Accidentally getting Shock Therapy treatment: The 5th Worst China Hospital Experience I've had.

"Bzzz! Bzzzz!" the doctor explained to me, jerking his hands spasmodically to show the effect of electricity on one's body.  It was at this time that I first noticed that the doctor was not wearing a shirt under his doctor's coat.  My doctor was no more legitimate than my Chloe bag. Conned again.

I considered my options.  My first instinct was to fling myself off the table,  emphatically stating that there will be no electrocution of Meghan today!  Only... there were needles on my head, neck, hands, feet, arms, and chest.  The needles were attached to electric wires.  The electric wires were connected to what I could only hope was a safe-for-humans voltage box.  And the voltage box was controlled by Dr. Qu, who was currently miming the word electricity in a very theatrical way.  

Obviously, jumping off the table in a righteous fury would be challenging.  Righteous fury is often lost in translation, I don't know the word for electrocution, and most importantly, I had dozens of tiny needles piercing my skin.  

My Dr. Kevorkian/Qu smiled benevolently down at me, and I was filled with a sense of foreboding.  But the idea of plucking each needle out of my skin while trying to convey my horror seemed dismally time consuming, and I made the executive decision to just let this happen.  After all, the worst that worst that could happen: my brain frizzles. 

I passively watched as Dr. Qu turned the dial on the voltage box.  The needles started jumping around in my head while Dr. Qu interrogated me as to my favorite type of Chinese food and how I could possibly prefer Greek food to Chinese food.  

"Greece is so small!  How could you like their food more?  So strange!" he marveled.  When I noted that actually, this (meaning the electric needles) was more strange than my food preference, he and the other patients and nurses in the ward all laughed at me. 

Apartments in China: A story of cyclical woe.

There are times when one forgets that one is in China, times when one starts to feel a level of comfort in China, times when one falls in love with the different, unique aspects of Chinese culture, and times when one would rather set fire to a Hutong, then throw themselves into it, than deal with the cultural divide. 

Welcome to apartment hunting in China. 

Looking for a new abode is never fun, but looking for an apartment in China is a very special, highly developed form of torture that renders most people substantially more paranoid and less humane than before they began their quest.  

                               A "ridiculously expensive apartment"

                               The view from my Dalian Apartment

As of now, I have gone apartment hunting three times.  I am now wiser, to both the market and the wiles of real estate agents.  All of this does me exactly no good, as now I have to acquiesce to the unfair practices with impotent fury instead of confused naivete.  

Lesson 1: Dalian: Things can always get creepier

This was my first time looking for an apartment.  With little language skills and absolutely no knowledge of the renting market, I somehow managed to get a fair price for a beautiful apartment, albeit after a series of bizarre days.

Day 1: Me vs. the Communist Apartments

Standing outside of the communist, unrenovated grayish-white blocks, I was caught up in the history of it all.  Imagine what these blocks have seen! Imagine the lives that these people lived! I wanted to be part of it, I wanted to eat cabbage and rice, I wanted the full Mao experience.  I could, for sure, rough it for a few months. 

Then, as I walked past the stacks of dried cabbage lining the hallway, noted the crazy maze of pieced-together, patched pipes and finally entered the dismal, tiny apartment, my little capitalistic heart fought back and won over my common sense.

-- 

Day 2: Me vs. future murder crime scene apartments 

By the end of this day, my real estate agent's will had been broken. Every apartment was exponentially more disturbing than the apartment before it.

        

Apt 1) A giant teddy bear painted on a hot pink wall — I was told that this apartment "was meant for girls." 

Apt 2) A studio apartment with the walls to the bathroom made of entirely see-through glass — "very modern Chinese building." 

Apt 3) An apartment with a massage table in the middle of it.

Apt 4) A studio apartment with three middle-aged Chinese men hanging out in it.

This was the final straw for my poor real estate agent.  She opened the door to find three older men staring blankly at us, she slowly closed the door and could only look at me with mute horror.  

Day 3: Me vs. the "ridiculously expensive" day of apartments

On this day, I looked at apartments that were nice and, according to my Chinese friends, insanely expensive.  They informed me that I was being tricked by my real estate agent and should find a new one.  The absurd price?  Around $250/month.  Based on what I had seen previously, I decided I didn't care if I was being cheated.  

Lesson 2: Beijing I: Deception is the name of the game

This was perhaps the most enraging of the three.  Every person, landlord and realtor, lied to me.  About everything.  One-bedroom apartments were actually studios, 5-minute walks to apartments were actually 35-minute walks, and apartments in Guomao were actually in Shuangjing.  

Lesson 3: Beijing II:  Being prepared doesn't help

This time around, I was prepared.  I knew exactly how much I should pay for an apartment, utilities and taxes.  But it didn't matter at all, because, as my real estate agent informed me, though I knew what I should pay, other people did not, and if I didn't take the apartment for the price that they wanted, some other person would.

5 normal things that can kill you in China.

         When people find out that I live in China, there usually is a series of questions they ask me, but one of the first questions is often, "Is it safe there?"
          This time last year, I would have said with full confidence that China is the safest place I've ever lived.  Now I would still say the same, as the other places I've lived are Washington, DC (murder capital of the country) and Moscow (murder capital of the world), but without the confidence.
        In the past year, I've been 1) robbed, 2) dragged out of my cab and almost down a set of stairs by a group of rabid drunk Chinese people and 3) got into a screaming showdown with the "leader of the taxi cab drivers of Dalian".
        That being said, that isn't the norm for foreigners in China. I just happen to be exceptionally unlucky, to the point where I don't even think Switzerland would be safe for me.  That being said, I wouldn't even put crime into my top 5 dangers in China because criminal activity is so scarce.  What would I put in my top 5 list?  5 things that every person in China encounters on a normal day basis.  


1) Death by Taxi cab drivers who live in a Grand Theft Auto World.
      Every single driver in China seems to think that he is Mad Max, and drives as such. 

At heart, every Chinese taxi driver is this man.

 However, even the Chinese people I met in Beijing noted how terrible the drivers are in Dalian, apparently Dalian is notorious for the death racers that are responsible for dozens of peoples' lives on a given day.  Worst of all, taxi drivers take it as a personal insult if one wants to wear a seat belt, indignantly informing the passenger that they are a good driver, then unbuckling the offending seatbelt.
 Just one example of a normal taxi drive.  
         While cheerfully asking if you like Chinese food and informing you that they like Obama/Kobe Bryant/some other American sports star I don't know, they are playing a chicken/bumper car hybrid game with their car: going into the wrong lane, driving full speed in reverse for over a mile (it was maybe the most impressive thing I've ever seen) and driving through active construction sites,  just of the top of my head.


2) Death by Mystery Meat Street Food
      "Fried tofu! How delicious!" It's not even meat, so it has to be okay right?
            Wrong. In street food, people often mix tofu with cardboard.  Can you imagine what they mix their meat with? As one might have heard, the Chinese culinary scope and width far exceeds ours in terms of what they will eat.  Which means that they will pretty much eat anything and everything, except for ice water. That means that a stick of chuar (a kabob) could be mutton, or it be the intestines of a rat.  There is a reason why Hepatitis B. is a huge problem here, and it pretty much starts and ends at mystery street food.  

Grasshoppers. 

             The worst part is that street food is curiously delicious, and most of the time, the street food is safe to eat, which lures people into a false sense of security about the food.  I've gotten around this problem by eating only seafood and vegetable chuar, which is delicious and easily recognizable.  


3) Death by being a Pedestrian 

     Being a pedestrian in China is a little like being in world where you are a bowling pin, and every car is a bowling ball that wants you dead. If you are lucky enough to make it to the safety of a sidewalk, one still must contend with the rickshaws.  As they are neither a car nor a pedestrian, they abide the laws of no man, and as such, are the lone source of anarchy in a country where everything is controlled by the government.

4) Death by Construction sites/random manholes
     When people say that China is a developing country, it isn't just economically.  It is literally developing, everywhere, in every city.  What happens when lots of buildings need to be torn down/built up in a short amount of time and there are no safety regulations?
       The question is, what doesn't happen.  Steel beams hanging above a sidewalk like an blade of destruction, sudden drops into the dark netherworld of Chinese sewage, skeletal buildings with frames held together by twine, and burning infernos of melded iron steps away from the sidewalk, these are not  occasional occurrences.  It's just a walk to the grocery store.

They'll get around to building the rest of this sometime

                      
5) Death by Fireworks
             The Chinese people are a moderate people, but when they celebrate, do they ever.  Going out for a few beers? Only if by a few, you mean "their body weight," and by beer you mean baijiu.  This is the country that only told their employees not to drink at lunchtime after heavy drinking competitions put one man in a coma and the other in a coffin in one week.  So throwing confetti? Eh, only if it is confetti of FIRE.
          As I've mentioned before, Spring Festival is the time of year when Chinese citizens throw fireworks (and caution) into the wind, with a reckless devil-may-care attitude of where the fire might land.  After all, what is the worst that can happen with millions of unmonitored pyromaniacs setting off fireworks in heavily populated cities?

Oops!

            Just to get an idea, this building is in the center of Beijing, and took up an entire block of downtown real estate.  It is now unusable, as no one can figure out what to do with the charred remains of the brand-new hotel that was build for the 2008 Olympics.

my street, full of fun and confetti

my street, under attack/"celebrating spring festival"

           For two weeks, China is under siege by people armed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fireworks.  And not just sparklers, but 4th of July-style fireworks as well.  They also have a cutesy type of firework that shoots balls of fire out of a tube, I discovered as I walked behind a group of little boys, all busy shooting the fireballs at the windows of the apartment buildings they saw.  
         Every year, dozens of people die, hundreds are hurt and several buildings burn to the ground, as tends to happen when dealing with combustible fire. 

MSG coffee? delightfully delicious

Being illiterate in the language of the country that one is residing in can be very complicated- it presents one with issues that one wasn't prepared for- a verbal language barrier can be broken through with miming, body language and a handy dictionary.  Characters that one can't even begin to recognize or identify provide a wall even more impermeable than the Berlin Wall in terms of comprehension. 

This makes shopping an ordeal since I've gotten here, since I often have no real idea of what i'm buying. Characters aside, grocery shopping is difficult because much of what is sold in China is unrecognizable to me- the products that are used for cleaning, beauty etc. deal with issues that never concern westerners (i.e. skin whiteners)

For example, I was confused as to why my hair spray, which I bought in the hair care area of carrefour, smelled like icy hot.  I discovered that my hair spray was in reality mosquito repellent.  I bought a bag of white crystals that I thought was sugar, only to discover that I had added 3 tablespoons of MSG to my coffee instead of sugar. 

Thus, shopping has turned into a mindtwister, requiring a skill of logical deduction that sometimes eludes me, as I search for the package for indications as to its contents, and try to judge what it might be, based on its location in the store floor plan.  Even my electronic translator is not that helpful, as the characters can be tricky to identify. Today was no different, as I returned home to find that three separate items were not what I had believed them to be. 

Shopping? quite the ordeal

Chinese hospitals = wretched.

I have been pretty well fortified against culture shock since I've been here, but I met my match with the Chinese hospitals.

When reading this, keep in mind that I love China and appreciate almost everything about China, save this one matter. China doesn't do healthcare well. It is most likely the combination of the fact that because they have 1.3 billion people, and so the value of an individual lessens in the pragmatic long-term viewpoint of a nation, because they're a developing country as well as the problem that they just don't have the knowledge base to build a better healthcare system at this point.

Recently, my friend was diagnosed with something that could have been an appendicitis- but had mysterious symptoms that did not fit with her diagnosis. Day after day, she would return from the hospital more confused than the day before, usually grasping the test results and X-rays taken that day, because in China, your x-rays aren’t needed by the doctors for your medical records because medical records? Don’t exist.

She asked me to come with her to the hospital the day before her surgery for moral support, because she was little frightened. As I walked through the hospital, I realized that while I had been wary of the dismal hospitals, I had not been afraid. I should have been. Elderly people stared at us with vacant eyes, as they laid on the gray cold tiles, resting their head on the single piece of newspaper that served as their pillow, The hallways, “waiting rooms”- just a wider hallways with chairs- and parking lot of the hospital were lined with sickly people in various stages of decay. It was horrific.

As for the surgery, it went off without a hitch. The doctors did know what they were doing after all, though the language barrier had made things much more difficult and stressful. However, healthcare in China is not anywhere in the realm of healthcare in the US.

First of all, the concept of sterile is to China as dragons are to Americans: make- believe. There is a reason why Hepatitis B is an issue here. What are the implications of this? Forget sterile, basic standards of cleanliness is too much for traditional Chinese hospitals. One is lucky to walk into a hospital and not see a floor streaked with blood and vomit.

Within hours after the surgery, my friend was taken off of painkillers. She had been sliced open and had an organ removed and had no morphine, vicoden or even tylonel to surpress the quite substantial amount of pain she was in.

-She was not given nearly enough general anesthesia- she woke up while she was still in the operating room

and oh, insurance is completely worthless in China. They still make you pay everything upfront, and the insurance reimburses you afterward. So if you are hit by a car, and don’t have the 10,000 RMB on hand, you are pretty much doomed.

Basically, if I get seriously ill, I'm on a plane back to America. China wins this round.