So luckily I never got seriously ill while in China for 10 months. I did get sick to my stomach a few times after accidentally swallowing tap water while washing my hair. However, I did have a few sinus infections.

One day in January I realized that my sinus infection wasn’t going to go away on it’s own. So I called my Chinese friend Rosemary (that’s just her English name) who is a nurse, and asked her to help me get some antibiotics. Now, I’ve had enough sinus infections over the years to know the difference between a virus and something bacterial, so I knew that I needed antibiotics. I’m also allergic to most kinds of antibiotics, and had a list of the two that I can still take. However, I don’t know the Chinese names for them, Cipro is not exactly something in my dictionary, OR that I could find on-line.

So Rosemary took me to the hospital the university campus that I taught (and lived) in. There are no clinics in China, just hospitals. This one was small, barely bigger than a clinic. It was gray concrete, and appeared mostly empty. We went in through the front door and went right into an examining room. The doctor was standing near his desk, talking to some women who had come before me.

Rosemary walked right up to him and started talking. She translated for me that I had a sinus infection. He took a quick look at me and said that he wanted me to have a chest x-ray to make sure I didn’t have pneumonia, but that this hospital didn’t have an x-ray machine. I insisted that I didn’t have pneumonia, just a sinus problem, and needed antibiotics. He pointed in the direction of the pharmacy and then turned back to the other women.

We went to the pharmacy and asked for Cipro, which they had. I asked if I needed a prescription and they said no. Then they gave me a box of ten days worth and charged me 3 yuan (36 cents). Then I bought some Ibuprofen and paid twice that.

I remarked to Rosemary that it was very odd that I didn’t need a prescription, but she didn’t think so. I then told her how much Cipro costs in the States and she didn’t believe me.

As we were walking away she told me a story about an exchange student from Germany who had studied there before my time. She had to have an appendectomy, and had it at that same hospital. She didn’t speak any Chinese and the nurses didn’t know any English, so one day they contacted Rosemary to have her translated. Apparently, in China it is thought that after you have surgery you need to get up and move around a lot, so that you don’t get constipated. However, the German girl wouldn’t get out of bed the day after her surgery so they needed Rosemary to make her do it.

I told her I couldn’t believe a hospital that wasn’t equipped well enough to have an x-ray machine would do appendectomies and she told me that in China health care is very good because doctors have to treat so many patients.

A few days later I got better, so the Cipro must have been real.

—-

A couple months later I went on a trip to Xi’an (where the Terracotta warriors are) with Rosemary and a bunch of the foreigners. Xi’an is probably not much larger than Kaifeng, where I was living, but it is much more built up infrastructure-wise. While I was there I came down with another sinus infection (they are quite frequent with me, I have a whole lot of allergies and nasal issues).

I went with Rosemary to a few small pharmacies that are everywhere around China trying to find more Cipro. None of them had it, though they did have amoxicillin (which could kill me). Eventually we found a very large pharmacy downtown that had it. However, they wouldn’t sell it to me without a prescription. So we asked if it was just in this part of China, or if you needed prescriptions everywhere. The pharmacist said that you technically need a prescription everywhere but the more backward places don’t care.

So we asked how we would get a prescription, and they said to go up to the second floor of the building and talk to the doctor up there. We went to the second floor, and found a receptionist-like window with a sign saying “Prescriptions - 1 Yuan (12 cents)”. Rosemary talked to the woman behind the window (presumably a doctor) briefly, giving her my symptoms and my age. She filled out the tiny peice of paper, and we went back downstairs and got some more $.36 Cipro and I got better again a few days later.

I recently came back from a 10 month experience teaching ESL to college students in China. It was a really interesting experience, one that I hope to never, ever repeat. I came back with some good stories, though. The best ones, I think, have to do with my experience with their health care system.

Now, I was in Kaifeng, which is a poor city in Henan Province, in central China. Kaifeng used to be the capital of Northern China, during the Northern Song dynasty (about 1000 AD). However, due to repeated flooding from the Yellow River, the city has been destroyed repeatedly. Nowadays it’s an interesting city of about (I’ve been told several conflicting numbers) 700,000, that is relatively unwesternized. (And by that I mean no McDonald’s, though there were 2 KCFs).

In order to live in China for over 6 months, you have to get a residency permit. And in order to get a permit, you have to have a medical examination. Now, I had one in the US, but the doctor didn’t do all the tests that they needed so I had to have another one in China. Kaifeng doesn’t have a hospital equipped to do the medical exams, so myself and other foreigners working or studying at the same university had to go to the next city over,  Zhengzhou, to get the tests.

In Zhengzhou we went to what was called a “Traveler’s Hospital”, a gray, nondescript building with bad lighting and bad English on all their signs. It was small, and I only ever saw one floor. The dozen or so foreigners and I all had bilingual medical forms that we needed filled out, with questions like weight, HIV status, and whether or not we had “manic psychosis.”

We first went to a small room where we were weighed and measured. The doctor thought we were all crazy because we didn’t know our own heights. I tried to explain that Americans use inches, not meters, but his English was not good enough to understand.

Next we were instructed to put on little booties over our shoes, but never told why.

The next test was an ultrasound. I felt really uncomfortable with it, because I had never had one before. I tried to ask the nurse what it was for, and she said something vague about checking our organs. I never found out what specifically they were looking for, like tumors or cerosis. I would think they were looking for pregnancy, but they performed ultrasounds on the men as well. (Who all made very bad jokes about ‘how far along the baby was’.)

The next test was a blood test for HIV. Now, before I tell you about the test I should add a little history about AIDS in China. Now, Henan province (where I was, remember?) has the highest prevalency of AIDS in the country. This is largely because in the past doctors were reusing needles. China, up until recently, had tried to hide the presence of AIDS because only “drug addicts” and “homosexuals” got AIDS, and China certainly has none of either! But in the last few years they have started taking a more realistic attitude, and admitted there is a problem.

But that still doesn’t mean that Chinese people aren’t more worried about getting HIV from foreigners than their fellow countrymen. An American friend of mine who was teaching at the same university as myself repeated a story to me from one of her students. This student’s friend had had sex with a “foreigner” (presumably American but my friend wasn’t told for certain), and then later started to feel sick. Now, she thinks she might have HIV but she won’t get tested because the government closely monitors test results.

I was astonished by this story for several reasons, including the fact that she has no proof that she has HIV, she could be sick for many reasons, and that she was way more likely to get AIDS from someone in Henan than an American. But I digress.

So they started taking our blood for the exams. Now, we were all nervous, knowing how HIV had been spread in Henan province in the first place. But luckily they were using fresh needles out of sterile packaging for everyone. The nurse who was drawing the blood, however, was not changing her gloves between person. I have a latex allergy so I asked our hurried “guide” from the university who was translating for us to ask her to put on non-latex gloves. She did, and after drawing my blood did not switch back to the regular gloves. So I was the only person who got fresh gloves before the blood was drawn.

After our blood was drawn we weren’t given band-aids (which until a few months later were not available anywhere that I could find, even after going to several pharmacies), but Q-tips to stop the bleeding. We stood around for a while until our guide, Jackie, told us that their x-ray machine wasn’t working so we would have to go to a different hospital.

So we got back in our van and drove to a much larger hospital. However, we did not go inside. Instead we went 2-by-2 into the van in the parking lot. The van had inside a chest x-ray machine and an EKG machine. When it was my turn I went in and had the standard x-ray. I do not remember any of the people in the van wearing led vests, so I hope they are alright. Then I went over for the EKG.

Now, the nurse doing the EKG did not speak any English and my Chinese was not good enough to understand what she was trying to tell me to do, so she abruptly starts taking off my shirt. I had already noticed in China that they don’t seem to have the same sense of modesty as in the US, even though people tended to dress more conservatively. This was evidenced by the fact that public toilets did not have stall doors. (SERIOUSLY). Of course, one was lucky if a public toilet (which were all squat toilets) actually flushed. Anyway, after I realized I had to take my shirt off for an EKG (hey, I had never had one before), I got really uncomfortable because it wasn’t like we had any privacy. The person at the chest x-ray was looking in my direction, and the doors were open. But it was only a momentary embarrassment.

Then, that was it. Jackie took us back to Kaifeng, after a brief stop at a Zhengzhou McDonald’s (where they didn’t serve cheese burgers). He then went back in the next day for our test results, but we never heard a word about what they were. But we then received our residency permits alright, so that must  mean I don’t have AIDS.

Next: illegal anti-biotics, 12-cent prescriptions, and a lesson on why (at least some) Chinese people think their health care system is so good.