Sunday April 20th – It all started out to be a rather bad week as weeks go. Then I went to the hospital and everything got a lot worse. Sunday I woke with a hangover. Nothing special about that, except that Saturday night wasn’t anything special to deserve such physical dissension. Monday morning as the sun was coming up and I was returning to bed for the nth time from bouts of sickness I decided to stop in the clinic for an IV instead of holding class expecting I was just having a hard time building my hydration levels back up. The IV helped and for the afternoon I just took it easy trying to rest in my apartment but that wasn’t working so well. After John, my co-teacher, finished class we headed out to have some dinner and when the world went spinning after one flight of steps we made the decision that perhaps something more was wrong and that we should take a trip to the hospital.
At the hospital doctors speculated that I may have appendicitis so they admitted me for observation overnight. I got a steady stream of IV for about the next 16 hours and at noon, when the room could not contain another white coat, what appeared to be the hospitals senior surgical staff said “Cut it!” (in Chinese of course) When I told John I wanted to get a second opinion on this before they decide to operate I merely meant that I wanted to talk to my friend Ariana, who is concluding her medical interning, or look up some information online. I wasn’t expecting my doctor, his boss, his boss’s boss, and his boss’s boss’s boss to each take turns doing rebound tests on me all morning. And when I say there was no more room for another white coat I am hardly exaggerating. The room was not private, there were five other beds and as I came out of a light sleep at noon, when the most pepper-haired doctor was standing over me, there were also roughly 20-25 doctors, interns and nurses all vying for a look at the sick foreigner. It was amusing. After a lengthy discussion between the doctors over me in Chinese I looked to John, who translated succinctly – “You’re going to surgery now. Is that OK?”
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