Moments: Illness

November 5, 2010

I took two students to lunch on Sunday. We stopped in at a popular campus restaurant, but the place was full of people. The students immediately turned and said we would find a different restaurant. I followed them to a place known to the foreigners as “The Corner Restaurant.” We ate green beans, rice, and a dish the menu called "Crispy Sweet and Spicy Chicken." At three o’clock that afternoon my stomach started the same dull ache I’d felt several times the semester before. I ignored it at first. By five, I was wrapped in a blanket on the couch, holding a hot water bottle to my stomach. Foreign friend Amanda brought toast to me at dinner. Ten minutes after she left, I walked to the bathroom, kneeled before the toilet, and passed out. When I came to, a lurch in my throat left vomit on my sweat pants, the bath mat, the hot water bottle, and the tile. I felt lighter – almost too light. I cleaned with paper towels and went to the couch again.

Almost every hour that night, I woke with more stomach pains and diarrhea. Substitute teachers were called for my classes. Amanda brought toast and rice. In the middle of the night Tuesday, I walked into the bathroom and twice lost consciousness. When daylight came, two teachers helped me to a small campus clinic. There, I could see just a few rooms – a pharmacy, a cashier’s office, a waiting room, and one room with two little stools that faced computer desks. Into the computer room I went, and sat down to face a Chinese woman who wore a white coat and had a firm jaw line. Glasses sat on the tip of her nose. She pressed her fingers into my stomach, asked a few questions, and led my helpers into the pharmacy room. I could see them through the doorway, talking for a while. When they came back, I was handed a box of tablets. The foreign teacher had looked up the word “antibiotic” in an English-Chinese dictionary.

Over the next two days, I watched an entire season of Gilmore Girls while I lay on my bed. Wednesday evening, I assured a supervisor I could teach an eight o’clock class Thursday morning. In the night, I woke with more stomach pain and more diarrhea.

Another visit to the campus clinic, and a better translator. This time I got directions: while taking the antibiotics, eat only liquid foods such as congee or soup. No meat, no solids, no cold food. A new box of antibiotics and a package of anti-diarrheal drinking powder were given to me. I have eaten only congee since. My stomach has so far had no pain. I will continue this for the next two or three days. But all this laying in bed has made me miss home a lot – Mom's chicken broth and English-speaking doctors and English medicine labels.

November 28, 2010

A few nights ago, I felt the same stomach pain that plagued me a month ago. I waited by the toilet, but no vomit came. I couldn’t sleep. The pain started gradually at around seven thirty p.m. At two a.m., on the phone with my parents, my mom and I searched the internet for any disease that remotely matched the symptoms – dysentery, ulcers, appendicitis. I called an American Registered Nurse hotline. At three the pain began to subside, and at four I fell asleep.

A student took me to the Xinzheng hospital at ten thirty the same morning. I sat on another wooden stool in a room much like the San He clinic on campus. The student translated the doctor’s questions, and led me upstairs for blood work and an ultrasound. In the lab, I sat at a little window and put my arm on a counter. My student talked to me while my blood was drawn.

Two nurses sat in the ultrasound room. A patient was standing by a bed, unrolling the waist of her long johns and zipping her pants. I laid on the same pillow and paper sheet that she’d lain on. The nurse spread the jelly, passed the camera, looked into her screen and said she could see everything clearly, just like pictures she’d studied in textbooks. I was too thin.

Downstairs again, the doctor prescribed four stomach medicines. It was now twelve o’clock. There was a crowd of people at the pharmacy and cashier windows – patients trying to get medicine before the hospital employees went to lunch. At one window, a woman put on her coat and pointed us to another window.

“Push through the people,” my student told me, “or we’ll never get your medicine.”

December 7, 2010

I finished taking the medicine yesterday. My stomach felt strange a few days last week, and I didn’t have a strong appetite – ate mostly toast, rice, crackers, and bananas. But by Friday, I felt quite normal again.