I had a bad feeling when I was dropped off by an AirAsia cab driver who had been lost every once a while during our drive to the destination. Yes, it was hot as usual. And yes, it was the clinic of destination. But the huge arrow sign pointing to the right gave me uneasy feelings. So I called my colleague who had reached the place 10 mins earlier. She sure said it was not the right place. You know what? I kind of knew.

She kindly sent off her doctor friend who works at the site to where I was. I thought I’d be melting like an ice cream by the time the friend got here, so I hid myself in the shade of the big wall. Taking a look around, this is another typical view of Selangor, Malaysia. It’s quite different from a suburban area like Subang Jaya, where I live. And it’s almost a universe apart from KL the capital, where you only see skyscrapers and lights and glitter and big things. It was tranquil and the time felt passing slowly. Yes, I was damn late for the meeting already in 20 mins or so. It was a beautiful day anyway.

The doctor friend arrived. Good Lord, I was not yet melted ice cream. However, we together discovered the gate was locked. She said she would need the key. I said I could climb on the wall easily so we wouldn’t need one, but she insisted I didn’t do anything stupid. Oh, I thought it was a good idea to save time, but OK. After all, I was a college professor of UM. She called someone, and the gate was opened. When we got to the clinic building, it was about 40 min. past the appointment time. Nobody complained. Malaysia is a good country.

And we worked. We are planning to carry a study about asthma outpatients in 2 governmental clinics to collect the detailed info of the patients. Doing so we’ll build a small registry for data analysis. We’re wondering if we could use data on their local EMR system to export certain blocks of the variables to our newly-built registry so we could avoid data-entry errors and ease the doctors’ typing burden.

There are restrictions in the system that burden us. However, we came up with some alternative ways. So the meeting was successful. Thanks folks. I was once again out. And it was hot.