ER: China

I recently went through my worst experience yet in China. While playing flag football last Sunday, I tore the Achilles tendon on my right foot (oh, this is Zach, not Tiffany, by the way). Surely I am cursed, as I tore my left Achilles about 2 years ago while playing indoor soccer in Washington DC. Last time, the doctors told me it was a case of not warming up, and rolling out of bed in the middle of a cold DC winter to go sprint around a gym, so that made a lot of sense to me. But last Sunday we were already almost done with the first half of the game (in which time I’d scored 3 touchdowns, 2 offensive and 1 defensive, lest you worry that I went down without a fight) when “The Incident… Again” occurred. Surely I am cursed. And not to be overly superstitious, but as many of you know, my mullet has been growing to epic lengths. On Saturday I finally conceded and went to get my hair cut. Was my stylist's name Delilah? Did my strength wane with every passing snip snip of her scissors? I don't know, but the coincidence and possibility of an Old Testament omen gives me the shivers.

As I collapsed agonizingly to the ground on Sunday, knowing full well what had just happened, I saw my sporting life pass before my eyes. It started when I was about 7, and I bet my brother a dollar, that some day, I would play in the N.F.L. We wrote the contract up and everything. If you wanted to know the full measure of my athletic delusion, I have still not paid him to this day. Still hoping for a shot as a long snapper or something, I guess. But at 31, I’m ready to retire. Aaron, I’ll pay up on that bet at Christmas. Time to move on…

But the real story is what happened from that moment forward. Our friends Marc and Meredith used to work at an expatriate hospital, so I called them up and asked them where it was. They were great, and told the driver where to go, and called up the hospital to let them know the situation and that I was on my way. In China there are two kinds of hospitals, local and expat. The local hospitals are packed like… well, packed like everywhere else in China. Overflowing crowds of patients wandering aimlessly with their IV bag in hand. They really seem to love the IV drip here in China. Everyone I’ve ever known to go to the hospital in China ends up with an IV drip. Just saline water for hydration, but it’s like their penicillin or vitamin C, the Chinese cure-all. Whether it’s a multiple fracture or a paper cut, healing begins with an IV drip. I swear I even saw a lady riding on the back of a motorcycle through the streets of Shanghai holding up her own IV drip bag!

The expat hospitals, though, aren’t covered by the national health insurance plan, only by foreign health insurance. Therefore, they are relatively empty. I was immediately wheeled in, had my vitals taken, was seen by the on-call physician and had x-rays taken. Because Meredith had called ahead, the orthopedic surgeon was already on his way to the hospital. They told me I should have surgery that evening. Whoa. My game had started at 2 pm. At about 3pm, I was falling in slow motion onto the artificial turf and now here I was at 5pm in a Chinese hospital being told to prepare for surgery?!? What happened to sitting in the waiting room, seeing a triage nurse, having my paperwork checked out, waiting for a doctor, getting a diagnosis, talking about getting a second opinion, scheduling a time for surgery? I had gone through this before in D.C.; that was the process. But, apparently, not in China. The last time this happened I’d done the requisite internet research and ultimately decided that surgery was the best option. So although I felt a little rushed, I was able to quickly agree to the surgery. My one request was that I receive local anesthesia, rather than the general anesthesia that they kept trying to convince me to take. Expat hospital or not, this is still China, and I was sure as hell going to watch to make sure they operated on the right ankle!

That proved to be a mixed blessing, because I was awake for three and a half hours while they operated, lying uncomfortably on my stomach with an IV in my arm, oxygen tubes in my nose and about eight wires stuck onto my chest and back to monitor my vitals while they reattached my Achilles. It was tortuously long and I was absolutely miserable. I was also doped up from the epidural and lacked full clarity, and so I spent three and a half hours trying to stay calm, and quiet the paranoia and fear running through my sluggish consciousness. When they finally wheeled me out of the OR into a recovery room, Tiffany was there to reassure me. You can ask her what her impression was, but I think she said something like, “You look like you just came back from a six-month stint at Guantanamo Bay.”

Before surgery the doctors tried to convince me that I needed to stay 5 nights in the hospital. Luckily I have been in China to understand that everything is negotiable here. So I countered by telling them the last time I had this surgery I was in and out on the same day. We settled on 2 nights.

The first night I was awoken by the nurses every 45 minutes to try and “make urea”, or their way of saying go pee. They scared both me and Tiffany (she was kind enough to spend the first night with me in the hospital) with stories of patients whose suffered internal systems failure from not peeing after surgery. Let me tell you, these kinds of stories do not help you make urea. They ran water in the bathroom, told me stories about great, flowing Chinese rivers, and even brought in a hot water bottle inside a stuffed animal tiger to put on my stomach. Surprisingly, the pee-pee tiger did it, and around 5am I finally made urea and have never been so happy.

At home, my treatment consists of antibiotics, Percoset pain killers, and some ‘vegetable’ medicine pills. The vegetable ones (I am convinced they are sugar pills) are supposed to promote blood flow to help the healing process. I went into work to get my laptop so I could work from home, and you would think I’d been carried in on a stretcher. In China, there is a belief that serious injuries take 100 days to heal. There doesn’t seem to be a way to categorize the injuries or specify by severity, just that if you are hurt, you need 100 days rest. I was told to go home and I was entertained with multiple stories about “I heard that one time this person didn’t stay home for 100 days and [insert tragedy] happened…” Anyway, I grabbed my laptop and got out of there as quickly as possible. The next day I received an enormous bouquet of flowers from work, signed in Chinese. I suspect the characters translate to, “…and STAY HOME, dummy.”

So now what? Six weeks stuck at home in a cast, what should I do? Here’s what I’ve been up to so far:

- Cleaning up my iTunes music library
- Watching the new Battlestar Galactica, Season 1
- Internet research on random topics (Mormonism, Brady Bunch trivia, YouTube, my Amazon Gold Box of on sale items)
- Sitting out on our balcony and enjoying the mild fall weather (along with incessant traffic & construction noise and air pollution, but pleasant nevertheless)
- Just finished reading “The Other Boleyn Girl” and started “Under the Banner of Heaven”
- And, of course, writing long, meandering blog entries

I guess if there’s anywhere to get cooped up, it might as well be in the country of cheap DVD’s. I think I’ll get caught up on old episodes of “A-Team” next week…