Dee’s appendix: The editorial

So I apologize if anyone thinks me writing this blog post is inappropriate while my wife watches the bachelor on the slingbox. Sometimes it can be cathartic for me to write. All the content of this blog post has been reviewed by Dee. She has approved of this ad.

So I’m not sure why Dee didn’t go into the hospital on Wednesday after 2 days of a sore abdomen. I think it might be the Sacajawea complex. ‘I gave birth to 4 kids. I’m not going to no stupid hospital because my tummy hurts.’ I know when I asked her if she was going to the hospital on Thursday, she said she couldn’t because Thursday is her busy day at school. You can’t let a leaky appendix get in the way of your busy day. I’m not sure how effective I would be at teaching/counseling all day with a 3 day old burst appendix, but apparently Dee managed. So the doctor had to wait until Friday morning.

On Friday, our driver took Dee to the hospital but got a little nervous when she when to the gynecological wing. In China you don’t go to the hospital by yourself. Not because the Chinese require moral support, but rather because the healthcare system requires a little more participative management by the patients. So when you go to the hospital for ‘woman problems’, your assistant has to help facilitate all the testing and examinations. Our driver knew he was in big trouble.

So he called his wife who was working at the coat store as a coat saleswoman. She left her job and came right over. Need to think about that one for a little while. If you were in America and your husband called you and asked you to leave your job to help his boss’ wife check into the hospital, it’s hard to know what you would say because the request is so ridiculously audacious. Yet there she was 20 minutes later with a smile. Turns out this would not be the most audacious request of her this day (again, foreshadowing)

After Dee spoke to the check in people, it was time to run some tests. In China, money talks. Dee paid the extra 50% in order to get to the front of the line. Not sure how much $$ this actually was, but Dee felt OK paying to cut in line instead of just cutting in line as a matter of course (It’s the American way to appropriately cut in line) The first test was an ultrasound. Easy enough. Except the ultrasound was on the other side of the hospital. It’s the patient’s job to get themselves to their own tests, so Dee walked with the driver’s wife to the other side of the hospital. You would think a gurney or wheelchair would make a lot of sense in this situation. You would not be Chinese if that thought crossed your mind.

So this is when Dee’s day begins to get interesting. It turns out the ultrasound is not the external ultrasound like when you’re pregnant and you want to see junior sucking his thumb. This was going to be an internal ultrasound, which I had never heard of before and I’ve been working very hard over the last week to try and not visualize this process.

This does become an interesting example of Chinese culture being so different from western culture. What we would consider a form of torture prohibited by the Geneva Convention, the Chinese view as efficient medicine. So all the women get prepped for their ultrasound by being disrobed from the waist down and wait in line. Then when it is your turn you get to lie down and have a couple doctors come and give you the ultrasound as well as a pelvic exam and then send you on your way. Mass produced medicine is pretty efficient but it’s normally a little too much ‘community’ for the westerner.

Then came the blood draw. You can’t have a nurse come to you and take your blood in China. This hospital has a ‘blood draw’ walk up counter (think 1950’s soda counter, China style). Which is, you guessed it, on the other side of the hospital. So Dee got to walk back to the other side of the hospital again.

Then it was time for the CT scan. Back to the other side of the hospital. A couple hours later Dee gets to review the CT scan with the doctor, but the scan did not turn out very well. Back to the CT scan room for scan #2. Then back to the doctor’s office to review the results.

So after the ultrasound, blood draw, CT scan #1, and CT scan #2, and talking to 4 different doctors using Google translator, Dee was able to hear from the doctor that she would need to be admitted with a perforated appendix. After a full day of walking around the hospital, Dee was beginning to agree with the doctors. Now this hospital is really large with a new wing and an old wing. So at the end of the walkathon, Dee was told that the new wing was full and she would have to go to the old wing. Dee didn’t care as long as she could at least lay down on something horizontal. But then she found out that the old section was also full and she would have to go to a different hospital that just so happened to be around the corner from our house. Kind of a miracle that hospital #1 would be full. Miracle #2 would be that hospital #3 was open and within walking distance of our home.

So by the time I get to my wife after feeding the kids dinner, she has found a bed. I asked her how she was feeling and all she could say is ‘this has been the worst day of my life’. Which having been married to me for 15 years, I know she’s had some rough days to compare with. So at this point the nurse comes in with an enema suppository. Using hand gestures, she asks Dee if she knows what it is. Dee says ‘yes’. Then the nurse asks Dee with gestures if she knows what to do with it. Dee says ‘yes’. Then the nurse leaves the suppository with the driver’s wife who starts putting on the little plastic finger protector and I begin to realize that she is getting ready to give my wife the enema. Again, the Chinese definition of personal boundaries is just a little broader than ours. Dee did manage to explain that she should take the plastic finger protector and take care of this one herself. I wish I had a video of the driver’s wife’s look of skepticism and then grudging relinquishment of the suppository while still giving some very clear hand gestures to make sure Dee knew exactly where that medicine was supposed to go and how she was supposed to get it there.

Next we had to explain to our driver and his wife that they really did not need to spend the night in the hospital with Dee. That she would be ok sleeping by herself. They weren’t buying it. No one sleeps by themselves in the hospital. Why waste all that bed space with just one person? What if Dee needed something in the middle of the night as there is limited nursing staff at night. We finally got them to accept that they needed to sleep at their homes and could come back in the morning. Early in the morning. So Dee went to sleep with her 2 roommates and their sisters, husbands, and mothers and waited for the driver and his wife to return at 8 am. Of course Dee was already awake against her better judgment due to her roommates’ decision for everyone in the group to wake up at 6 am. You have to make hay when the sun is shining after all.

The next day they moved Dee to a new room with beds that had some mechanical adjustment mechanisms that no one ever used. This is where we again realized that hospital visits are a team sport. Dee had an IV that was running into her hand. But there was no monitor or regulating device. They just expect the patient to watch the IV bag and when it’s empty, you call the nurse. So it was my job to watch the IV bag. I failed. A lot. The other 3 women in the room and their cohorts were constantly hitting me and pointing at the IV. I got to press the nurse call button and then apologize to the nurse for letting the IV run dry so they would have to get all the air out of the line before they hooked up the next bag.

Dee also could not go to the bathroom by herself at this point as she couldn’t hold her IV bag by herself while going to the WC. So whenever she had to go, she had to ask one of the neighbors if they would be willing to walk with her down the hall to the WC and help her. Which they always did. The downside, however, about having all the helpers in the room with you is that makes for a lot of sleeping bodies in one room. Statistics are against you at that point in that the chances that no one snores like a lumberjack is slim. Dee did not beat these odds the first night. But graciously, the husband did not have a repeat performance any of the other nights.
The hospital did a good job of managing sterility at the point of medicine delivery. Outside of the short distance from medicine to IV port, the expectation was a bit lower. Having one bathroom for everyone on the floor led to a lot of ‘community’ in the bathroom. It would seem like soap would be a reasonable expectation, but hand soap is not on the list of hospital equipment. You were on your own for that. When the nurse would change IV bags, she would have to get the stream going a bit before she could connect it to Dee’s hand (see earlier note about delinquent husband letting the IV run out) Seemed pretty clear to the nursing staff that there is no better place for this initial stream than on the floor. They figure it will evaporate and be fine at some point. Also the smoking in the hallway took a little getting used to. And the alcohol drinking. Before last week, I had never seen a hospital that sold liquor in the convenience store in the lobby. From the picture you can see that the soda and water shelves look untouched. The beer and baijiu was pretty depleted.

By Sunday, Dee was looking pretty rough. 3.5 days with no shower doesn’t seem to affect Chinese hair very much. It had a pretty big effect on Dee’s. In the midst of all this craziness it is still amazing to see God’s hands all over the story. We could both feel Him bringing both of us to that point of realizing we are not in control and we needed to trust God for providing his grace and mercy. In this case God’s grace was delivered to us by the hands and feet of a Chinese woman who offered herself as a complete sacrifice to Dee after just meeting her. And for those who have never experienced it, there is something particularly/peculiarly profound about worshipping God when you feel broken with nothing to offer. Having Jessica and Emily praying with us Sunday night will most likely be a more enduring memory than all the other crazy stuff in this blog post; Having a very real sense of God’s presence in the midst of all the madness. (As a side note, this line of thought begs some interesting questions: Did we experience God’s grace because Dee is a good person? For the woman across the room who was not experiencing God’s grace, was she less deserving? If things had turned out badly, would we still remember God’s grace positively? These are all great questions that I don’t have the answer to. All I have is the experience that we had which was one of great peace and joy in celebrating God’s goodness while the world around us was riddled with craziness). (As a side note to the side note, the last thought can be a pretty significant moment of introspection that normally means more for the one who experienced it than the reader. But I also believe God can have a great sense of humor that we can all enjoy. When I finished writing the earlier comments, my IPOD starting playing the beevis and butthead ‘my bunghole’ ditty that I got from Nels Smith. Impossible not to smile about life’s little ironies)

But in the end, you have to give the Changchun hospital credit. Their treatment plan was identical to what we have experienced here in Beijing, and I would guess at 10% of the cost. As westerners we have come to expect privacy in our sleeping and in our restrooms and . . . We expect machines to do things for us. We expect nurses and doctors to do a lot of things for us. When really in the end, we can do a lot of these things ourselves and just need the nurses to provide a sterile environment for medicine delivery and the doctors to provide information on diagnosis and treatment. Everything else is gravy to make us feel like we’re special. Just my opinion. I think I am willing to pay a lot of money for that gravy, but we should never forget that a lot of it is not necessary to our health. Just our peace of mind.