I've been sick the last two weeks or so. Missed a week and a half of school, and one weekend of work. (I started to get sick on Friday, and went ahead and worked through it on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But by the next weekend I was even worse, and couldn't do it.) Actually, with all the times I've been sick here, that was the first time I've called in sick to work. But I was pretty sick, and for a long time I just kept getting worse, not better. My symptoms would change, but not improve. For three or four days I literally ate almost nothing; a few bites of rice or something. Probably not eating didn't help me get better faster, but I went to the hospital (when you're sick here, you go to the hospital; I'm not sure if there are smaller clinics or "doctor's offices" or not) and they gave me IV nutrients (fructose, vitamin C, maybe more) along with my drugs.
I'm not normally given to taking medicines or visiting doctors, but that first Saturday my girlfriend told me I was really warm and went and bought a thermometer. I decided if my temperature really was so high then I would let her take me to the hospital like she wanted. It turns out I was 39.1 (102.4) in the mouth so we went. They wanted to give me some injections, but thinking that (a) I didn't want the shots, (b) I didn't want to spend the money, and (c) I would probably get better on my own like always, I didn't let them give me the shots. I was satisfied that they didn't freak out and say it was something super serious, and went home and took some leftover prescription antiviral pills as well as ibuprofen and figured I'd be better soon.
A day or two later I was not better but worse - my right tonsil had swollen to grandiose proportions, bigger than I would have thought possible. I was seriously afraid it was going to burst or something (can tonsils do that?) and so anyway we went back to the hospital. When the doctor looked into my mouth, she literally said "no way!" or "impossible!" or "it can't be!" or however you would translate that into English. In any case, this time I consented to the injections. It turns out the default way of doing injections here is via IV drip, and intramuscular shots are comparatively rare. This time, they prescribed me three bottles of stuff (I'm not sure what all, anti-inflammatories among others probably) each day for two days. After having finished that, I still wasn't better; my tonsil had shrunk back to a more normal inflamed size, but by this point my throat and mouth hurt so much I couldn't speak or eat or barely drink. My biggest concern of course was the not eating, so we went back to the doctor. This guy set me for three more days of IV, this time including the fructose and everything. Actually, I was glad that the medicine and everything was done by these IV drip bags, because getting jabbed with a needle was actually a less painful way to get fluids into me than to drink them. I wonder if that's why they do it that way: to make sure you get fluids. If so, maybe it's smart. Of course, if you have no problem drinking water or juice yourself then maybe you'd rather just get the regular shot and be done with it, and drink your fluids on your own time, in your own place.
Either way, for five days in a row I went to the hospital and sat there for several hours while getting my fluids and meds. The upside is I got a whole bunch of reading done. Most of the rest of the time, I was too tired to do anything. At times walking was hard. At times sitting up was hard. A couple days ago I finally started getting better. I'm still getting better. Today, tomorrow, and Friday we're off school for a national holiday (mid-Autumn festival), which means we have to go to school on the weekends to make up for the missed time. (Yeah, I know.) Since kids go to school on the weekends, that means that they can't take their weekend English classes on the weekends, so we teach those on the weekdays when they're off school.
Anyway I started writing this not so much to talk about my own illness (or the peculiarities of the holiday calendar) but rather about what the health care system is like, from my experience. I've been to a couple different hospitals here, several times, either for myself or accompanying a friend (or girlfriend) for their sake. In all cases -- with the exception of sitting and waiting for the 15 bottles of IV stuff they put in me -- I was actually very impressed by the speed, efficiency, and cheapness of the whole procedure. No appointments (maybe you can make them, but I never saw anybody), just walk-in, wait times are quite short (compared to my experience in the US,
even when you have an appointment, doctors are on hand to check you out pretty quickly, they prescribe something and you just walk over to the pay counter and pay for it, then take your receipt across the hall to the pharmacy counter and pick it up. And if it's just a regular drug, you're on your way. If it's something that needs injecting, you go to the injections department and they do it for you there. It's all actually fairly streamlined and efficient, and like I said, cheap, even the drugs. And no obviously more or less effective than medical care in the US, to me. No insurance (again, maybe some people have it, but not that I've seen). Being examined by a doctor costs about one US dollar per visit. (I don't think that'd exceed the deductible on my policy back home.) Last year I had to get an x-ray for something and I think that set me back like 8 or 9 USD.
This is of course in contrast to everything-fricking-else in China (e.g., my visa/residence permit, which I finally successfully picked up yesterday btw, on my fourth trip to the Public Security Bureau) which is incredibly bureaucratic and paperworky and complicated and nonsensical and, most of all, inefficient. (Even when I got internet installed in my new apartment, the company had to send representatives out 3 different times to the apartment. First for me to choose what plan I wanted and sign the papers and them to get a copy of my ID, then for the technician to come out and do the installation, then for the sales rep guy to come back again to pick up the money. Not a huge hassle for me that time, since they came to where I lived, but surely unnecessarily complicated for them!) But credit where credit is due, the healthcare delivery system seems to be pretty efficient. At least they move you in and out quickly. Presumably the results are comparably accurate/effective.
The hospitals themselves, though, are not exactly up to US standards. The floors are dirty, there are crawling and flying bugs (in the past eight months I don't think I've been bitten by mosquitos anywhere more consistently than at that hospital), the common exam rooms are shared and open so there's little privacy (visually or audially), lots of sick people surrounding you (I do wonder if part of why I didn't get better quickly was because of contracting an opportunistic infection or two sitting in that massive IV room for so many hours with other sick people filling the other hundred or so chairs). Toddlers pee on the floor and men spit on it, but that happens everywhere; if somebody throws up that gets wiped up pretty soon. People are moaning and babies crying all around you, which may be true in all hospitals (I don't really have much experience with hospitals in the US) but surely more here since there are more people in a smaller space. I assume the actual instruments they use on you are well sanitized (right?) but I did see a nurse just rinse off a handful of thermometers in the sink and that's all (but they put those under your arm, not in your mouth). One doctor who opened me up to look in my mouth actually lit a little paraffin (or something) lamp on her desk and sanitized the instrument in that before putting it in me.
But, you know, this whole not-super-clean, not-super-perfect thing is pretty much true of the whole city, and probably much of the world, compared to the suburban US environment that I was formerly used to, and is a function of population density and not necessarily poverty, but non-rich-itude. I'm used to things being that way now; I got used to it in Lima. (When I first arrived in Lima, in the taxi from the airport, all alone, seeing the run-down-edness of things, I was like, "ooookay, this is the city I chose to live in?" but by the end, or sometime in the middle, of my time there, sights like that just seemed normal. And they still do. The place I live now has rats and cockroaches and I'm glad, for example, that my mom can't see what the hallways look like, and the exterior of the building looks no different from all those other dirty Chinese apartment buildings you always see in pictures. So that kind of thing just doesn't really bother me too much anymore; this is how people in the world live.
What does bother me, probably my biggest complaint about the Chinese medical system, is that Chinese herbal medicines and Western chemical medicines are all mixed up together and not necessarily well labeled on the front (although you can, and I do, read the ingredients to see what's in the pills, and if all it is is chrysanthemum and cinnamon or whatever). I think that's important because - as much as, like I said, I don't really like to use drugs, and don't actually think them incredibly useful - Western medicine has been proven effective through scientific experiments and double-blind trials and FDA approval and what have you; this herbal stuff just hasn't. (I've tried to look for the studies - if anybody knows of studies that have been done on the effectivness of Chinese medicine, I'd love to know.) So folk wisdom, tradition, is mixed up with the science. Surely that happens somewhat in the US too; I'm sure that some advice doctors give to treat, say, a common cold, is sometimes just what they heard from their mom and not from actual scientific studies. (Stress causing ulcers might be an example, right?) But it's rampant here. It seems like literally everybody believes and accepts that Chinese medicine (and ancient Chinese ideas about hot and cold humours, yin and yang, etc., making you sick) is just as good as Western medicine (and Western ideas). And protesting it is almost unpatriotic or something. For my girlfriend too, her culture outweighs her education (which was in chemistry) on this. Every time I don't want to take, or don't want to buy, the herbal stuff, she takes it almost as an offense toward her whole culture, like I have an irrational preference for the medicines of my home country just because it's my home country. I don't, of course. I have a rational preference for things that are, to put it succinctly, FDA approved.
Anyway, happy Mid-Autumn Day. Go to your local Chinese grocery store and pick up some moon cakes to share with your family. If you actually read this far.
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