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.

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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.