Monday, November 20, 2017

The Great Wall of China
20. Lily's Adventure in Wonderland

During my sixth day in the hospital, I got a phone call from Lily, my roommate, best friend and sister from another set of parents. It is no exaggeration to say that when you are in a hospital in China following brain surgery, it's nice to hear a familiar voice. It took her six days to call me because she had her own hedge maze to run through.

From Lily's point of view, two of her friends went to Beijing for the weekend. Amy came home with several broken bones and the news that I was taken to a different hospital with a head injury. That was the starting point.

Calling me was not an option. My phone was lost in the accident. I would have been unavailable at that point anyway. Calling Amy's hospital was difficult. Voluntarily delivering information is not a Chinese trait. It took more than a few phone calls from several people just to get the name of my hospital. Then it took several phone calls from more than a few people just to acknowledge that I was there, alive and in more or less one piece.

The funny part is, this was not a privacy issue. Chinese hospitals are not the least concerned with privacy. News reporters and cameras routinely walk into emergency and recovery rooms when celebrities are hospitalized. In one of the Hannibal Lecter movies, Edward Norton's character despises Philip Seymour Hoffman's character who bribed his way into a hospital and took graphic photographs of him. That was supposed to show how dishonorable Philip Seymour Hoffman's character was. In China, that sort of thing happens all the time. Ironically, they always blur out the graphic parts when they print the photographs. It might be easier if they simply faked everything.

When Lily finally found me, she was told that I could not come to the phone. That did nothing to reassure her. Now that she knew where I was, she booked a flight to Beijing, but she had to wait for a visa. In the meantime, she kept calling until someone eventually told her that I could speak to her.

Hearing her voice was the best thing I could imagine. All of my doctors spoke English, some with more creative pronunciation than others, and I can do reasonably well in Chinese, albeit with my own foreign cadence, but Lily's Canadian accent took me out of the Twilight Zone. The doctors, nurses, hospital and Beijing were all alien to me. Lily was the sound of home.


The Great Wall of China part 1

2 comments:

  1. So did news reporters come into your hospital room and take pictures of you?

    ReplyDelete
  2. There's no reason they would. I'm not famous in Bejing, Hong Kong or anywhere else.

    ReplyDelete

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