The Great Wall of China31. Sixteen Weeks Later

I still get headaches pretty much every day, but they are mild and tolerable. More often than not, just thinking about something else distracts me enough to ignore it. Otherwise, there are breathing techniques, meditation and, if all else fails, hardcore drugs.

I ate a banana the other day. Immediately after I finished it, I started coughing. Fruit usually tells you when it is bad. Bananas go black. But if there is some problem other than spoiling, they might look normal while giving off a bad smell. I could not smell it. Naturally, I wondered if I had just eaten something dangerous or if the coughing was only a coincidence. I had Lily sniff out the bananas. She is used to it by now. She said they smelled like bananas and ate one. She then said it tasted like a banana.

Since neither of us dropped dead, I had another banana earlier today. Immediately after I finished it, I started coughing. The bananas taste and smell normal, according to Lily, but they make me cough, for some reason. It seems like a pretty mild issue, but if it continues, I should probably tell my doctor. Knowing him, that would only make him want to give me a banana test.

I cry more than I used to. My parents taught me how to suppress emotion was I was young, so it has always taken a lot to turn on the waterworks. Lately, I cry at the slightest provocation. I was watching one of the 10,000 Gordon Ramsay shows on the BBC channels we get and I started crying when he did something nice for someone. Music especially gets me going. Great music has always been powerful, but now I even cry when I hear Simply Red's “Holding Back the Years” or Paula Cole's “Hush, Hush, Hush”. For reasons I don't fully understand, crying gives me a headache. It supposedly has something to do with increased hormone levels and decreased blood flow in the brain.

Dark rooms have suddenly become a problem. Whenever I go into a dark room, I have to cover my eyes until I turn on a light. According to all my eye exams, my vision is the same as it ever was. Chinese people are always amazed that I do not wear glasses. But opening or closing my eyes in darkness drives me crazy now. I have to press my hand over my eyes and turn on the light quickly. I don't know if that is psychological or physiological. Obviously, I would rather walk around a lit room than a dark room, but the dark never bothered me before.

There was some construction noise coming from one of the apartments downstairs. That is something you better get used to if you live in Hong Kong. There is always construction somewhere. It seems like new buildings rise and fall every week, and if you travel for at least ten minutes in any direction, you will find blocked streets and road crews digging up the pavement. This was the first construction noise I ever heard in our building.

It was not especially loud. I think it was the floor below us, but not the apartment directly below us. There was some distance. The volume was never the problem. In between the hammer banging and what sounded like slamming doors, they used a power drill. The sound of the drill freaked me out more than it should have. The hammering was a minor annoyance. The power drill forced me to retreat under headphones, which only gave me headaches from all the crying.

The construction sounds only lasted two days. They were not building the apartment. I assume there were some minor cosmetic alterations in between tenants. I worried that the power drill might come back, and worried even more that it bothered me at all, but it was only on location for one day. The hammers were the star of that show.


The Great Wall of China part 1