Repeat after me: Fish, Policeman, Pig

A visit to the doctor in Bangkok is always an experience. Last night, I went to Chulalongkorn Hospital about my left ear.

It has felt odd for weeks, as if it is full of water. At work last night, I was having trouble hearing.

I belong to a social insurance scheme, which allows me to visit my local state hospital for free.

It has been years since I visited Chula. I had forgotten what to do. I didn't even know where it was, and was surprised to find the hospital is just around the corner from the top of Silom.

If you go to Chula after hours, you visit the emergency room, even if your problem is not that acute.

The place is stuffed with young doctors, men and women alike. I was the only foreign face there, and was quickly surrounded by doctors eager to probe me about my condition.

I jostled for attention with aged monks in flimsy robes, children with minor scrapes, middle-aged women with purple faces.

Chulalongkorn Hospital is supposedly the nation's top state hospital.

The emergency ward is run-down; the corridors surrounding it, where I went to pay a token fee, are like a rabbit's warren, poorly lit and neglected.

My case was assigned to a young woman in a white coat, who questioned me for 20 minutes. She spent longer questioning me, in fact, than she did examining me.

While she was probing me earnestly, her colleagues approached me to chat.

'Hello!' one young doctor with a pock-marked face asked me in English, not once, but twice, even three times. The others laughed.

'Farang ears! ' they must have thought. 'They are bigger than Thai ears...I wonder what goes wrong with farang ears that we don't find in Thai ears.'

My young doctor consulted a senior colleague, who looked in my ear after she had finished. 'You have an abrasion,' she said.

The doctor referred me to a specialist at the same hospital.

I went to see her at an ENT outpatients' clinic at 8am today.

I waited 3.5 hours before my name was called, which was a pain.

I complained several times about the delay, but really should have held my tongue: in the West, at least when I left the place, patients can wait months to see a specialist.

A young woman, slightly older than the doctor from the night before, saw me.

She took a quick look in my ear, and asked me to get my hearing tested at a lab across the way.

That took another hour or two. The highlight was getting my hearing tested in a sound lab, built in a sound-proofed tank.

It looked like a diver's tank. The only thing it lacked was one of those wheels on the door which you swivel around to get it open.

The lab has one window, looking out into the doctor's office. I sat inside, while the doctor stayed at her desk, talking to me through a microphone.

'Put the headphones on, and hold up your finger every time you hear a pulse,' she said.

She told me to turn away from the window, so I couldn't see when she pressed her pulse switch.

Beep!

I raised a finger.

The modulation of the beeps varied, as did the pitch. Some, I could barely make out. Judging by the results of my test, I missed some beeps altogether.

Inside the tank, I was surrounded by toys, no doubt intended for the amusement of kids whose parents bring them in to get their hearing tested.

The best part?

The woman testing my hearing - at 44, the oldest of all the doctors who treated me - asked me to repeat Thai words after her.

She put a face mask between her mouth and the microphone, to muffle the words as she spoke. Some were hard to make out.

'Fish.'

'Pig.'

'Student.'

'Policeman.'

This is the way to learn a language, I thought - repeat the words as a native speaker pronounces them.

Unfortunately, my pronunciation habits are already cast like dye into my memory. They are hard to change, even when I try.

Fortunately, I did not do too bad a job learning the pronunciation rules when I started on Thai nine years ago.

Well, that's what I tell myself. Forgive an ageing man his indulgences.

PS: The result? The hearing in my left ear has diminished 20%. I go back on Wednesday to see if we can find the cause.

PS 2: I spent the day surrounded by women doctors, which is welcome. For some silly reason, I thought the Thai medical profession might be dominated by men.