Entry #4 What about the Dan Dans of the world?
You maybe wondering just who the hell Dan Dan is. Well, she's a girl in a rural Chinese village that had a hole in her abdomen. Her illness began when she was 12 and she spent 7 years in bed before there was enough media coverage for the local hospital to take some action - the same one that turned her away before when her parents didn't have enough money to continue her operations.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning. I just finished watching the show on CCTV channel 10 where they showed a documentary of a girl named Dan Dan with a hole in her abdomen. The official title of the documentary was called - I kid you not - "She has a hole in her abdomen", I guess someone didn't pay the writers this month. One day at the age of 12 Dan Dan had a sickening stomach ache and decided to tell her mom about it, who - being a truly wonderful mother - took her to the local doctor immediately. The local doctor, summoning all the medical knowledge he had acquired from the self-paced biology lesson he took in high-school, diagnosed her with appenditicis and immediately proceeded to operate on her. Because you know, care and attention to detail is SO overrated in the medical profession. So, after Dr. Kevorkian took out her healthy appendix - or at least we hope it was her appendix, and not her spleen - the aching resumed with the pain being even more fierce than before. The opening from the surgery had failed to close over time and soon the skin around it began to rot. Her parents began to worry more than ever before and proceeded to take her to hospital after hospital in hopes of a proper diagnosis and treatment. This did not happen. She was wrongfully diagnosed at every single hospital and suffered needless surgeries only to be turned away when her parents had given up ever ounce of their life savings and could give no more. She was left to rot in her own bed for the next 7 years, awaiting with each cycle of the sun, her slow yet seemingly imminent death. The wound began to grow larger and more of her bowels began to seep out of the unnatural orifice shaped by rotting flesh. Her parents lived day to day, saving only enough money to keep her barely alive with some meager amount of food, because you see, by this time, so much of her bowels had rotted that the food did not even have a chance to reach the rest of her intestines before falling right out of her body. She was 19 at the time this documentary was made. Her body was that of an 8 year old.
That's when her parents began contacting the media about their story, tv station after tv station, newspaper after newspaper, she went to them all. And as no media source can ignore a story such as this - for a few years before, it would have been far less dramatic and therefore, less news worthy - they flocked to her bedside like vultures sensing the rotting flesh of her bowels. Who could resist a story such as this? For if she died, it could surely be used as a propaganda piece against the healthcare system, and if she lived, it would be a story of triumph and courage about how one little girl survived because an entire country held out their hands and lifted her from the dark well of mortality. Either way, people loved this stuff and the ratings showed that they ate it up. And so it was with this motivation behind them that Dan Dan's story began to spread like wildfire around the country. It was not long before the chief of her county hospital was called to its attention and agreed to take her in free of charge. He instituted a program in which every staff member in the hospital was responsible for providing Dan Dan with one nutritious meal. Of course, all of this was done under the scrutiny of the media. A skilled GI doctor from Beijing even heard about the news and offered to operate on her. Finally, after much diagnosis, it was confirmed that she did not have an appendicitis that one fateful year so long ago, but rather, she had a bowel infection which came about due to her innately weak immune system. They opened another hole on her left side so that she could have a colostomy bag placed there. Her abdominal wound and bowels are suppose to heal over time, after which they will reattach her intestines and remove the colostomy bag. Whether or not this ever happened, I don't know.
At the end of the documentary, she walks out of the hospital, colostomy bag attached - the first time she's been in the outside world since the age of 11. She has no idea how the world has changed in the last 7 years, and considering that she lives in China, I would imagine that she does not recognize much now. The show ends with a scene of her riding on a public bus and taking into her lungs the polluted city air as if it were her first fresh breath in decades. If I had to guess, I would say that it's what air on top of Everest must taste like.
And now that we've saved Dan Dan, what about all of the other Dan Dans in China? Asia? The world? Must we shine the camera lights in every wretched face to read the messages of death that fall from their silent lips?
If history is any indicator of truth, than perhaps we should.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning. I just finished watching the show on CCTV channel 10 where they showed a documentary of a girl named Dan Dan with a hole in her abdomen. The official title of the documentary was called - I kid you not - "She has a hole in her abdomen", I guess someone didn't pay the writers this month. One day at the age of 12 Dan Dan had a sickening stomach ache and decided to tell her mom about it, who - being a truly wonderful mother - took her to the local doctor immediately. The local doctor, summoning all the medical knowledge he had acquired from the self-paced biology lesson he took in high-school, diagnosed her with appenditicis and immediately proceeded to operate on her. Because you know, care and attention to detail is SO overrated in the medical profession. So, after Dr. Kevorkian took out her healthy appendix - or at least we hope it was her appendix, and not her spleen - the aching resumed with the pain being even more fierce than before. The opening from the surgery had failed to close over time and soon the skin around it began to rot. Her parents began to worry more than ever before and proceeded to take her to hospital after hospital in hopes of a proper diagnosis and treatment. This did not happen. She was wrongfully diagnosed at every single hospital and suffered needless surgeries only to be turned away when her parents had given up ever ounce of their life savings and could give no more. She was left to rot in her own bed for the next 7 years, awaiting with each cycle of the sun, her slow yet seemingly imminent death. The wound began to grow larger and more of her bowels began to seep out of the unnatural orifice shaped by rotting flesh. Her parents lived day to day, saving only enough money to keep her barely alive with some meager amount of food, because you see, by this time, so much of her bowels had rotted that the food did not even have a chance to reach the rest of her intestines before falling right out of her body. She was 19 at the time this documentary was made. Her body was that of an 8 year old.
That's when her parents began contacting the media about their story, tv station after tv station, newspaper after newspaper, she went to them all. And as no media source can ignore a story such as this - for a few years before, it would have been far less dramatic and therefore, less news worthy - they flocked to her bedside like vultures sensing the rotting flesh of her bowels. Who could resist a story such as this? For if she died, it could surely be used as a propaganda piece against the healthcare system, and if she lived, it would be a story of triumph and courage about how one little girl survived because an entire country held out their hands and lifted her from the dark well of mortality. Either way, people loved this stuff and the ratings showed that they ate it up. And so it was with this motivation behind them that Dan Dan's story began to spread like wildfire around the country. It was not long before the chief of her county hospital was called to its attention and agreed to take her in free of charge. He instituted a program in which every staff member in the hospital was responsible for providing Dan Dan with one nutritious meal. Of course, all of this was done under the scrutiny of the media. A skilled GI doctor from Beijing even heard about the news and offered to operate on her. Finally, after much diagnosis, it was confirmed that she did not have an appendicitis that one fateful year so long ago, but rather, she had a bowel infection which came about due to her innately weak immune system. They opened another hole on her left side so that she could have a colostomy bag placed there. Her abdominal wound and bowels are suppose to heal over time, after which they will reattach her intestines and remove the colostomy bag. Whether or not this ever happened, I don't know.
At the end of the documentary, she walks out of the hospital, colostomy bag attached - the first time she's been in the outside world since the age of 11. She has no idea how the world has changed in the last 7 years, and considering that she lives in China, I would imagine that she does not recognize much now. The show ends with a scene of her riding on a public bus and taking into her lungs the polluted city air as if it were her first fresh breath in decades. If I had to guess, I would say that it's what air on top of Everest must taste like.
And now that we've saved Dan Dan, what about all of the other Dan Dans in China? Asia? The world? Must we shine the camera lights in every wretched face to read the messages of death that fall from their silent lips?
If history is any indicator of truth, than perhaps we should.
posted by Peter at 4:30 AM
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