Experience

Oh joy, the life of a traveller. Yesterday was a splendid trip down memory lane. It took me all the way back to Berlin, New Years Eve, 2002.

Oh the memories! Some time that afternoon I shifted my nonchalant gaze from a featureless beige ceiling to the only window in the room, intent on inspecting the festivities from a viewing pane which provided a glimpse of a few building rooftops and a rather unexplosive sky. I could hear the fireworks though. The consistent pop of disturbed air glided into the room and left me reflective. The world was going on. Somewhere, nearby, lots of people were having lots of fun, together. I knew what I was missing but it didn’t make me sad. Three weeks of travelling alone and three days in hospital had already dulled my already weak sense of social purpose.

I’d purchased and eaten vegetarian spaghetti from a kebab house down the road from my hostel. The Accused. When I sat down to eat it I was tired, lonely and cold. I’d walked round Berlin all day. Peered at the street lights reflected in the ice sheets forming over a small waterway and shivered; visited a big, dark, empty gothic church; walked around the German parliament and its memorial to the Jews and Nazi Germany. I peeled off the steamy plastic take-away container and peered at my meal. Jabbed at it with my fork a little. Sighed inside. It had little bits of beef mince in it. Crap, fuck, fuckwit shop owner. Two voices of reason wriggled into my consciousness, my Mother’s, of course, and the Do’s and Don’t’s section of my Lonely Planet. But at the same time a voice which has been with me long before I could understand my mothers tongue, and one which I personally have always found hard to resist, ordered them silent. It was My Stomach and he ordered me to eat. Bad move. He regretted it.

I spent the next twelve hours alternating the two holes which mark the beginning and end of the digestive process over a toilet bowl. I couldn’t even return to my room, it was too far, there was an extra door in the way. Brief pit-stops were spent on a conveniently placed couch outside the bathroom. In the morning, I walked downstairs and fell asleep on a pile of beanbags. The receptionist came and brought me a cup of tea. I drank it, then went upstairs and sat on the toilet again. When I came back down he told me I should go to the hospital, I could walk there, it wasn’t far. It wasn’t far!? I’m explosive man, come on! But I went, there wasn’t really anything left in me anyway. I felt like a lost ghost drifting down the street, but I found it and after a while, was admitted.

They almost took my appendix out, I was on a drip for four days, I didn’t eat or go to the bathroom for three days, I woke up one night covered in my own blood after my drip fell out. But that’s another story. I’m meant to be talking about yesterday.

Yesterday I’d been sick for two days. My nostrils were a tributary of green slime. My throat was as sore as I can remember in living memory. My whole body ached and I was struck by the kind of lethargy which made it difficult to get up and get a glass of water. I wasn’t getting any better either. So I called a friend. Smart move Stefan, smart move. She has almost finished studying to be a paediatric nurse here, she’s from Beijing originally but has been in Kunming for a while, she got me my teaching job. I met her at the hospital and we went and saw a doctor.

Yun, that’s my friend’s name, walked straight in and found one of her teachers, me in tow quietly assessing the general appearance of the place, which you really shouldn’t do in China, because huge cracks in the floor and dirty walls doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad hospital here. I also caught a glimpse of a young female doctor with a surgical face mask on, who struck a striking resemblance to an assassin you’d see in a Japanese ninja movie. So I got my first little bit of paperwork and went and saw a doctor.

One remaining constant about my foreign hospital experiences is that there always seems to be an invisible woman dying awfully loudly in a bed in the same room which I am admitted. She does not receive any treatment, not even a side-glance, while the doctors calmly assess the patients with runny noses and mild fevers.

I explained to Yun what was wrong with me and she communicated it to the doctor and then the doctor asked me what was wrong with my anyway, as doctors do, and should do. So I explained. Did I have a fever? I don’t know, don’t think so. She took me temperature, 38.5. Hmm, yes, I had a temperature and suddenly felt it, geez it was hot in that cramped room with the invisible woman writhing in agony behind me. I wiped my brow. She took a look at my throat and mumbled the Chinese word for serious, then told Yun to come have a look. Yun made a noise I interpreted as a bad noise, she agreed. At that point, I also explained that I’d just got back from Thailand and had been bitten by lots of mosquitoes. Malaria, maybe, no? No, throat infection, but we’ll do a blood test.

So off we went. I had to wait behind a little boy and his father at the blood test clinic. He saw me and stared. Fair enough little boy, I know I look different, I know what you’re thinking, ‘foreigner, foreigner, god, foreigner, look, foreigner, so different, foreigner, so strange, foreigner…’ and so on. I’ve felt that look a thousand times. But I got my revenge. He cried, he bawled, just like any little boy or girl from any country would, when faced with the gross, unexpected injustice of a needle prick in the finger, followed by blood extraction from that prick. So blood test and then a ten-minute wait for the results. You can actually watch them peering into the microscope and mixing samples from behind a glass dividing panel from where you sit. China - like restaurant, like hospital. Then back to the doctor.

No malaria. But I needed antibiotics and a drip, oh the wonderful drip again! So we went off and paid for my consultation, $4, and my antibiotics and 4 drip bags and blood test, $25. Collected the little vials of medicine stuff, went here, went there, got pushed in on a couple of times, were told this little bit of paper wasn’t complete, this other one wasn’t clear enough, so on. At this stage I just couldn’t stop thanking Yun enough, she revealed to me her foreign friends had come to call her Supernurse, I concurred.

Eventually we found a bed in the outpatient department and they paired me with another waiguoren (foreigner), a seventy nine year old German man with a fever, sore throat and aweful hospital temperament. Over the course of the next four hours he’d raise himself like a mummy every fifteen minutes and demand to go home. The absolutely lovely head of the Chinese Medicine Department, who had worked in Germany for two years and could speak German, was overseeing him and would plead with him to no avail ‘bitte, bitte!’, before ordering him in terse German to lie back down, to which he reluctantly obliged.

She was hilarious, every time she had to deal with him she would mumble in Chinese about how troublesome and difficult this old man was, how she wanted to hit him, asking me and Yun if we agreed, we would nod and laugh. It was Friday evening, she had plans, she was working overtime for no extra pay, so this one patient could talk German to someone. I found out that every Chinese hospital has a Chinese Medicine Department. She made me Chinese medicine tea and felt my pulse for five minutes to assess my heart, my health, my general well being. She gave me my first acupuncture I’ve ever had. A needle in each earlobe - pressure points for the throat.

So yeah, I got a shot of penicillin in the bum and my drip started flowing. I even got some noodles. Bree and Matilda, Aussie classmates, came and saw me, and then had to evacuate the room when the old German went to piss in a container. But they came back and stayed for a while, which was nice. Yun stayed the whole time and even dressed a blister on my foot – lifesaver, Supernurse! Then I went home with a little red receipt and some Chinese herbs feeling a whole bundle better. I’m going back today for some more drips, they love their drips here; give them out on a whim.

So there you go, be a little afraid, but don’t be bored. You’re sick, you can’t do anything about it. Enjoy the hospital experience. I do, if I can.