One time I was left alone while my sitter and a few other friends were down
stairs having dinner in the food court.  I decided to go down stairs to join
them. At this time I was in the temporary ankle cast, so it must have been one
of my first few days in the hospital.  My legs were very weak, but had not given
out completely at this time. Since I could barely stand and could not walk
without the aid of the back of a chair for support and balance. After getting a
chair in position I got out of bed and made my way to the elevator. It was then
that sanity returned. I realized I had no idea where I was going. What would
people think of a man pushing a chair randomly looking into restaurants,
especially a man who was clearly unstable on his feet.So I pushed my way back to
my bed. Itt wasn’t long before my sitter returned. I didn’t mention my aborted
search for her.

The hospital did not serve meals to patients. There was a food court on the
bottom floor, and at meal times the hospital would sponsor a food cart that
wheeled through the halls. The menu was not all that varied. The cart offered
cartons of rice with 4 or 5 different toppings, or noodles with the same choice
of toppings. Each carton, rice or noodles, cost a little under $1.00 USD. Or the
companions and sitters could go out for food and bring it back.

I fell out of bed one time after my legs were completely gone. I rolled over,
lost my balance, and kept going over the edge of the bed. This was the first
time I had fallen after my legs were gone. They were absolutely no help in
catching me or breaking the fall in any way. It is scary to be falling through
the air without any legs. I landed on my side and my head bumped hard into the
floor. I thought I might pass out, but I quickly recovered. A nurse and a few
helpers ran over and helped me back into bed. They put sides up on my bed and
they stayed up for the rest of my hospital stay.

One of the doctors who saw me from time to time, but was unable to diagnose
my illness simply wished me “Good luck,” when I checked out. I took that to mean
he had done all he, and his fellow doctors, had done all they could. My case and
my rapidly deteriorating body were now in the hands of god.

The patient doctor hierarchy in the hospital runs roughly like this: doctors,
nurses, other medical help, food handlers, cleaning personnel, patients. Below
patients: nothing.

After my legs gave out completely I could not walk to to bathroom, so I used
a plastic urinal. When a urinal was empty, I lay on my back, position the urinal
between my legs and let her rip. As it got fuller I would sit up on the side of
the bed to use it. In that position the urinal was straight up, so it could be
completely filled. I would sit up on the side of the bed with my feet on the
floor to keep steady. After using it I would sit it on the floor beside my bed
where I could find it easily the next time it was needed. One night I sat up in
be to urinate for the second or third time. I swung my feet off the side of the
bed and onto the floor. When my feet hit the floor I felt something wet, and
knew immediately something was very wrong. It  turned out that the urinal had
split along its seam, spilling urine all over the floor. I woke my girl friend
who cleaned the mess somehow, found a new urinal, and never complained. A
saint.

As I talk to people and have more time to think about things I’m sure
I will think of other anecdotes. I will add them below this line.

There was a kid in my chess club who stayed with me one day and night. I call
him a kid, but I’d guess he was in his early 30s. This gave my girl friend a
much needed break. At this time I wasn’t eating much and only had a bowel
movement every two or three days. Unfortunately for both of us, the urge hit me
during his time with me. Since my legs were gone I had to use a bed pan. He
helped position me on the pan and I let her rip. It was a large and very foul
smelling movement. When I finished he rolled me over, cleaned me up, and
disposed of the deposit I left in the bed pan. I have never felt so bad or been
so embarrassed in my life. He took everything in stride and never complained a
bit, though I noticed his eyes were watering a little. I felt both bad and
grateful for his help and left him my backup laptop when I left China. I knew he
would enjoy the computer because he had borrowed it from me several times and
used it to play games. He certainly earned it.

Looking back I wonder why I was not alarmed at the deterioration of my legs. As they grew weaker I just tried to adjust my behavior to accommodate them. I should have been alarmed and hopped on the first plane home to the U.S. where I could get good medical treatment. Instead I messed around in China until I broke my ankle and entered the Chinese hospital. The only explanation I can come up with I had arsenic poisoning in my brain causing muddled thinking. Once a nurse told me arsenic likes to hide in body fat and the brain is similar to body fat. So it’s logical that some arsenic was embedded there. It is also logical that arsenic in the brain will affect thinking. This is my totally unscientific explanation for why I behaved quite irrationally. It may also explain why my memories of my hospital stay are fuzzy.

About 3 weeks into my stay an acupuncturist visited me. She rolled me onto my stomach and stuck needles in the back of my legs. It was over in just a few minutes. There was neither pain or good results from the procedure.

The doctors continued to tell me to eat more to build myself up, and to exercise by swinging my foot off the side of the bed. This, supposedly would get my muscles back to normal. Meanwhile the nurses continued to fill me with the contents of IV bags. One nurse told me my body needed potassium and that was causing my muscle weakness. I was given potassium IVs every day until my blood was in balance. Of course, potassium was not my problem.

One day a doctor told me to exercise by rolling over in my bed. My bed was the size of a coffin and my movement in it was further restricted by the removable sides the nurses insisted on keeping in place since I had fallen out of bed on one of my first days in the ward. Plus I usually has IVs in one or both of my arms and would risk pulling them loose. When I pointed this out to the doctor, he replied to just roll over part way.

A few days later I was transferred to a room with only one other bed in it. This was a welcome change from the confusion of the ward. I noticed that my memory was becoming blurred. The entire time I was in China I kept a diary/blog about my trip. My diary keeping became erratic after I dropped and broke my camera. I felt my diary was much less interesting without pictures, and I assumed I could catch up after I bought a new camera. I didn’t foresee my illness when I made these plans. Suddenly I found myself stuck in a hospital bed in a Chinese hospital with an undiagnosed illness that was quite alarming to me, and I was unable to record my experiences.

Anyway, about this time my memory became extremely fuzzy. I’m not sure if it was the monotony of the never ending days in the hospital that all seemed the same, or the many IVs and pills I was taking, or just mental laziness. I remember thinking I should write this or that experience down, but convinced myself I could remember them. And having my laptop in the ward was out of the question. Well, some things I did remember, and some I doubtless forgot, and some I do remember I can not place in contest. I tried making a time line, but quickly gave up.

In the final part of this story I will write about some of my random experiences and thoughts. They will be in no particular order.

My adventure ends after more than two months in the hospital. My legs were worthless, and what ever caused the condition remained a mystery. My ankle was in pain, but presumably set correctly.

I got on a United flight from Hong Kong to Chicago, then home. I went to an American hospital where my illness was found to be caused by arsenic poisoning. After my body was flushed of as much of the poison as possible, I entered physical therapy where my muscles and nerves began to be rebuilt. And not one doctor told me to swing my leg off the side of the bed.

A couple of days later a female doctor stopped. I had not seen her before. She glanced at my cast and without any more than that cursory examination, she said the operation would take place Tuesday. Tuesday came and went with the same results as the previous Wednesday. I tried to ask around to see if this was standard operating procedure for Chinese surgeons, but no one seemed to know anything.

In the mean time, they had stopped giving me pain medication at night. I laid awake suffering with the pain from my ankle combined with the increasing pain from the disease in my legs. I asked a nurse if I could have something to ease the pain so I could sleep. She said they only gave heavy medication for a limited time because if they gave unlimited narcotics, addicts would do things like break their own ankles to have access to it.

So far as I was concerned, if a person was desperate enough to break his own bones, he deserved some state administered narcotics. At least he wouldn’t be breaking the bones of innocent citizens while robbing them to get money for drugs.

A few days later the original ankle doctor came by and told me he’d operate on my the following Wednesday. Before he could run off to the next patient, I asked him what time? He said he was unsure. The operating room was not that closely scheduled. Then I reminded him he and the female doctor had missed the previous two appointments. And while I didn’t have much better to do than lay in bed and wait for him, I thought it was both unprofessional and rude to blow me off without a word of explanation.

I don’t know if it was my complaining or happenstance, but Wednesday morning they came and got me and took me to the operating room. I don’t remember very much about the room or the procedures. They put me to sleep and I woke up some time later in my own bed. My ankle was bandaged. I was in considerable pain with little if any medication.

After three or four days they removed the bandages from my ankle. There are three incisions, one on the inside of the ankle, one on the outside and one in front. Each incision had about 10 stitches. The one on the inside of my ankle had metal staples, the other two were sewn with thread of some kind. The doctor said to leave the bandage off because exposure to the air would promote healing.

About ten days later the doctor removed the staples and the stitches and sent me to have the ankle x-rayed. After a quick examination, the doctor handed me the x-rays and I put them in my back pack. I assume he was satisfied with his work, though he said nothing. Months later I noticed my right leg, the one with the broken ankle, was about an inch longer than my left leg.

Anyway, when I checked into the Peking University Hospital, Shenzhen one of the first things they did was test my urine and draw my blood for analysis. The tests must have determined I was in bad shape. The IVs and the pills began the next day.

IVs were administered more than pills. Four, six, eight or more IVs were given to me daily. At the height of the IV flood they administered thirteen IVs in a single day. Most of the time they were given through my left arm, but occasionally the right arm was used, and sometimes both arms were used simultaneously One day when I glanced at my left arm it had swollen to nearly twice its size. I signaled the nurse who removed the IV and reinserted it in my right arm. The swelling in my left arm went down in a couple of hours.

Sometimes I would ask the nurse what was in a particular IV. Most of the time they couldn’t tell me or couldn’t speak English. When the head nurse came around she could tell me what was in a bag, but she didn’t come around very often. I remember getting saline and potassium bags. Otherwise I have no idea what was being pumped into my body. The only exception was at night when they gave me something very strong that induced a very good night’s sleep. I have no idea what it was, but I wish I had some now.

Every morning a blood sample was taken and from time to time my urine was examined. Slowly the number of IV bags dripped into my arms and the pills I had to ingest began to decrease. After about three weeks, the IVs all but stopped. I assume my blood and urine were in balance. No nurse nor doctor told me such thing. I am making an assumption.

In theory my health should have improved when my blood and urine were purified and in balance, but it continued to deteriorate. My legs were completely worthless, and they burned with a feeling of both fire and electricity that originated in my feet and spread upward. The muscles were all but gone rendering my legs to little more than burning bags of jelly. And the disease seemed to be moving into my upper body parts. I worried that it might spread to my heart and lungs, making them so weak as to be useless. Even worse, I worried I would loose control of my bladder and bowels. I could feel the fire slowly entering my arms and hands.

Meanwhile my ankle continued to knit in its cast. About once a week the bone doctor came by and asked how it was doing. I told him it was painful. He nodded then went on to his next patient. After three weeks he said it was time for the operation to set my bones. He indicated there would be a plate inserted on one side of the ankle and pins on the other side. I was amazed he could come to this conclusion without looking at my ankle, much less touching it or taking an
x-ray. How did he know it was knitting correctly? Anyway he told me the operation would take place the following Wednesday.

First of all there is TCM, traditional Chinese medicine. I lived about two blocks from a very large TCM hospital. It was at least 20 stories tall and was visible from everywhere in my neighborhood. I didn’t know what TCM meant and felt very good about being so close to a hospital in case of emergency.

One day my girl friend asked me to accompany her to the TCM hospital. She had a pain in her shoulder that I assumed was arthritis. So we walked to the hospital. There was a large room to the right of the entrance hall where there were dozens of people sitting with IVs. It almost looked surreal.

We took the elevator to the 4th floor where My girl friend went to a window and was given a slip of paper which was her appointment to see a doctor. Then we went to the tenth floor and found the room. It was a smallish room with a doctor sitting behind a desk and four or five people milling around in the room. There was a stool next to the doctor’s desk where the current patient sat. After a short conversation the doctor wrote his prescription and the patient was replaced by someone already in the room, presumably the next patient.

We waited outside the doctor’s office until a couple of patients had been treated before my girlfriend entered. In a few minutes it was her turn and she took her place on the stool next to the desk. After a short talk she emerged with a prescription in hand. The consultation took much less than five minutes and the doctor never examined her shoulder in any way, at least by western standards.

She took the prescription to yet another window on yet another floor and paid for it. If I remember correctly it was about $15.00 USD. Finally we went to the dispensary, which was on a different floor. There she picked up a large bag full of teas, roots, and herbs and god knows what else. The entire time we spent in the hospital was about an hour. There were short lines in front of every window, and waiting in those lines is what took most of our time. All in all, it wasn’t a bad experience. We took the medicines home where she brewed a cup of boiling water and added the appropriate ingredients. She drank the concoction. Of course it didn’t work immediately. In fact, I’m not sure it worked at all. I’m a TCM skeptic, but am smart enough to keep my mouth shut about it.

TCM is widely accepted in China, especially by older people. Many of the pharmacies stock half modern drugs and half TCM roots, sea horses, herbs, mushrooms, and whatever. Because there is so much counterfeiting of medicine, and everything else, many people don’t trust the slickly packaged modern drugs. They prefer the TCM which can be seen, smelled and touched to insure it is what it should be. Some of the TCM medicines are extremely expensive and are kept under lock and key. Even stores like Wal-Mart and Carrefour sell traditional Chinese medicines, usually under lock and key.

Another aspect of TCM is it seems to be based on having a well balanced set of chemicals and nutrients in the body. These can be measured by analyzing the blood and the urine. If everything is in balance, you should be healthy. If things are out of balance, the can be corrected by adding the missing elements, most often by way of and IV, a drink, or a pill. Once things are in balance, one’s health should be restored. I can see elements of TCM in modern medicine.

More tomorrow…Maybe??

I must say I did not appreciate the landlord’s attitude. I lived in the apartment nearly two years without a single “falling down drunk” incident until the previous 30 days or so. He should have believed my girl friend.

Back at the hospital, after 4 nights in the hall I was transferred to a ward with about 20 other patients plus their helpers. By this time I could hardly stand, my leg muscles were so weak. I was confined to my tiny bed in my leg cast while my ankle knitted. Every day or so a team of 5 or 6 doctors came through the ward. Apparently there was a head doctor and four or five students.

Sometimes they would stop as ask how I was doing. I always asked about my leg weakness. I never asked about my broken bone since it was receiving care from another doctor. Their standard answer was to eat more food to build up my body, and to swing my legs off the edge of the bed as a strengthening exercise.

This led to a few questions in my mind that I tried to ask the doctors, but was unable to because they were quickly off to the next bed. My unasked questions included how did they know it was a nutritional deficiency that was causing my weakness, and why was the weakness confined to my legs? I am not a small, emaciated person. In fact I am about 20 pounds over weight. So how did they come up with their diagnosis? Also, I have been on diets fairly regularly most of my life and I have never experienced muscle weakness as a result of them. So once again, I asked myself how did they come up with the diagnosis?

Frustrated, I got on my computer and looked for diseases that cause muscle weakness. I came up with Guillain-Barre Syndrome which causes muscle weakness, loss of reflexes, and numbness or tingling in affected parts of the body. I was experiencing all of these symptoms. I wrote the name down on a piece of paper and asked the doctors if they had considered this syndrome the next time I saw them. The head doctor was livid that I would try to diagnose myself when I was not a trained medical professional like himself. He said if he was in my house he would not insult me by trying to tell me how to run it. The same principle applied in his house, the hospital.

I apologized and tried to smooth things over by saying the illness was very rare and it probably never appeared in China. And there had only been a handful of cases in the U.S., so I thought it might not even be mentioned in Chinese medical literature. The head doctor was not mollified, and as the little group began to move on, I offered the paper on which the name was written to them. One of the student doctors took it, but I don’t think anything was done with  it.

To be continued tomorrow…I hope.

I called my girl friend who came over and helped me to the bed then she went to the pharmacy for advice. She returned in a few minutes and called an ambulance to take me to the hospital. The ambulance arrived and with the help of the ambulance driver, his assistant, and two large men from off the street, I was loaded into a wheel chair, rolled into the elevator, and carried down the  front steps of my building. Then on to the Peking University Hospital, Shenzhen.

Supposedly this was the second best hospital in China, second only to the Peking University Hospital, Beijing. Remembering how good the medical treatment was supposed to be in communist Cuba, I assumed it would be similary good in communist China. Surely their facilities would be more than adequate for an ailment as simple as a broken bone.

When we arrived at the hospital, which was only about 10 blocks away, I was taken to a doctor fairly quickly. After a couple of x-rays he determined my ankle was broken in three places. He put a temporary cast on my leg to keep it from moving. A couple of days later he put a plaster cast on it to allow it time to knit.

After seeing the doctor for the first time I was assigned a bed space in the entrance hall, as all of the beds in the rooms and wards were full. There were literally dozens of others lined up on both sides in the wide hall.

In this hospital the patients were encouraged to bring a friend to stay with them. This cut down on the need for nurses. The friend could take care of routine things like changing bed pans, changing clothing, feeding, changing sheets, and all sorts of minor tasks that an untrained person could attend to.  If the friend couldn’t bring a cot, a cot was provided by the hospital. Some patients even had children camped out with them. There seemed to be no rules about the number of visitors or visiting hours. This system allowed a single nurse to take care of the several dozen patients. Caring for that number of patients would have taken several nurses and assistants in the west.

My girl friend was kind enough to drag a cot to the hospital where she camped out next to my bed for the duration of my stay.

More tomorrow… Hopefully.

My experience with Chinese hospital began in March of 2011. I was living in Shenzhen when I felt  a strange twinge in my left calf while on my afternoon walk. I would have thought nothing of it, and it would have been forgotten had I not felt another a few days later. Then so slowly and to be almost imperceptible, I realized my legs were getting weaker and weaker.

Then one day when I was entering my apartment I slipped on the freshly moped, still wet, hall floor as I was getting off the elevator. I couldn’t get enough traction on the wet floor to get up and had to walk on my knees to my door where I unlocked it and crawled inside. Once in I was able to use the dry floor and a chair to help get up. I blamed the incident on the fake Crocs I was wearing and their crummy traction. I didn’t know it at the time, but the landlord was watching me wallow around in the hall with the security camera.

A week or so later I was walking down in street in front of my building with a few friends. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, I fell down and carried a couple of my friends down with me. The fall caused me to sprain both of my ankles. I hobbled into my building and up to my apartment on the seventh floor. I didn’t realize it, but the landlord saw me fall in front of his building.

I decided not to go out any more until my ankles healed. It was then that I noticed it was harder and harder to actually stand up. My leg muscles were very weak. I got around in my apartment by leaning on the back of a chair to stand up, then pushing it ahead of me and stepping behind it. Oddly enough, at least in hindsight, I didn’t think a thing about the weaknesses and the odd feelings in my legs. I guess I assumed whatever was causing it would go away.

Finally after a few days I ventured out of the apartment for a Shenzhen Daily, the local English language rag. Walking was difficult from what remained of the sprains and the weakness. The news stand was about two blocks away from my flat. After walking less than a block I realized something was badly wrong and I would be unable to make it to the news stand. I leaned against a wall and called by girlfriend to help me home. She didn’t answer so I left a message.

After sitting on the wall for a few minutes I felt a little stronger and decided to continue on to the news stand. I made it, but was very shaky.  There was a small café across the street, so after resting again I made it to the café and sat down at an outdoor table. I ordered an airplane size bottle of a clear liquor whose name I don’t know. It is called “black beer’ by the expats, and was very popular with both them and the local Chinese. It was very strong, and very warming, so even though it was a hot day, it sounded good to me. I thought it might steady me.

Before I could take more than a couple of sips of “black beer” my girl friend got my message came walking up to the café. She seemed angry, but I don’t know why.  Maybe my message came at an inconvenient time. We started back home.

I had to stop and rest every half block or so. The tiny sip of “black beer” hadn’t steadied me in the least. My girl friend helped me up the steps to my apartment. My landlord was sitting at the front desk, observing everything.

To be continued… Tomorrow I hope.

I usually don’t write a lot of negative things about my travels, but I Had such a bad experience with Sinh Cafe today, I must record it.

First of all, I must admit I’ve used that company dozens of times, all with good results. Today, however, was different. I was in Ho An for 3 days, but found it so boring that I changed my plans to leave after only one day. It ended up costing me nearly $800.

In the first place the clerk had such a thick accent I could barely understand a word he said. Then there were cancellation fees, addition fees, car fees, and fees for the sake of fees. Even thought I had prepaid for my bus ticket to Hanoi, I couldn’t get a refund for the unused portion. Never did understand why.

I expected to pay for the air ticket to Hanoi, but for some reason there was a 100,000 dong surcharge added to it.

Also, I had to prepay my filthy hotel room booked in advance by thr Sinh Cafe and Sinh Cafe expected the owner to to to Sinh Cafe for his refund. I, of course, never saw a dime of the refund.

I don’t know  if this guy was a rogue, or if Sinh Cafe has changed their rules, but I will never use them again and sugest no one else does either.

I’m sorry I didn’t get the guy’s name as I would certainly publish it.

More of better times in Hoi An soon.