This past weekend on Saturday night I was in downtown Chongqing (pictures below) which is about a 50 minute bus ride from the University with a group of six fellow students. We arrived a bit early for dinner and therefore decided to grab a snack. And, while there was a great supermarket with all kinds of American snacks about 50 yards away, a few of us decided to eat some spicy, sketchy looking “lamb on a stick” from a conveniently located street vendor. At the time, the meat tasted fine and myself and the other students enjoyed a nice night in the city shopping for DVD’s and clothes, and eating at Pizza Hut for a taste of home.
When we got back to the University, however, my stomach began to hurt. I was hoping it would be just another stomach issue that could be resolved by Tums, but as I watched a movie with my roommate and a couple friends, the pain in my stomach slowly began to increase. By the time I was ready to go to bed around 1:00a.m., it had compounded to the point where I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. Therefore my roommate convinced me to throw up (thankfully in our dorm rooms here we all have our own private western style toilets!). So I tossed the pizza, which was relatively expensive by the way, and popped some NyQuil hoping to pass out for the next 8-10 hours. Unfortunately, this plan backfired because I woke up about half an hour later feeling very groggy, disoriented and extremely nauseous. I limped my way to the bathroom, puked a second time for about 5-10 minutes and basically for the next 6 hours I puked 3-4 more times, dry-heaving. My body became very achy, and a fever flared up accompanied by a migraine. I tried eating oatmeal around 6a.m. but my stomach wouldn’t have it. That went too. To top it off, by the morning the food was coming out the right end but the wrong way!
Then at 8a.m. I called Robb Willett who came with another Chinese friend and they helped me limp up to the campus hospital which was about 10 minutes away. They translated my symptoms to the doctor who had me take a blood test. After discovering how dehydrated I was, they put me on an IV drip for 9-10 hours. And, while in the States this wouldn’t have been too eventful, the Chinese hospital was a bit different. The room they put me in was only a little larger than my dorm room and already had 3 other patients in it with 3-4 visitors. The bed I laid on was a bit dirty and had unwashed sheets with urine and bloodstains, as well as saliva from past patients. There were ant’s crawling on the ground eating crumbs, flies buzzing around the room, and the bathroom was a stinky squattie pottie with no soap, paper towels, or hot water. The IV equipment itself thankfully wasn’t that sketchy, but everything else was and I was in terrible shape being dehydrated, dizzy, nauseated, and exhausted though unable to sleep. To make matters worse, my fever wouldn’t go away so the nurse had to give me a shot in the butt in front of 7 other Chinese people! My bed was in the middle of the room and she had me roll over and pull down my pants. The shot wasn’t quick either. It took about 15 seconds to administer and made me sorer than I already was for over 2 hours! (While this was humiliating it was rather hilarious and my friend Tracey who is a Chinese student here who stayed with me in the hospital to translate taught me “Wo pigou tong!” which is “My butt hurts!” and the nurses got a kick out of me telling them this when they asked how I was feeling.)
When I finally got out of the hospital that night around 8:00pm, I tried to eat some rice porridge for some sustenance but my stomach said no and I puked twice more off of a 30 foot balcony outside the restaurant. Thankfully, however, when I got back to my room I was able to take a long, hot shower and once I took the 3 Chinese medicines the doctor gave me I slept rather well for 9 ½ hours. The next day I went back for another IV for about 2 ½ hours. For the next two days all I ate was rice, crackers, and bananas and I stayed home from class to rest. And now, five days later, I am slowly getting back to being healthy, though my diet is still rather meager. While this experience wasn’t glamorous at all, it is something I will always remember and I will definitely be more appreciative of American health services.
Aside from this painful experience, everything else over here has been going well. My classes have very little homework so I find myself with a lot of free time. Somehow, however, I feel as though I almost always have something to do especially since I am in the International Dorm and have made friends with the Minnesota students and other foreigners. I’ve spent time playing soccer, ping pong (losing to Chinese freshmen girls on the tables outside the other day was humbling), playing badminton, reading the Bible (Robb, Andrew, and I are reading it in 90 days), tutoring and being tutored 2-3 times a week (Tracey is teaching me Mandarin, and I’m helping her English pronunciation and teaching her “big” words), watching movies/tv shows (a group of us are watching “Freaks and Geeks” right now – a classic one-season-wonder TV show about the 80’s), and exploring the city and 2-square mile campus.
This next week our group is going on yet another traveling adventure to the city of Xian which was the capital city of China during six of the early Dynasties and is home to the Terracotta warriors. I’ll update again sometime after that with hopefully some sweet pictures!
A couple more observations:
1. Charades or other games like it would have been great to play before coming over here as we continue to struggle to explain what we are trying to say using body motions and hand signals.
2. Since such a small amount of Chinese people own cars, they walk nearly everywhere here. And besides the times we opt to take a motorcycle taxi (a little freaky – I’ve only done this once), or a campus bus, we also walk everywhere. Therefore I find myself walking up to 3-4 miles in a day sometimes. Quite a different story than in the States considering at home I’ve definitely driven from Ashton to class before!
Downtown Chongquing. As you can see I'm nearly a head taller than most people and am therefore able to see over the masses that were there during the holiday weekend.
Some delicious little fruit pancakes we found in downtown Chongqing.
A couple of friends in downtown Chongqing showing me their beautiful smiling faces.
A statue of the infamous Mao ZeDong on the SouthWest University campus. I still need to walk around campus and the local city BeiBei and take some pictures.
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