The situation has improved in the last few years, but medical care in Cambodia has been problematic because of a lack of hospital facilities and trained medical professionals. For anything more than a simple broken arm, we traveled to Bangkok. And for serious medical emergencies, we arranged medical evacuation flights.
I have been on four medical evacuation flights in my time as a missionary.
The most interesting of these — when I was preparing to come to Cambodia — was the evacuation of a deaf man from Tel Aviv to Hong Kong. The Catholic deaf group in Hong Kong had organized a pilgrimage to Israel, Lourdes and Rome. We had with us a deaf man with intellectual disabilities.
A few hours after our nighttime arrival in Israel, I was called to his room at 10 p.m. and found him coughing up huge amounts of blood from a throat condition triggered by the aircraft cabin pressure.
We got him admitted to a hospital, and at about 2 a.m., I said I would go back to the kibbutz where we were staying and return in the morning. The hospital staff said, “No, you are not leaving! We don’t know sign language. This man does not know Hebrew or English. You are staying.” I stayed — for five days — while the rest of our group toured Israel and went on to Lourdes.
It took four days to stop the blood flowing into his lungs. The hospital said he could then go — but couldn’t fly unless accompanied by a doctor. It took another day to get a Hong Kong doctor to Tel Aviv with a huge bag of medical equipment.
Eventually the deaf man and I were in bulkhead seats in business class in a 747 bound for Hong Kong with a stop in Bombay. He was still coughing up some blood, so I tried to stay awake during the eight-hour flight to India to follow him into the toilet each time so I could wipe up the blood there.
We stopped in Bombay only to let people off. Suddenly, alarms sounded, the lights flashed, the cabin door swung upwards, and the evacuation slide deployed. The crew had not disarmed that door upon landing.
The pilot assessed the situation and said to just cut the emergency slide loose and leave it. It dropped to the tarmac, and two crew members and I hung on to the aircraft door sticking straight out, 45 feet above the ground, to pull it closed. And then we flew on to Hong Kong.
An ambulance met us there and took us to a hospital where the man’s mother and a travel agent were waiting. Knowing the deaf man was now in good hands, I got my return ticket from the travel agent and returned to the Hong Kong airport and boarded a flight to Rome. I was in Hong Kong less than four hours.
Seventeen hours later, I landed in Rome, where the group, coming from Lourdes, had arrived before me. I met them at the hotel and took a shower, and then we all piled into a bus and went to see the sunset at the Colosseum, where I was to be the sign language interpreter. It was quite a trip.
Father Charles Dittmeier is a priest of the Archdiocese of Louisville who serves the deaf community and English-speaking Catholics in Cambodia.
