Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


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KHUN BUPHA GETS THE TREATMENT
Western and Traditional

Text & Images : John Cadet

Treatment - almost the final phase

A friend of mine, a well-to-do lady in Chiang Mai, broke her arm recently. She was up at her house on Doi Suthep, the mountain overlooking the city. Lovely location, tremendous view and cool all through the year. She was giving a party up there and before dinner was showing guests around the mossy garden.

"Do watch your step," she was telling them. "The path's slippery…"

And over she went immediately - CRACK! A broken humerus.

Well, she was carried down to the city, in some pain. They took her to the McCormick Hospital, gave her a shot of morphine - and if you've ever had a shot you'll know what the effect can be. Ah! The wonders of modern medicine! And though when I visited her the effect of the morphine had long since worn off, Khun Bupha was sitting among the cushions looking beatific.

How can I describe it? A plain, square, almost austerely-white little hospital room, but ablaze with flowers: gladioli, roses, flags, as well as orchids of every variety. As I say, Khun Bupha isn't short of the odd coin, and neither are her friends, but a glance around that private room convinced me that the flower markets of Chiang Mai had done phenomenal business that day, quite out of the ordinary.

And naturally, her friends were there in force, their voices animated, Khun Bupha's not the least among them.

"Have you seen my X-rays, Ajarn John? Here, this one shows what the arm was like before. You see how the bone sticks out here? And the jagged pieces? The pain - the pain - simply terrible! And this is afterwards, after they'd - how do you say? Repaired it - Ah, set it. Thank you."

I examined the X-rays.

"Hul-lo, Khun Bupha!" I say. "You seem to have swallowed a safety pin."

"Ha-ha-ha-ha - Oh-oh! I mustn't laugh. It hurts too much. No, Ajarn. You're joking me. That's the safety pin on the bandage, after they set the bone."

I must admit I'd been a bit worried when I heard about the accident. Khun Bupha's knocking on a bit - certainly not at a good age to be mending fractures. She was to have her arm in a cast for two months, and that's no joke, however well you're being attended to. But when I left the hospital I carried away with me the image of a Bodhisattva-like figure beaming among the pillows. A steady stream of kanoms (cakes) is circulating. Khun Bupha is telling the story of her accident and her treatment for the umpteenth time, how frightfully painful it has all been, and her face is wreathed in smiles, her eyes almost disappearing into the folds of good humour.

And I realize that whatever the other responses appropriate in the Thai sickroom, gloom and despondency aren't among them.

Still, at this stage I had only the slightest idea of the Thai resources for countering suffering with sanuk - enjoyment. It was in the weeks that followed, as I visited the convalescent in her home, that I began to get the fuller picture.

Imagine for yourself the comfortable bedroom: Western furnishings, traditional Thai paintings on the wall, a remarkably fine Tibetan tanka at the head of the bed, and through the window the gleam of the Ping River. Khun Bupha is again ensconced among the pillows, someone massaging her feet. A friend is peeling fruit artistically but the patient has no time to take any because she is on the phone to Bangkok - a business call, apparently. Life must go on, and commerce with it…

And on the balcony, beyond the window, an incongruous figure - a villager in faded blue, steaming something on a kerosene stove and making passes with his hands as he does so, muttering incantations.

And he's not all that incongruous, I realize later.

Khun Bupha explains. "He's a mor bow katha, John. My carpenter recommended him. 'Doctor blow spells,' if you translate directly. He's steaming herbal medicine in bags. Now he's rubbing them on my shoulder to take the ache out. This part - ooooh! OOOOH! - is a little painful. He digs his thumbs into my back. And now, as you see, he's blowing magic spells over my arm to mend it."

And indeed he was, with the same occult gestures and mild air of mystery.

He left some pots and bottles on the table when he went.

"This one I have to sprinkle on my arm every six hours," says Khun Bupha. "And this I take internally, five times a day - I think that's what he said."

At the next visit I see these medicaments have been added to.

"This is what my sister gave me," Khun Bupha says, holding up a small jar. "It's for warming my shoulder. There's so much ginger in it, it makes my skin peel. Look here! But also I use this electric warming pad, and together they help a lot."

Additionally, there's holy water - nam on - a Western nurse has brought back from Wat Pan Oon, not to speak of the ointment her sister-in-law has got hold of.

"She went to another temple. There's a monk there who's very skillful. He said I have kroh (a particularly virulent form of bad luck), and got rid of it by carving my horoscope into a candle and burning it away."

Also there's the herbal liniment a Chinese journalist acquaintance rubs her down with. "It gets rid of bed-sores, John. She massages me with the side of the hand, like this… A little painful maybe, but afterwards you feel so much better."

Two weeks out of the hospital and I count no less than six different specialists practicing their arts on Khun Bupha - not all at the same time, of course. On one occasion I arrive to hear her answering the telephone. "No, no! I really don't need it. Please tell him not to come." Putting the phone down, she tells me that some kind of expert in wizardry in the town of Farng, a hundred miles to the north, wants to come to her bedside to bring her his benefits. Later she said she couldn't remember this call, and not surprisingly, because at the height of the treatment, hardly any of us can keep abreast with what's going on.

"And my husband is making fun of me, Ajarn John. He says all these ointments and medicines are making me fat and oily, like a Kobe beef. I've stopped using most of them."

And just as well, it seems to me. I take the tops of some of the bottles, sniff at the contents and my impression is that the majority are laced, if not downright loaded, with potent local liquors - lao, sura. Their name is legion, but their effect identical. Too free an internal application and whatever they do to her arm, Khun Bupha won't have reliable use of her legs for a while.

Fortunately, the patient is a pragmatist, like most Thais. As I say, she discriminates. A month into convalescence and only the Western doctors and the Chinese masseuse are attending. The jars, pots, bottles and vials remain on the dressing table, but they're just gathering dust there, most of them.

"I keep them there as long as I'm convalescing so that no-one will be offended," says Khun Bupha, the diplomat.

And it's just before Christmas that the last act of the medico-magical cycle is played out. Khun Bupha and her husband arrange a pitti khun baan mai - a house-raising ceremony, in the literal translation. So she tells her friends, though not wanting to be thought too superstitious, she doesn't mention the pitti sueb chadah - the life-lengthening ceremony - it incorporates.

We might call it a housewarming, though its relation to the Western practice of that name is certainly distant. The house is a new one: there's that similarity. Then too, friends, relatives and acquaintances are invited to enjoy hospitality and by their presence inaugurate the new building. There is though the spiritual dimension. Khun Bupha's friends and relatives are convinced that her recent bad luck, culminating in the broken arm, has been brought about by her failure to perform the pitti khun baan mai, and urge her to delay no longer.

At all events, here Khun Bupha and her husband are. It's the morning of an auspicious full moon day. They're kneeling in the drawing room of the new house. Sacred threads have been tied to their heads, the ends linked to the apex of the banana-tree and the sugar-cane tripod raised over them. A mor phi - spirit doctor - has placed clay figures of a human being and a buffalo head in banana-leaf boats, and having recited katha, floated them - and, one hopes, all the kroh with them - away down river. Now a chapter of monks from nine temples with particularly auspicious names - Prosperity, Bright Halo, City of Stability, Splendid Birth, Extinguishing Evil, etc., etc. (there's no shortage of auspiciously-named temples in Chiang Mai) - is chanting Pali sutras. Soon, the monks will be invited to take lunch, then the guests will flock onto the lawns overlooking the river, themselves to be regaled in the winter sunshine.

Long life, safety, improved karma and a happy home atmosphere accrue from this last act of the drama, and if you can't quite bring yourself to believe that the hostess - her arm just out of the sling and the bone mending rapidly - has actually benefited from every one of these practices…

Well, you'd be unwise to suppose she hasn't had a great deal of sanuk in submitting to them. And where convalescence is concerned, isn't having fun, dispelling gloom, generally raising the morale of the patient - isn't that a major part of the story?

Text & images © John Cadet 2009
(The author lives in Chiang Mai and his works - The Ramakien: the That Epic among them - are on sale in major bookstores).