Monday, October 11th, 2021
11:45 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I just got back to the guest house from the hospital and the vaccine clinic. The headline news is that I was successful in getting the second dose of Pfizer. I was hopeful that this would happen, but I wasn’t entirely confident that it would. I’m so glad that it worked out. Exactly HOW it worked out, I’m not really sure. My experience on this second visit stands in stark contrast to my first visit.
For one thing, as happens often in Mae Sot, it was pouring down rain when I left to go to the hospital. This is the city of rain. And it’s surprising how much more difficult everything becomes when it is raining. Simply walking down the street becomes a challenge. It can be hard enough finding room for a lonely pedestrian in Mae Sot’s streets on a normal dry day. On a day when heavy rains have left deep puddles everywhere, there is even less room. Deep puddles blocked my path multiple times, and I had to wait for a break in traffic so I could circle out onto the street and go around it. Other times, I would circle the puddle on the left, but then I had to be wary of passing vehicles. More than once, I had to dodge out of the line of fire as a passing vehicle’s tires went through the puddle and sent up sheets of water in my direction. I was also somewhat distracted by holding onto my umbrella and thinking about the vaccination ahead. Once, I was so distracted that I forgot to monitor all the traffic coming up behind me, and I got clipped by a small white car. It passed within inches of me: so close, in fact, that its mirror slammed into my right elbow. Technically, you could say that I was in a car accident on my way to the vaccination clinic.
Simply getting into the hospital was more of a challenge this time as well. People everywhere were shaking off their umbrellas, taking off rain ponchos, and otherwise blocking the entranceway and doorways. The hospital was much more crowded than before. I made my way to the sixth floor, and found it quite busy. On my first visit, the entire place was nearly empty. I counted 220 chairs at that time, and I believe five of them were occupied. This time, all the chairs appeared to be filled with people.
The check-in table at the front was equally busy, and I noticed with dismay that everyone appeared to be clutching some papers or forms. And many had bright red cards with numbers clearly printed on them. I had nothing but the simple, pink appointment slip to hand over. Not knowing what I was supposed to do, I presented my pink slip and my passport to one of the women at the table. And she indicated with sign language that she wanted my stack of forms. Where were my forms? Alas, I had no stack of forms to give her. No one had given me anything on my last visit, and I hadn’t seen anywhere to get forms on this visit either. The woman at the table pointed to the office windows and indicated I should go there. At the first window, I was pleased to see the same friendly and helpful English-speaking woman as from my first visit. I’m not sure she recognized me, but I like to think that she did. Things were different here, as well, however. The place was far busier, and she didn’t have the time to hold my hand and walk me through the process. She handed me a form to fill out and then said something about how I should go “wait in the room”.
I tried to clarify what she meant. Which room, for example? And who or what should I wait for? Shouldn’t I hand in this form after I’d filled it out? Shouldn’t I register in some fashion? Or was I already registered? Do I have a registration or ID number? Am I on a list? I simply didn’t know. She wasn’t able to tell me much more than what she had already said, so I had no choice but to leave the window and take my chances. I wandered around for a while until I found a table where I could uncomfortably bend over and fill out this form. It asked me for all the same information that I had registered with them last time. I assumed all of this data was in their computer system, but the way the world works, you must fill out the same papers again. It appeared that all evidence of my previous visit and my first vaccine had been wiped clean and I was starting from scratch.
I’d been told to just go to some kind of room and wait, but that seemed odd. Now that I’d filled out the form, shouldn’t I hand it in somewhere? So I went back to the same window. I was very apologetic for bothering her again, but I just wanted to confirm what I was supposed to do next. And she repeated that I should just go “sit in the room”, and she waved her hand to my left somewhere. I left the window and walked in the direction she indicated, and to my surprise, there was a room with a sign above it that said 2nd Dose Pfizer. So, there was an official and separate place where this happened.
There were three connected rooms, in fact. The first two rooms were filled with people sitting on chairs. The third room had a table with some medical equipment on it. It seemed odd to me that I should just locate a random empty chair and sit down. At this point, I had done nothing in the way of registering. No one was officially aware of my existence. Shouldn’t there be some kind of system where they take note of me? So as I entered this room, I approached a woman in a nursing uniform, and she took a look at my form and then waved me toward the third room at the back. Apparently, I had to get my blood pressure and pulse taken and have them noted on the form. I went back to that room, and a nurse just happened to be leaving as I arrived. There were three blood pressure cuffs and some stethoscopes scattered about on the table, so I took a seat in one of the chairs and waited for the nurse to return. I waited quite a long time, but she didn’t come back. Finally, another patient like myself came into the room. He was from Pakistan, he told me, and he said that the nurse wasn’t coming back and there was no point waiting. Apparently, we were supposed to take our own blood pressure. I tried to wrap the cuff around my upper arm and start the machine, but I couldn’t figure it out. I eventually gave up and just wrote down what I thought was an appropriate blood pressure and pulse on the form and left.
Back in one of the main rooms, I tried to hand my completed form over to a nurse there, but she just grunted at me and waved me towards the chairs and left. I wasn’t happy about this, but everyone kept telling me to just sit in a chair and wait for an “officer” to come talk to me. So I just sat down in a random chair and began waiting. It was very stressful for me, because I like to know what is going on. I’ve been in many similar situations in my lifetime in various countries, and it has never turned out well. I will be told to go sit down and wait, and I will end up sitting there for hours, waiting patiently, and nothing will happen. I will just be forgotten.
I took some deep breaths. I even closed my eyes and attempted a rudimentary kind of meditation. I imagined myself sitting beside one of the rushing rivers in Umphang and listening to the flow of the water while butterflies landed on my arms and a gentle breeze swirled around my head. Imagining this scene actually did make me feel better, but it didn’t improve my situation. When I opened my eyes, I was still just sitting there with no clue what was going on. I still had not registered or made my presence officially known to anyone there, so how could anyone know about me? How could it ever be my turn to get vaccinated? How would any officer know to even come to talk to me?
I endured this uncertainty for as long as I could. I even turned to the man sitting beside me, another man from Pakistan, and I tried to ask him what he knew of the situation and what would happen next. Unfortunately, he seemed to know as little as I did. I eventually got up and went back to the window with the English-speaking woman. I did my best to appear sheepish and apologetic for bothering her again. But I really felt like I had missed a step and she just didn’t know that. Surely, I had to register somewhere with someone. I tried to make my concerns more clear this time, and I said something like, “I’m trying to understand the system. It’s just that no one here officially knows that I’m here, that I exist.” But then this woman pointed behind her to another woman in a nursing uniform, and she said, “She knows you exist.” I didn’t know who this woman was, but perhaps she was in charge. But I guess the point was that someone was personally aware that I existed. I didn’t know what this meant, but, apparently, I could relax in one of those chairs and not worry.
I still worried, however. I could make no sense out of the activity going on around me in the rooms where I found a chair. There was no order or system that I could understand. Occasionally, a rather gruff woman would come in and kind of wave her hand at a random bunch of people and indicate that they should get up and go somewhere else. But I don’t know why she selected those six people in particular. Every time she came in, she seemed to pick out another area of the room at random. No one was sitting in assigned chairs, and she didn’t seem to be moving through the rows or sections in any kind of order. She certainly wasn’t consulting any kind of list or computer printout of appointment slots and times.
And in my case, I kept getting up and leaving the room, vacating my chair each time. I worried about what this would mean for the one woman who knew that I existed. One time, I went to talk to the woman at the window. Another time I went to the bathroom. And a third time, I left to retrieve my umbrella, which I had forgotten at the spot where I’d originally filled out the form (the form which no one had looked at or taken from me). I could have come back and sat down in a different chair each time. I could have taken a new seat in an entirely different room each time. So, how would it ever be my turn to be chosen among the lucky six? Where was this woman who was aware of my existence? I never saw her again. And I had one funny encounter, because the path to the bathroom took me down the rows of 220 chairs in the big main room. And as I walked past them, a nurse there waved at me and pointed to the next empty chair in her row. She was strongly encouraging me to come and sit down. And I saw that a vaccination team with a trolley loaded down with needles was making its way along that row. So, I could easily have just sat down in that row and perhaps gotten a shot. The nurse there was simply waving down anyone who happened to wander nearby. But I don’t even know what the people in that row were being injected with. I had no idea why I was sitting in random chairs in that other room or what I was waiting for there, but it seemed best to return there and wait. I’d been told multiple times to do this, and it was the only thing I knew for sure.
After what felt like a long time, the gruff woman came in and seemed to wave her hand in the general direction of the area where I was sitting. The man from Pakistan beside me got up, and he indicated that I should get up, too. Apparently, he knew more about the system than I did. I guess my time had come. I still had not registered with anyone or any system. I had not handed in any type of form or document or shown any kind of ID. So I don’t know how they even knew who I was or what I was there for. But I was included in this group of six, so I joined them.
Left to my own devices, I would have walked out into the main room with the 220 chairs and taken a seat there. That is, after all, where I got the first vaccine dose. But the man from Pakistan stopped me and indicated that we were supposed to go into the office. I had no idea what that meant, but I followed his lead, and it turned out there was a second room behind the office, and this was the designated spot where you got your second dose. The 220 chairs in the main area were for the first-dosers. We second-dosers went to this second much smaller room tucked away behind the office. As I walked through the door into the office, the woman behind me who was pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair slammed the wheelchair into the ankle of my left foot. The foot rest ripped open the back of my left heel and tore a bunch of skin off, and I sat there in this room on my new chair with blood dripping down into my sandal.
I didn’t see any particular order to what was happening in this room either. There was a random grouping of empty chairs available, and we six just sat down in the chairs that were free. I still hadn’t registered. My name hadn’t been written down anywhere. No computer screen or record had been accessed. I saw that other people had red tickets with numbers on them. But I didn’t have one of those. The only paper I had was the random form that I had filled out on my own and which no one had looked at yet. But none of this seemed to matter, because a nurse or doctor eventually showed up and started going down the rows of chairs and sticking needles into arms. Eventually, it was my turn. A nurse took my form, put a sticker on it, and then I got an injection. And that was it. She kept the form, and I was left with nothing. No one at any point had looked at my form. There were boxes there to be checked to indicate whether I had had severe and terrible reactions and side-effects to the first dose. Of course, I didn’t have any adverse reactions, and I just ticked “NO” beside every item. But if I had ticked YES to each one and indicated I had dangerous underlying health problems, no one would have known because no one actually spoke to me or went over my form. And now that I got my second dose, I had no idea what was supposed to happen next.
The thing is that from my point of view, this was only half the battle. I appeared to have gotten my second dose of Pfizer. I was very happy about that and extremely grateful. But I had no paperwork at all to prove this. I had seen the needle go into my arm with my own eyes. That’s true. Yet, just as important, I needed a vaccine certificate or a vaccine passport. And it wasn’t clear to me how this was going to happen. I tried to ask one of the attending nurses, and she simply waved me back towards the beleaguered woman who spoke some English. She in turn waved me towards a wall where they had tacked up some step-by-step instructions in English. One sheet had the instructions for getting a vaccination certificate. The other sheet had instructions for getting the vaccine passport. I didn’t even know that they were two different things or what they even looked like.
The instructions looked relatively straightforward at first. For both of these documents, I had to go down to the first floor and visit Room 101. There, I would apply for both of these documents. And then I had to go to Room 107 and pay 50 baht for each. And then I had to bring the receipt back to the 6th floor and present it to the “officer”. However, there were issues. For one thing, I had to register with a 13-digit number, but I had no such number. In fact, even if I did go down to Room 101 to apply for the vaccine certificate or the vaccine passport, I had nothing in the way of proof to show them that I had gotten vaccinated at all. Shouldn’t I have some kind of paperwork by this point? But I didn’t have a thing. I certainly didn’t have a 13-digit number. Where was I supposed to get this magical number? I turned back to my English-speaking clerk, and she simply waved this mysterious number away and said it didn’t matter. I didn’t understand how it could not matter, but I had no choice but to just move on to the next stage.
I took the stairs down to the first floor, because the elevators were packed by this point. And, of course, there was no Room 101 or Room 107 anywhere in sight. I eventually figured out that they meant Window 101 and Window 107. So I went to Window 101, but it was completely empty. No one was there. Luckily, I ran into my new friend from Pakistan again, and he indicated that I had to go to Window 102, not 101. At Window 102, I wasn’t sure what to do. I just told the woman there that I would like a vaccine certificate and a vaccine passport, please. And I had nothing in the way of papers to give her in support of my request. It all felt very strange. She didn’t seem to think it was strange, though. She just asked for my passport. And then she handed me a payment slip. I was supposed to take this slip to Room 108 (NOT 107), and pay them 100 baht. I did that (at Window 108), and my payment slip was stamped, and I went all the way back up to the sixth floor. With no clue what “officer” I was supposed to hand this receipt to, I had no choice but to go back to my long-suffering English-speaking clerk. Very apologetically, I held out my receipt to her and waited for more instructions. And she told me something about Line. This happened during my visits to the other hospital as well, and I don’t understand it at all. But it appeared that I had to follow the instructions in Step #4 of the posted step-by-step instructions. And this is what it said:
- Add friend LINE application and send the photo of your passport. LINE ID @706szjdb
This might as well have been written in gibberish, assuming that gibberish is a language. I didn’t have the slightest clue what any of this meant. What was I supposed to do? I don’t even know exactly what LINE is. I think it is some kind of social media messaging app, but I’m not sure about that. And why would I even have a LINE account? Is everyone in Thailand just expected to have one? Is this, perhaps, where the mysterious 13-digit number comes from? And what friend was I supposed to add to my LINE account? What was this application I needed to submit to this mysterious friend?
Once again, I had to adopt the posture of a sheepish child and explain to the English-speaking clerk that I had no idea what I was expected to do. I sensed that she had had enough of me by this point. She had other work to do, and she couldn’t be expected to do everything for me. But I honestly didn’t feel bad. I’m positive that every single foreigner that shows up for their vaccination clinic has these exact same questions. And they must have to answer our questions a hundred times a day. Surely, they’d eventually figure out that the system wasn’t exactly working. I mean, was there a system? As far as I could tell, no official record had yet been made of my vaccination, so how would sending a copy of my passport to this mysterious LINE ID mean anything to anyone? I was flummoxed. The clerk grabbed another sheet of paper and stuck it to the window so I could read it. And it simply repeated the sentence from Step 4 but in much larger letters. But just because the letters were bigger, it didn’t help me to understand what it meant. All I could do was shrug my shoulders at her and say again that I had honestly had no idea what I was supposed to do. I wasn’t being lazy. I just didn’t understand. I could guess that LINE was some kind of social messaging program. And I could go back to the guest house, get on WiFi, download LINE and create an account. But what then? What does “Add friend LINE application” mean? What friend? Who do I add? In the end, she simply took my passport and took a photo of it with her personal phone. And then she told me I was done, and I just needed to come back in two weeks and my documents would be waiting for me. I still wanted more than that. I was glad that she was helping me. And it seemed like she was going to do the work for me and send my passport photo through LINE to this mysterious LINE ID, bypassing the need for this friend. But even so, what did that mean? I couldn’t help but notice that I was walking out of the hospital with nothing. I didn’t have a single scrap of paper or document or form or registration number of any kind. I just had the same empty hands I’d arrived with. My only evidence of being vaccinated was in the memory of this English-speaking clerk who had been dealing with me all morning. She and her friend knew I “existed”. But that’s it. And she told me to come back in two weeks. And my hope is that she will still be working there and will remember me. But I have no guarantee of that.
And that’s pretty much the end of the story. I didn’t bring a camera with me, so I don’t have a video record of any of this. But I’m fine with that. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable waving one of my cameras around in there anyway. Getting vaccinated is somewhat routine for me, of course, but it’s still a medical procedure, and I didn’t think all the other people in those rooms with me would have appreciated having their faces plastered all over social media. It felt like there were privacy issues to consider in that situation. And many of the people in my group getting their second dose of Pfizer were quite elderly. I mean QUITE elderly, and a lot of human frailty was on display. I had the impression that a number of these people were normally housebound if not bedridden, and this trip to the vaccination clinic was the first time they’d been out in public in a long time. They would not have been able to walk on their own. It was not the kind of atmosphere I felt comfortable capturing on video.
I have just a couple of random thoughts to finish this story. One is that it has often struck me that there are two sides to an effective and efficient bureaucratic system. One side is that such a system should exist and the staff should know to implement it. That is important. But just as important, in my opinion, is that the customers or guests should also be aware of the system. It’s not enough that a system is in place. The people the system is meant to serve should be AWARE of this system and how it works. Without that awareness, the system is kind of pointless. It’s entirely possible that this vaccination clinic was running like clockwork and there was a powerful and efficient system in operation and all the staff were executing it properly. But that doesn’t amount to much if the people showing up to be vaccinated, such as me, don’t know anything about the system and have no clue what is going on. It’s possible that there was a full and complete computer record of my two visits to this hospital and that a 13-digit number had been assigned to me. But I had seen no evidence of this.
Of course, when it comes to my dumbness, I have to shoulder much or most of the blame for the simple reason that I am a foreigner and don’t speak or read Thai. Perhaps the structure of this system was perfectly obvious to all the Thai people because they could understand what people were telling them and the instructions written in Thai made more sense. Somehow, though, I doubt that. I didn’t get the impression that anyone understood any better than I did. People just sat around and waited to be told what to do next.
Another thought that occurs to me is that I just noticed that the timing for the vaccination certificate and the vaccination passport might be completely different. I took photographs of all the instructions posted on the walls (and of any papers that passed through my hands), and I notice now that one of the steps says that we will get an appointment to return to pick up our certificate.
And in the next line, it says that “on the appointment date, please inform the name and the date that you request for the vaccine passport.” So it appears that two weeks from now, I have an appointment to get my certificate, but NOT the passport. It reads like I have to apply again in two weeks to get the passport and provide some kind of request date. That doesn’t make sense to me either. I submitted my application for both and paid for both today. Why do I have to apply a second time for the passport two weeks from now? Why can’t both be produced at the same time? I asked multiple times to make sure that I would be getting both the certificate and the passport. And I was assured I would get both. One is required for domestic travel in Thailand. And the other is required for international travel. But according to their instructions, I will get only one of them in two weeks. And I just heard from a friend of mine here that he got his vaccination certificate four weeks ago, and he is still waiting to hear about the vaccine passport. So, the confusion will continue for another month at least.
And my final note is that it strikes me as funny that I left this morning to get a vaccine to protect me from physical harm caused by a virus. And I returned to the guest house with an elbow smashed by a car, an ankle ripped open by a wheelchair, a brain turned to mush by stress, and a body feeling overwhelmed by fatigue. I’m not sure how far ahead I am in this game.