Читать книгу Rainforest Asylum - Sara Ashencaen Crabtree - Страница 16

Ahi, a Malay MA (Medical Assistant) turned up (he’s not too friendly towards me most of the time) just as I was writing down the patient audit from the nursing chart. He starts helping Bong to hand out medication to the locked section with Hui Ling helping. As usual I am surprised by how compliant and passive people are when they take their meds. One poor man in the open section keeps asking to go back home in Malay: ‘balik kampung, bila?’ (When do I go home to my village?). The MAs ignore him. He then appeals to me, maybe because I am White and possibly influential, to take him back to his remote Iban kampung in X. Bong, another patient, helps with translation.

Bong:	He says that he has had ECT so now wants to go back home.
Researcher:	Has it helped him?
Bong:	Yes, he is much more stable now. [To Ahi] How many more?
Ahi:	Three more, course of six.

While I am taking to Bong a patient in the locked section is hanging around the grill and talking incessantly, non-stop and apparently unintelligibly. After some time of this I comment on it to Bong.

Researcher:	This must be hard for people to cope with.
Ahi:	[overhearing] That’s why he is here. He talks all through the night. The brother says it drives them ‘up the wall’. Non-stop talking, the words don’t hang together though. [Pause] He talks so much he should get a job as a lecturer.
Researcher:	Yes, he’d be perfect - all he’d have to do is make sense.

[Ahi gives me a sly, side-look and laughs. Later as I am leaving]

Researcher:	Well, I must go now.
Ahi:	I hope this is worth your time.
Researcher:	I know it seems strange.
Ahi:	Yes.
Researcher:	But it is very interesting … you learn a lot by observing.

This interaction with Ahi is a typical encounter representative of our relationship, in which in the space of a couple of hours he manages to get in two digs, the first conveying that I talk so much rubbish that I am no different from a particularly incoherent psychiatric patient. The second that I am wasting my time just hanging around watching the staff and no doubt, the message is also that I am wasting their time as well. Not surprisingly I never enjoyed spending time on the ward when Ahi was present, as I usually found myself in the position of trying to observe the ward while wincing at the pinpricks he delivered - when he was willing to acknowledge my presence at all. The second extract from my field notes highlights the difficulties of gathering data while in a state of awkward discomfort at being pointedly ignored by members of staff.