chinatroll

There is a rapidly expanding family of cockroaches living in my laptop, giving new meaning to the idea of one’s electronics being bugged. I think they must like the warmth the computer provides, especially now that the temperature has actually dropped. It has been sampling the 40s at night for the past few days, providing an explanation for the quilted pajamas and electric blankets I saw on our last journey to Walmart. The bugs trip around on my computer, scurrying beneath the keys, trotting out of the fans as they fire up. I squish some of them. Some of them are too fast to catch up with. When Athena is awake and watching she points at them as they meander up the screen, “Bug, Mom, bug! Squish it! Squish it! Squish it!” This is when she is not busy building what she tells me are apartment complexes for the bugs to live in out of clothespins or purposefully dropping a bit of her dinner on the floor so the bugs won’t get too hungry. When I spill something, she says, “Oh, don’t worry about it, the bugs will get it,” like I used to tell her when we were living in a house with dogs that really would come and get it. The bugs probably don’t bother me as much as they should. I find them kind of fascinating.

On the eve of the launch of NaNoWriMo, I launched into what seems to be a never ending sinus infection. I am no stranger to sinus infections, and frequently I can get over them by rinsing my sinuses out and avoiding foods with milk. But this infection dragged on through all of November, and all hope of squelching it on my own vanished. With prompting from my mother, who looked like she was maybe going to crawl through the Skype connection to throttle me if I didn’t get a move on, I faced my fears of medical treatment in general and going to a Chinese hospital in particular, and proceeded with a visit to the doctor. I asked the Amazing Ayi for help on Monday, not being in any way up to deciphering the process on my own. Athena came with us, getting to satisfy her inexplicable and frequently expressed desire to go to a hospital. The AA called the Beijing University Hospital before we left the apartment. They said that they weren’t giving out numbers for appointments anymore, so we flipped through my copy of The Comprehensive Shenzhen Pocket Guide (which has handy sections on pretty much every aspect of expat life in Shenzhen) until the AA spotted an acceptable hospital to try. She called the Second People’s Hospital of Shenzhen, and they said that yes, they were still giving out numbers. We piled into a taxi and were off.

The hospital was teeming with people. A man walked by me with his neck completely wrapped in gauze sticking up from his stripped hospital pajamas. He looked like a Dr. Seuss character. We went to the registration desk and the AA gave them a form with my name, gender, and chief complaint on it. The registrar’s reluctance to believe that I am a woman sent the AA and I into a bout of hysterical laughter. Athena was quite taken with the nurses in their cute uniforms. They have not abandoned the starched winged affairs of the variety worn by my grandmother when she graduated from nursing school in the 40s, though the nurses here sport uniforms in pastel pink and blue, and some of them wear big red sashes with yellow characters emblazoned on them a la Miss America.

I paid the registrar roughly US$1.00 and we were sent to the Ear, Nose and Throat department where we took a number from another winged nurse and sat down to wait. I watched other patients wandering by carrying printouts of pictures that had just been taken of their ears, noses and throats. The AA looked more closely at the ticket that the winged nurse gave us and we moved to some seats by the door of the examining room I’d been assigned to.

We went in after another patient tottered out clutching pictures of her ear, nose and throat. The AA told the doctor that I have a sinus infection. The doctor motioned for me to sit down. I did. She pulled a reflective metal thing that looked like a miniature satellite dish with a hole in its middle over her eye, scooted forward, put some instrument up my nose and took a look. Then she looked at my throat. She grimaced, shook her head, and said, “How long?” “A month,” I answered. Her grimace deepened into a scowl. She made a few notes on my chart, wrote a prescription for a killer course of antibiotics, and told me to come back if I wasn’t feeling better in a week. We went to the cashier and I paid roughly US$40.00 for my antibiotics. I then watched as the AA negotiated the lines at the pharmacy, behind a bank of windows adjacent to the bank of windows the cashiers sit behind. I noticed that other sick people had come with someone else to help them make it through the lines, too. You have to be very hawkish about getting your order into the pharmacist, as your place in line doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll get a turn at the window if you’re not aggressive about it.

The smell and taste of antibiotics now permeates my whole head, and I feel as if I could sleep for a week.