UPDATE ON QUOC Letter dated January 7, to a friend
I am including this item, a "paste" from a letter to two longtime friends, Long Nguyen and Randy Holmberg. This expresses my panic -- at the time -- as decently as I was able:
Today [January 7, 2006] at noon, we took a friend and his wife and one of their three kids out to dim sum in Tampa. The friend, a guy named Quoc, took a work team to New Orleans to make a little Christmas cash for their families. Somebody had cranked up a generator (to watch TV) in the building where they were sleeping. One of Quoc’s team had gone back home that afternoon because he sensed “evil spirits” in the building. The police found Quoc collapsed over the generator, apparently trying to turn it off, with his two best friends dead on the floor at his feet. The final member of the crew, who was in another room, came back to St Pete as a permanent “human vegetable.” Quoc himself was in a coma for almost two weeks. Ban, Quoc’s two brothers, and his wife, camped out in the ER waiting room the whole time. When they got him back to St Pete, no ER would treat him or even diagnose him due to lack of insurance. Good old “Bush-ism” in health care! (If you’re too stupid – or poor – to buy insurance, to hell with you. Literally. Let god clean up the gene pool.)
Hell, Florida’s “baby Bush” version of “Compassionate Conservatism” is at least a tiny bit more in touch with ordinary people’s reality than that of his older brother George, and that of the political "Star Chamber" cabal he fronts for.
Well, Quoc isn’t at all the same person he was: used to be a real hell-raiser, always mouthing off; now, pensive and silent. We thought he was a Night-of-the-Living-Dead zombie until somebody cranked up a Karaoke machine in his house: Quoc suddenly “came to life.” I was able to help his wife understand that though she didn’t get back the same Quoc, just as Ban didn’t get back the same Frank, she did get back the REAL Quoc. If there is a god, he surely is perverse to stick me, with my annoying but relatively minor brain damage into the middle of such a heartbreaking episode of brain damage! (The last two entries to my “blog” have to do with my near insanity at home alone while Ban camped out in the New Orleans ER waiting room with Quoc’s wife, and his brothers.
The one advantage seems to be that both of us, Quoc and me, came out of the “brain-dead” experience looking younger, me a little younger, him a lot younger. Today was the first time I’d seen him face to face since the coma. He looks much too young to have a wife and three kids! On my advice, we kept me and Quoc from meeting, up to now, because he seemed not to be able to cope with English, and I knew from my own experience that having me, with my only Vietnamese being bedroom-and-poolhall-Vietnamese, attempt to talk with him could really drive him nuts.. My experience with similar phenomena is that it is kind of like being back in your own home (in your own brain) and suddenly finding that somebody else has come in and rearranged everything: you know where everything is, only when you try to grab something, it isn’t there. So you have to keep groping around until you find it. As you may be able to see, I am still a little emotionally “strung out” over all this. It made my OWN difficulties return vividly. Unbearably vividly.
(Beware, I may paste some of the above into my “blog.” This is the first time I’ve put it into words that seem to me to be an honest description of what happened to me and also seem to have some likelihood of being understood by others.)
[And this posting is what was threatened in the parentheses above. -- Lobsang]
Today [January 7, 2006] at noon, we took a friend and his wife and one of their three kids out to dim sum in Tampa. The friend, a guy named Quoc, took a work team to New Orleans to make a little Christmas cash for their families. Somebody had cranked up a generator (to watch TV) in the building where they were sleeping. One of Quoc’s team had gone back home that afternoon because he sensed “evil spirits” in the building. The police found Quoc collapsed over the generator, apparently trying to turn it off, with his two best friends dead on the floor at his feet. The final member of the crew, who was in another room, came back to St Pete as a permanent “human vegetable.” Quoc himself was in a coma for almost two weeks. Ban, Quoc’s two brothers, and his wife, camped out in the ER waiting room the whole time. When they got him back to St Pete, no ER would treat him or even diagnose him due to lack of insurance. Good old “Bush-ism” in health care! (If you’re too stupid – or poor – to buy insurance, to hell with you. Literally. Let god clean up the gene pool.)
Hell, Florida’s “baby Bush” version of “Compassionate Conservatism” is at least a tiny bit more in touch with ordinary people’s reality than that of his older brother George, and that of the political "Star Chamber" cabal he fronts for.
Well, Quoc isn’t at all the same person he was: used to be a real hell-raiser, always mouthing off; now, pensive and silent. We thought he was a Night-of-the-Living-Dead zombie until somebody cranked up a Karaoke machine in his house: Quoc suddenly “came to life.” I was able to help his wife understand that though she didn’t get back the same Quoc, just as Ban didn’t get back the same Frank, she did get back the REAL Quoc. If there is a god, he surely is perverse to stick me, with my annoying but relatively minor brain damage into the middle of such a heartbreaking episode of brain damage! (The last two entries to my “blog” have to do with my near insanity at home alone while Ban camped out in the New Orleans ER waiting room with Quoc’s wife, and his brothers.
The one advantage seems to be that both of us, Quoc and me, came out of the “brain-dead” experience looking younger, me a little younger, him a lot younger. Today was the first time I’d seen him face to face since the coma. He looks much too young to have a wife and three kids! On my advice, we kept me and Quoc from meeting, up to now, because he seemed not to be able to cope with English, and I knew from my own experience that having me, with my only Vietnamese being bedroom-and-poolhall-Vietnamese, attempt to talk with him could really drive him nuts.. My experience with similar phenomena is that it is kind of like being back in your own home (in your own brain) and suddenly finding that somebody else has come in and rearranged everything: you know where everything is, only when you try to grab something, it isn’t there. So you have to keep groping around until you find it. As you may be able to see, I am still a little emotionally “strung out” over all this. It made my OWN difficulties return vividly. Unbearably vividly.
(Beware, I may paste some of the above into my “blog.” This is the first time I’ve put it into words that seem to me to be an honest description of what happened to me and also seem to have some likelihood of being understood by others.)
[And this posting is what was threatened in the parentheses above. -- Lobsang]
posted by Frank | 6:04 AM
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