was going on. I'd also just been through a traumatic, mortifying ordeal of Herculean proportions, which is totally tangential to this story (buy me a drink sometime and I'll tell you all about it). I was shaking, holding back tears and listening in bemusement as Steve tried to explain the technical procedure of opening up my wrist, pinning bone fragments together and installing a biodegradable plate which would eventually dissolve into my body.
Dr Ngo arrived just as Steve was finishing up his description of my impending operation and fuelling my nightmares for years to come.
"He is surgeon." Steve informed me helpfully.
He was in his mid-to-late twenties, tall, chiseled, bright, smiley, capable and turn-on of ultimate turn-ons, he spoke fluent English.
"Hi, I'm Dr Ngo. I'm part of your surgical team, I've been asked to speak with you and explain the procedure." Sexiest introduction of all time.
He informed me that the surgical team would be performing a simple Somethingorother. He didn't just speak English, he spoke medical jargon! Swoon. He gave some rapid-fire orders to a nearby nurse in Mandarin, and smiled at me again as he told me they would take good care of me.
"You're going to be just fine." Confident and reassuring. Maybe it was the drugs, the pain, or a reversal of the Florence Nightingale effect, but I was very much in love.
Of course after our first magical encounter, when the anesthesia wore off, he was gone; leaving me scarred and alone. Typical.
Em
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