Sickness on the Road
Trip Start
Feb 03, 2008
1
16
33
Trip End
Aug 16, 2009
Tongren,
Qinghai,
China
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Dan is sick. Fever, chills. Urgent bathroom visits.
We're in a beautiful town, Tongren, but staying in the nastiest hotel in China. Mold on the ceiling, wall paper in shreds. Only one precarious electrical outlet already supplying the TV, the lamp and the water heater with intermittent juice.
They don't give us a key for the room; when I want to get back in after paying for the room I have to hunt down the surly attendant who won't even look up from her cell phone game. She plays it as she walks down the hall and lets me back into the room. I could have been anyone.
If Dan had been in any shape to move to a different hotel we would have.
Outside, a garrison of soldiers practice marching in the courtyard. Dan says later that their bugles and shouts mix with his fevered dreams till he thought he was marching with them.
We stay two nights. The first night is the worst. Dan's got the duvets from both beds piled on top of him, both of our Nalgene bottles filled with boiling water trying to warm him. He can't get warm, he says.
At seven the next morning I get up to try to find a pharmacy. He needs some diarrhea medicine. Our little pink Pepto-Bismol tablets aren't designed for this kind of sickness.
The pharmacy is closed until 8:30 so I buy some orange juice, bottled water and more toilet paper.
When I get back to the room Dan remarks on the color of his waste. Red. It's blood.
Forget the pharmacy, he needs a hospital. In China, it's rare to visit a doctor in his or her private practice. Doctors keep their office hours at the hospital, so any ailment requires a visit to the hospital. I have gone to the hospital a few times in the last two years, though always before because of an eye or skin infection. Never for something this bad. And before, we always had a Chinese friend to translate for us.
Dan doesn't want to go to the hospital, but I read out the health section from the back of the Lonely Planet to him about dysentery and its symptoms and convince him. We take a taxi down the hill to the place the receptionist of our hotel recommended.
The hospital isn't open yet. A coughing man and his wife, in traditional Tibetan clothes, are the only ones there. They're waiting at the cashier's desk. The cashier, dressed like a nurse, ignores them and counts her money. They try to interrupt her and she barks at them like a cross sheepdog. The man sings to himself in a low voice. The woman pulls the ends of her bright pink head scarf over her mouth and avoids looking at Dan and me.
Eventually, the nurse/cashier deigns to open her window. More patients are coming in. I get across what's wrong with Dan and she points us to a small office opposite hers. We don't have to pay yet, for some reason.
The sign on the door says 'internal medicine' and there are posters with diagrams showing germ transfer via coughing. We can't read the Chinese but the meaning is clear. Dan thinks we should take some for our classrooms too, but I think we can get them back in Zunyi. Today we need to focus on getting some help for Dan, without our usual assistance of a translator.
There is no doctor. We're alone with a desk littered with papers and forms. There's a comfortable chair on one side of the desk and a hard wooden bench on the other side. I'm sitting on a stool near an examination table. It's sparse.
A gum-chewing young man wearing a black stylish T-shirt and a fashionable spiky, longish haircut comes in. He looks like an American teenager, but puts on a white coat and sits at the bench. He completely ignores us. Dan and I exchange glances and after about five minutes I ask him if he's the doctor. He laughs and says no.
We wait. Dan is wearing about ten layers of clothes. He looks completely out of it. I see my reflection in the window. I look worried.
Another assistant arrives, some patients follow him.
Finally the doctor comes. We've been waiting for about 45 minutes and I hope Dan can make it for a little bit longer.
I've been carefully rehearsing my speech in Chinese for what's wrong with Dan. Luckily a few months ago I had done a unit on going to the doctor for bowel troubles in my Chinese class, so I was anticipating which questions the doctor would ask even if I couldn't exactly remember the vocabulary. I remember the word for blood from the word for "vampire." Luckily, the doctor understands me. He sends us down the hall to the sample-taking room.
A harried nurse collecting urine samples from a dozen tiny children-probably due to the contaminated milk scandal, we speculate-gives Dan a cup and sends him to the bathroom.
He comes back with what looks like a glass of burgundy and gives it to her. She raises her eyebrows in surprise. She obviously hadn't expected so much blood.
We go back to the doctor's office and he prescribes a bunch of pills and an IV drip. I call our friend Alicia in Zunyi to translate the treatment exactly; the doctor's Tibetan accent is hard to understand. She says that Dan will have to have the IV for a few hours today and if he doesn't get better in two days we'll have to go to a hospital in Xining or another big city.
Getting an IV drip is standard practice in China. Pretty much every ailment seems to require this. I liken it to leeching--it's that terrible. I have a needle phobia, so when the nurse asked me to hold the tray for her while she injected Dan, I was pretty useless.
To the intense amusement of the nurse, the other patient in Dan's room and the other patient's family neither of us could watch her put the needle in Dan's arm. In fact, I cried.a little bit. That broke the ice for awhile, and the other patient, a beautiful Tibetan woman wearing an awesome faux fur-lined Tibetan coat and great silver earrings, would look at me or Dan from time to time over the next hours and chuckle.
Dan got four bottles of unknown medicine put into him, and was already feeling a bit better by the time we got back to the hotel.
He settled down to rest, and told me I should go out by myself to explore the city.
* * *
What it cost:
Terrible hotel room for two: 80 RMB
Taxi to the hospital: 3 RMB
Doctor's visit: about 5 RMB
Medicine and drip: about 80 RMB
