Von Recklenhausen makes a visit to Vietnam

I think that I have only seen one other patient with Von Recklenhausen Syndrome; better know as the Elephant Man syndrome from the move of the early 80’s. The patient had come to the hospital with recurrent tumor in his leg and unfortunately spread of cancer to his lung. This illness is now known to be related to a mutation on chromosome 7and from what the patient has to say he is the first in his family with the mutation. Usually there are café au lait spots, freckles and what are usually benign tumors of the nerves but in a few cases there is a malignant development and that is what has happened here. I guess that I though that I would only see this illness in Europeans because of it name but of course the mutation can occur any where in the world. It was tough when he asked several times what his prognosis would be. Finally when we were clear enough he had made his decision to go home to be with his family. I feel that although the Morphine can help that we are not even doing enough to help with the many problems people are having with symptoms and that support will be skimpy. I know that the Vietnamese will respond to this need with the same kind of rigor and effort that they apply toward so many things.

Every day I am seeing new patients with the fellows and today in my Vietnamese I tried out a few simple sentence constructions. The grammar is fairly straight forward with no conjugation of the verbs. Just the same form with different pronouns or nouns so not that bad. Like is many Latin based languages the discriptor is after the verb.

In the afternoon I made my way to Bach Ma hospital. Surely this must be one of the largest hospitals in the world. Certainly bigger than anything that I have seen. I went on to a conference on Infectious disease and HIV and it was nice to met some more colleagues here.

I now have a hotel to stay in when I go to Hue this weekend on the Camel bus. So my travel plans are fairly well set.