The Great Wall of China11. The First Hospital

I don't remember getting into the ambulance or most of the ride. I sat next to the nurse and watched Amy for a minute before we pulled into a hospital emergency room. In the ER, they wheeled Amy into an examination area and one of the nurses asked me if I was ok. I had a few little cuts here and there, and my hands and arms looked like I tried to tunnel out of a prison, but no bones were sticking out of me. The doctors rightfully concentrated on Amy. I had a headache, but nothing to write home about. Amy was crying in pain. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Amy stopped crying when they gave her some drugs. It was like shaking something that rattles in front of a crying baby. She went immediately silent. It was kind of spooky. I was standing nearby and could see everything. Had I not been able to see that she was awake and moving around, it would have been scary.

While several people worked on Amy, a nurse had me sit on an exam table and rubbed antiseptic all over my little cuts. I thought it was unnecessary, and as an American, worried too much about what they would charge me for a dollar's worth of over the counter ointment.

For reasons no one explained, the nurse had one of the doctors talk to me. The nurse spoke in Chinese, so I talked to her in Chinese. The doctor immediately spoke English, so I talked to him in English. My initial assumption was that the nurse wanted someone to speak to me in my native language, but the doctor just asked me a bunch of basic questions I could have easily answered in Chinese. 你叫什麼名字? 覺得怎麼樣? 你痛嗎? 呼吸困難嗎? 今天星期幾?

I thought my answers were pretty good, especially since I was speaking English. That's a language I like to think I know pretty well. But the doctor wanted to get a CT scan of my head. I objected, but they were unimpressed. On the one hand, I wanted them to leave me alone and concentrate on Amy, even though she had plenty of doctors and nurses with her. On the other hand, there is something authoritative about a doctor in a lab coat with his name stitched on the front. He was too old to be a resident and sounded too experienced to dismiss.

They had me lie down on a stretcher, even though I had no problems walking at all, and rolled me into the radiation room. The scanning process was not the least bit claustrophobic. Most of my body was outside of the giant space donut. It was a painless and simple procedure, but the machine looked exceptionally expensive. I could see American hospitals charging a thousand dollars for a quick ride. I wondered what this hospital would charge and then laughed that a completely unnecessary test was going to cost more than the cast on Amy's arm. None of the people around me laughed, but I thought it was funny.


The Great Wall of China part 1