Foot Surgery at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok
This is part four of the story I’m calling “The Foot Saga”. Parts one through three haven’t been written yet – I will post those later. The saga is about my experiences with medical treatment for my broken foot in Thailand. It started over a year ago when I fell from a ladder and broke my foot. I went to the emergency room at the Pak Chong clinic of Bangkok Hospital’s Nakorn Ratchimsa branch. A series of poor treatments by Bangkok Hospital eventually led me to seek treatment at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok. This Part 4 writeup is about my experience with foot surgery at Siriraj Hospital.
After having been previously examined by Dr. Bavornrit at Siriraj Hospital he had determined that the pain I was experiencing in my foot when I walked was due to excess bone growth over the area that had been fractured when I broke my foot. When the break had healed an area of bone had formed that protruded into the channel where the ligament is located. When I walked the ligament was impinged and inflamed by this rough protrusion of bone. The recommended treatment was to perform surgery to remove the excess bone and repair the ligament channel. So surgery was scheduled for July 12. I was to check in on July 11, have surgery July 12, and check out on July 13.
I checked in on the afternoon of July 11 at the “84 Year” building which has three grades of private hospital rooms. I stayed in a mid-grade room, room 533 to be exact. The three different grades of rooms have something to do with when they were last renovated. This room wasn’t bad but looked kind of old and tired. The lower grade rooms must have been ancient. No idea what the newer top grade rooms look like. The cost for my mid-grade room was 2,000 baht per night. Food was an additional 150 baht per day for Thai food or 250 baht per day for western food.
Upon check-in I signed some consent forms and a nurse did a quick check of vitals. A month earlier I had been to the hospital for a pre-surgery checkup that included blood tests, chest x-ray and ECG so I had already been deemed fit for surgery. Later in the afternoon another nurse came in to get my medical history. Her first question was why was I there. For surgery on my right foot was my reply. This is something they do repeatedly, asking you to confirm why you are there at each step leading up to the surgery. Later in the evening one of the doctors who would be assisting my surgeon came in to see me. He first asked why I was there, and then he explained the procedure.
A note about language. Most of the nurses have only rudimentary English language skills. The doctors I met are all fairly fluent in English, some better than others. I speak Thai well enough that I could get by, but if you don’t and you don’t have someone along who can translate then it would be a little confusing at times. The hospital probably has people who could assist if needed but because they rarely treat foreigners (judging by seeing only two other foreigners among the thousands of Thais in several visits to the hospital) they don’t have those bilingual “ambassadors” that the private hospitals have.
Even later in the evening another doctor came by to see me. He was the resident who makes the rounds to check on all patients in the building. He also confirmed why I was there and then talked a little about my case and about Dr. Bavornrit. I asked him what he thought of my experiences at Bangkok Hospital where the doctor had actually told me I should seek treatment elsewhere because they don’t have a specialist for my case. The resident said he wasn’t surprised because there are very few foot and ankle specialists like Dr. Bavornrit in Thailand. Interesting, but still somewhat disturbing that a hospital chain the size of Bangkok Hospital Group doesn’t have such a specialist.
Around 10:30 a.m. on July 12 they came to take me to the operating room on a gurney. Once in the receiving area a nurse again confirmed why I was there. Then I was taken into the operating room and the anesthesiologist came in and talked to me about my options. He said they would use a spinal block but that I could also choose to sleep through the whole operation and I could also have an additional local so that when the spinal block wore off in four or five hours my foot would stay numb and I would experience no pain at all for quite a while longer. I went for a mild sedative rather than being completely knocked out which resulted in a little relaxing snooze but I did awake about an hour before the operation was complete. I have never had a spinal block before and the sensation of being completely numb and immobilized from the waist down was strange and a little disturbing. But as advertised there was no pain and with the mild sedative it was quite relaxing.
When I awoke from my little snooze I could hear what sounded like a hammer and chisel in use. That’s exactly what it was as I confirmed later. The doctor said they used both a power tool and a hammer and chisel to remove the excess bone. At the completion of the operation while I was still on the table the doctor gave me this little plastic bag contain the largest of the pieces of bone that were removed. Nice little souvenir, don’t you think?
I was taken to the recovery room where they monitored my vitals for a couple of hours, then back to my room where I stayed in bed while the spinal block wore off. I experienced virtually no side effects, no nausea or dizziness and no pain at all. Nurses came in every couple of hours to check my vitals and feed be paracetamol. By that night the spinal block had worn off but the local in my leg kept my foot completely numb until the next morning. Even then there was no pain. It wasn’t until the next night at home that I felt some pain in my foot but the combination of paracetamol and Arcoxia that they gave me kept it to a minimum.
Since everything seemed to be fine and I showed no signs of complications they discharged me on the morning following the surgery. The bill came to a total of 22,700 baht or about 760 U.S. dollars. That was for everything – operation fee, all hospital fees and materials, room and food. That’s a shot of the hospital bill below.
Overall the experience was quite good. So now I wait a couple of weeks and then go back for follow-up with the doctor. Hopefully the epilogue to this saga will be a story of success.