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[Hamish]

This is segment may be one of an ongoing report on Chinese surgery and medicine in Baoding, Hebei, a small town in the People�s Republic. It is underway as I write and we do not know how it will turn out � although we feel good about things at the moment.

Last Friday morning, after 0800 classes were over, my wife and I came to our sixth floor apartment to start our weekend. It is a free period every week that lasts from 0920 on Friday until 1000 on Monday. It is punctuated by visits from friends, calls to and from the kids, bike rides, correcting student papers, and watching the occasional DVD.

My wife livens up the place by putting plants everywhere that will hold them. She has two pots on the sill of the window on the sixth floor staircase landing. It is your archetypical Chinese staircase, starting at the bottom, going to the top, with landings toward the front of the building halfway up each flight. Puttering around, as is her wont, she carried a glass container of water out to the flowers and gave them a drink. Returning up the short flight of stairs from the landing to our apartment she lost her balance for some reason (I accuse her of tapping my Lagavulin�which she denies) and, dropping and breaking the glass container, fell to the landing outside our door. In her descent she put out her hands and placed them on the shards, severing the inside tendon (that used to close the digit) and nerve in her left thumb as she did so.

I was sitting in front of this computer looking for someone to insult on the forum. Over the sound of Steppenwolf crying out about �Monster� (About as good as it gets for Viet Nam era protest songs. Kids today have no taste in music. Opposed to the war in Iraq, I keep looking for that great protest song of this situation that will unite the present generation of young Americans. Given what I know of their attitudes, the dirge from Beethoven�s Seventh may have to do�but I digress�but you knew that�who the hell am I talking to?) I heard her plaintive cry for help. No doubt grumbling about being interrupted, I went out the door of our office and found her lying on the floor dripping blood. She had no interest in getting up. So, I made her show me the wound, saw no arterial bleeding, and got her a pillow to rest her head, and a towel to soak up the blood.

I called our friend, and boss, and told him I needed assistance getting the victim down the stairs and to a hospital. While I waited for him to put that effort together, I cleaned up the blood and broken glass and coaxed my wife off the floor and onto a bed. There, I wiped the blood off her hand and arm, placed an antibiotic soaked bandage over the cut, and wrapped it in a fresh towel.

About that moment, perhaps ten minutes after my call, in walked my boss and several students all prepared to carry the casualty down the staircase. Stumblebum had recovered enough at this point to walk under her own power, so, with an alert escort on every side, down the stairs she went. At the bottom, the neighbors were gathered in concerned silence, and so was the school President�s car and driver.

At the neighborhood hospital, completely unoccupied by the way, the doctors took one look and sent us to the big People�s Liberation Army hospital located here. Walking in the door of PLA Hospital #2, also completely vacant as a consequence of the SARS problem, we encountered a pleasant, polite fellow who turned out to be the Dean Of Surgery for the hospital. He took a squint at the problem, noticed we weren�t �from around these parts, �and called his leading hand surgeon away from his lunch and day off to come and put humpty dumpty back together again.

(I�ll stop here and test the water. Does anybody want to read more about this adventure? I don�t want to invite the hook. One final point though, Chinese hospitals, if our experience this time is typical, are really pleasant places to go now for a quiet moment or two. There is no one there except ghostly figures wrapped from head to foot in cloth armor who check temperatures with ray guns of every living thing they see (some handheld laser gizmo I�ve never seen before) and shove thermometers under your arm if you look sideways at them.)

Regards,

[Mr. Kalgukshi]

Please continue, and I hope she recovers fully and without complications. Having had a similar injury years ago, she is probably looking at physical therapy once she is able to tolerate it. Whatever the case, good luck.

[Roger]

Yes, Jim, DO CONTINUE...
I am not experienced in the type of events that ensued after...
MIght put me in a more optimistic mood in the event I do have to go to one of those hospitals!
And, of course, I too hope your wife is well again!

[chinasyndrome]

Uncle Hamish! I'm waiting for the next instalment and hope Aunt Sallie is well and truly on the mend.

[pratyeka]

Type on... seems to be unfolding a little differently to my sole China hospital experience

[MartinK]

...

[arioch36]

Please continue. I'm on pins and needles, and it hurts!

[Hamish]

With 33% of my readership telling me to �be quiet,� (That, at any rate, is the gist of what their votes communicate.), I no longer expect this missive to get me to Stockholm in December, and I had been counting on it. But I have judged that there is sufficient excuse in the forum�s response for me to assuage my ego once again (It being laid bare and throbbing by the hobbles of old age, lost hair, a pot, even kettle, belly, and rejection from the maidens.) by broadcasting my innermost ramblings and acting like it is art. I have not been able to find a beret here in Baoding, but I am wearing a pair of my wife�s panty hose stretched tightly over the top of my head, and some happenin� sun glasses.

There has been a lot of chatter on this forum about the quality of Chinese medical care and the condition of her hospitals. I have been to several Chinese hospitals in Baoding, and also toured the surgical floor, and had a dental crown fitted, at a PLA hospital in the capital of Hebei Province, Shijiazhuang City. Three of the hospitals were public hospitals and two were facilities run by the People�s Liberation Army. I spent 10 nights in one of the public hospitals in Baoding, and underwent four surgical procedures while there. It was for a life-threatening situation that had been incorrectly treated by eight different American Doctors, seven of whom were armed with the correct diagnosis, before I came to China. When it flared up here, a wonderful Chinese Doctor correctly diagnosed the problem, treated it properly, and cured it.

As I have progressed to my present advanced state of decay, I have had occasion to visit numerous hospitals in the United States. In America I have been treated in the emergency room of the huge hospital in Boston, in a small hospital in rural Indiana, at Kanakanak Hospital in Dillingham Alaska, in Soldotna, Alaska, in Portland, Oregon, and in the nice place recently built in Scottsdale, Arizona. I have visited my wife while she was being treated in the University of California Hospital in San Francisco. As several of my friends and family are in the medical racket, I have had the chance to tour the inner workings of surgical floors in Seattle, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Boston. I have also been given a guided �cooks tour� of an American Veteran�s hospital in California.

I have always had a lot of money, and good medical insurance, so the treatment my wife and I have enjoyed has always been gold plated. The general point I am making in this memo is that we have continued to receive gold plated medical care in China. Whether it is luck, or we are just so damned good looking, we have no complaints about the care we have received and think no one need fear going to a hospital in China.

There is no reason to think that my opinion of Chinese hospitals, or our experience in them, is representative of the country generally. I would not try to lecture on the general condition of American medical care facilities and givers based upon the small sample of US hospitals I have discussed above. Similarly, our experiences in Chinese hospitals have been very limited, and other people on this forum have different attitudes from ours regarding what they have encountered in their areas.

Entering a PLA hospital in Baoding now is like walking in to a library. I mean it is quiet and deserted. No one is there except those who must be. In my experience, everywhere I have been, a hospital entry hall is a swarming, squirming, steaming, blood covered mass of the broken, old, lame, ill, and their families, all struggling to find the magic room where they will be cured, and waiting for some bored minimum wage clerk to call their name or number. I can detect no substantial difference, qualitative or esthetic, between the emergency room in Boston General and that in People�s Liberation Army Hospital #252 in Baoding, China, except that the one in China may be cleaner. Also, because of the SARS episode still in progress, the hospital in China is nearly unoccupied.

Having been rushed there in a college car, we were met at the door by a kindly gentleman wearing a PLA officer�s uniform who wanted to know why two large white people and their two Chinese women friends were so excited, in his hospital. Our good friend and colleague Anne, a 47-kilogram delight I call �Goofy,� and the Dean of the College�s Foreign Affairs Office, whom I call �Madame,� had responded to my SOS and were running interference for us two monoglots. He sized up my wife�s condition and led us to a place where she could be more comfortable. As there were many staff people per patient, all swathed in the most elaborate protective clothing, boots, leggings, blousy garments, rubber gloves, hoods, goggles, and masks, several carrying small laser gadgets they aimed at our heads and with which they collected our temperature, we felt very attended to.

The place is CLEAN! Obviously, China does not have the money to invest in chrome plated faucets, special overhead lights, and all the bells and whistles that American consumers are used to seeing, but, where it is necessary to be so, operating rooms, emergency rooms, treatment rooms, the place is sanitary. By the way, it is much better than I remember the facility being in San Francisco that is provided by my government for those who have served their country in the military. For those who have seen the film, �Born On The Forth Of July,� it is an accurate representation of what I saw in San Francisco, and much worse than anything I have seen in China.

Regards,