8. Hospital 2
I was lucky enough to get ill enough to go to hospital, again! This time with some funny disease with a funny name I can’t remember. It started just as a cold and then turned in to a fever, and when I went to hospital they decided to give me days and days of IV, oh joy of joys.
I mentioned the IV room before but I think I can elaborate on it somewhat, as it is quite an experience visiting one. They partially resemble an airport waiting lounge, with uncomfortable blue chairs and lots of rubbish scattered across the floor. There can quite often be a bad smell, more on that later, and a funny mix of people.
With quite a lot of the IV rooms the first thing you notice when you walk in is the screaming, funnily enough, small kids and babies take a rather strong disliking to being held now and having needles inserted in to their hands, feet and the top of their heads. And this creates a really rather uneasy atmosphere, not only have you got your own illness to worry about but the naturally distress inducing ululations of a small child. Then you have to go and find your seat and tell whoever is sat there to move to another seat, this is sometimes a person on IV and sometimes just someone who is accompanying their unfortunate friend. Or you can just find an empty seat and sit there and wait for someone to tell you to move, and perpetuate the IV room flux. But luckily being a laowai, and not wanting to move, it’s possible to pull the ‘I don’t understand’ ‘ting bu dong’ card, anyone who comes waving a small piece of paper at me saying something in Chinese and looking faintly annoyed but mostly curious will get a swift ting bu donging! And I will be left to sit back and enjoy a couple of hours of mediciney antibioticicy in the veins hydration.
So with a couple of hours you tend to glance around a few times, and it’s quite funny what you see. There is a really eclectic mix of people, from young babies to old biddies and people who look like they’re about to die to people who look like they are just stopping off here on the way to work, like they are just sat on the underground reading their newspaper the way they do every other day. It’s not uncommon to see two people waiting for IV, one looking terrible and the other obviously accompanying them, and then the nurse come along and hook up the healthy looking one! And of course anyone whether ill looking or not is likely to cough up a big ball of phlegm and spit it on the floor. Parents too lazy to walk their children to the toilet will just pull over a bin, whip down the kids trousers and let it rip, whether it goes in the bin or not does not matter, neither does it matter if the bin doesn’t have a bag in. And as you can imagine, if people are willing to litter the floors of a hospital they are not going to hold back anywhere else. There are always kids going in the street, children’s clothes here even have a little slit running along the bottom for easy access. But it’s not just the kids, everyone seems to be in on it, just about every urinal I have used here has a sign above it that reads.
向前一小步，文明一大步
Literally, ‘forwards a small step, civilized a big step’, but maybe I have the translation wrong here, as it seems that most Chinese blokes go ‘backwards a big step’. I don’t know if this is because they just can’t be bothered to take an extra step forwards, or they don’t want to stand so close to a dirty urinal, but they just don’t seem to care either way. They will happily stand a good foot or two back and just watch as it goes everywhere without thinking to step forwards and actually get it in the drain rather than on the floor. This even happened in school, when both urinals broke, cardboard signs were placed inside saying ‘do not use’, but this did not stop them. The signs got pissed all over and were soon soggy jokes left standing in a flooded urinal. And when these became too malodorous or ugly to urinate on people just came in and pissed on the floor. The worse thing about this was that the toilet still worked absolutely fine, it was just the urinals that were broken. But this did not matter, urinating here is just something that happens, and it doesn’t matter where. When I was walking out of the terracotta warrior museum I saw a mum walk up to her young boy, standing in front of the main entrance, lift his t-shirt up, pull his trousers and pants down, point at him and tell him something seriously. Then he started peeing and she ran back and got a nice photo of her boy at the museum.
To get back to my hospital visits, I had all this to enjoy whilst feeling so ill I actually thought I was dying at one point. But this is all over now, no more illness, I am back to good health and making sure I stay that way.
