homeless

Standing in line is always annoying. When it’s because the doctor in the hospital your flat-mate spent the night in did not write out a prescription but rather scribbled the name of a drug on a piece of paper it’s ESPECIALLY annoying. Let me explain this. She woke up in the middle of the night with a high fever. H1-N1 is on everyone’s mind. She woke me up at 1:30 am and we went to the hospital. I was very confused and for a moment was actually grateful it wasn’t time to go for class. What an illusion. We also felt lucky that there was a hospital just around the corner. Everyone was asleep. A guard (since in China there’s ALWAYS a security guard) directed us to the ER. A nurse on her cell-phone was startled by us. She put on her little hat and came out to assist us. A doctor came, probably in his early 30s; he looked really young and giddy. The first thing he did was to send me to another building to buy a notebook where he could write his diagnosis. I almost walked in the intensive care unit. A startled nurse (many of those, let me tell you) sent me away. I found the right building. A sleepy guard with a lazy eye helped me wake up the girl behind the counter, I paid 5 jiao (5 eurocents) and got the stupid notebook. It looked like my school notebook. The lady behind the counter seemed to share my irritation.

My flat-mate’s fever was quite high, the doctor concluded after taking her temperature with a thermometer that had been soaking in a murky-looking liquid. She needed a blood test. I was sent again to the other building where the lazy-eyed guard helped me wake up another doctor. He analyzed the sample on some fancy-looking computers. The building was so dirty and derelict that this sort of reassured me and surprised me at the same time. I came back to a teary-eyed friend. They wanted to give her x-rays. She was tired, weak and scared. I reassured her. One X-ray won’t give you cancer…We followed our friendly doctor. I don’t remember when I paid, I was sort of in a constant state of shock. Speaking about medical things in Chinese at 3 in the morning is not my favorite activity, although I had to do it various times over the coming week.

The state you’re in when you’ve only slept for 3 hours and then find yourself in the position of translator/comforter/choice-maker/bellboy is one close to sleepwalking. You try to figure out what’s normal and what isn’t and to pretend everything is ok, but it’s scary. “do you know what H1N1 is?” we replied that we’d come because we feared that’s what she had. He almost jumped. “they have it in America?” “She doesn’t know anyone who has it… maybe in the airplane?” We had to explain this various times. Particularly to a stern-looking doctor who seemed to be higher up in the hierarchy. “do you have any Chinese friends? Did you get this in China?” We were tired and confused, we also had no answers to some of their more cryptic questions.

At some point, while we were waiting outside the x-ray room observing an insect as long as my pinkie crawling around the hallway, they decided that she did not, in fact, have H1-N1. I was sent to buy a couple of I.V. and some antibiotics from a sleepy-looking pharmacist inside the hospital. I first had to pay the grumpy lady at the cash-desk and then the doctor took it on himself to pound on the pharmacist’s door. As we returned to the ER, he asked me if procedures were that 麻烦 (bothersome) in foreign hospitals. I diplomatically replied that I didn’t really know because my father was a doctor. He commented that every country has it’s麻烦 aspects. I nodded in silence. My friend and I were led to a room with beds. A sign in front of the room said “observation ward.” A few people were sleeping in the beds, but the nurse turned on all the lights and spoke loudly. We were embarrassed. Eventually S-my flatmate-gave in and lay down on one of the beds. The sheets were dirty and stained. I tried to sleep. I really did. The problem is that there is such a thing as a chair that is too hard for me to sleep on. Aside for the fact that it wasn’t cold it was actually worse than the benches in the Vienna airport where I spent the night a couple of years ago. Aside from that, the fact that S felt woozy and threw up and that we could hear a baby crying hysterically, an old lady shouting and someone coughing the whole night long did not contribute to my peace of mind.

The next morning I stared in bewilderment as people came and left the ward. Sheets were never changed; at most, a nurse would come by and fold the duvet. It seemed as though EVERYBODY and their mother were getting an I.V. According to an Italian class-mate of mine it’s wildly popular here. I’m not sure what that actually means, though. We waited and waited until her IV was finally done around 10 am. We were confused. No one seemed to pay any attention to us. Finally we managed to grab a doctor’s attention. She was to come back in the afternoon. And she did not have H1-N1 because her throat didn’t hurt. She should go buy the medicine that the night shift doctor had told us to buy. She made it seem easy.

We went to the so-called “out-patient pharmacy” at the far entrance of the hospital. A nurse sitting at a desk shouted at her colleagues. They had the medicine. We had to go pay for it she said. We headed towards the cash desk in another building. We had to stop and ask along the way, but finally got there. We explained our problem to a nurse at the information desk. She stared at us and pointed at a cash window. It’s horrible how your exuberance and feeling of having succeeded can just crash when from one window you’re directed back again. I really hoped it was not the long line. The nurse at the information desk confirmed my worst fears. We had to stand in the long line. At the end of the line a doctor sitting behind what looked like a school desk wrote out prescriptions. I collapsed on a chair as SP (my other flat-mate) took care of S and stood in line. I stared blankly at the doctor who wrote out prescriptions like an old calligraphy master or a cleric in Medieval Europe. I handed out a yuan to a man with a horrible-looking cancer on his neck. He continued moving up the line pointing at the protuberance on his neck and pushing his hand forward. The doctor now looked more like the local letter-writer in a town of illiterates. People peered over his shoulder and commented on his beautiful handwriting. I stared at the disgusting ads against smoking that were being passed on a big tv-screen overhead. By the time we got the medicine I was in a complete state of shock. That means that the 6 flights of stairs I had to walk up to make it back home were particularly painful that morning.