Adventures By Design

Late Saturday evening I started fasting.  On Sunday morning we took the train to Shanghai and arrived at the hospital where we immediately checked into our room.  At first I wasn’t sure if this was really our room, or just a holding area.  The room was rather nice: leather couch, coffee table, private bathroom with towels, toothbrushes, and soap.  It’s nicer than a lot of hotels we’ve stayed in. The nurses did a bunch of tests including some blood tests, a chest x-ray, an EKG, and a penicillin allergy test.  For as out of shape that I am, my heart rate was so slow that the nurse had to get me to do hospital bed sit-ups to get it high enough to register on their machine.  My blood pressure was fine too (Ha! So there, mom!).  After the tests we met with the doctor to discuss the procedure and sign consent forms.  At this point they told me that if the excision was too big, they might have to do a skin graft from my shoulder or behind my ear… freaky!  For the rest of the day we just waited around in the hospital room watching TV on my laptop.

On Monday (after fasting since the night before) I was told I was second in line for surgery. So we waited until about 10am when they came with a gurney to take me to surgery.  Gin came along as far as the big ominous red line on the floor, and then she had to leave me alone.  They wheeled me down a hall with lots of big doors, and parked me outside of a room where the previous occupant was just being finished.  It was a little freaky hanging out but at least I didn’t hear any bone-cutting saws or blood-curdling screams.  They wheeled that guy out and then it was my turn.  They brought me in and some of the doctors asked how I was feeling.  I told them I was nervous and they told me not to worry, that it was minor surgery, and I’m sure in the scale of what hospitals do it was.  But for me just being in that room with all the beeping machines, bright lights, and funny smells was scary.  A more immediate problem however was that the operating table was only as wide as my shoulder blades and I had to make a conscious effort to keep my arms on top of my chest.  This reminded me of the sleeper bus Gin and I took in Vietnam where my arms would flop down beside me, and, after five minutes of them hanging down hyper-extended, I would wake up with shooting pain.  However, these guys had a solution: they tied me to the bed with straps around my thighs and my shoulders.  While they hooked up the blood pressure cuff, a heart monitor, and a saline drip, I had a couple minutes to relax (the heart monitor helped me know just how relaxed I was: my pulse dropped from 80 beats/min to 58 or so).  Then it was showtime.  A women introduced herself: ‘I am your anesthetist.’  To which I naturally replied: ‘I am your patient.’  Her eyes crinkled above her mask. She put the cup thingy on my mouth and nose and told me it had oxygen and medicine in it and she asked me to breathe deeply.  After 3 breaths or so nothing was happening and I was thinking ‘what kind of crackpot Chinese hospital am I in here?’  By the fifth breath my face went tingly which I thought the doctors might want to know about, but before I could say anything I was out.

I woke up in a recovery room, with a few other patients and spent some time drifting in and out of lucidity.  I didn’t barf as far as I know which is good.  Eventually they wheeled me back to my room, and Gin, who was starting to worry a bit because I had been gone for three hours.  There was a special nurse who was there to take care of me (and only me!) and I spent the next six hours flat on my back with no pillow.  At about 7:30 they finally let me sit up and eat dinner.  By that time I was feeling fine, which surprised me because I wasn’t on any painkillers.  After dinner I watched BBC for a while on my flat-screen TV and then was told to go to sleep.  After so much time spent flat on my back, I couldn’t tell which hurt more: my nose, or my lower back.  Even though in my waking time I didn’t perceive a lot of pain, when I tried to go to sleep I found the dull ache kept me awake.  Plus, I’m pretty sure I disturbed my stitches by chewing dinner (until then I didn’t realize how much my nose wiggles when I move my jaw).

Eventually I did go to sleep and woke up at 6am this morning.  The packing in my nose was starting to fall out and was really annoying because there was a piece of bloody gauze dangling above my mouth.  The doctors would change it later, I was told, after I took a shower.  I was also told that I needed two more bags of IV antibiotics and then I could go home.  They finished one bag and then the nurse told me that the doctor would change the packing so I walked down the hall to the exam room.  They yarded out the old gauze, which felt immensely disgusting, and told me to relax and it might be a little painful as they reapplied the packing.  I sat with my shoulders and head leaning on the wall and my feet flat on the floor and took a few deep breaths like I always do when something scary like this is happening.  The doctor spun the gauze around and packed it into my nose, but she didn’t put it very far up.  As she finished I opened my eyes and immediately started to get light-headed.  The construction and traffic noises from the street below suddenly got really far away and my vision darkened.  The doctors (there were two in the room) asked me if I was feeling nauseous or pain, and I slowly replied “… No… I am… feeling…  light-headed…” (I hoped they understood what that meant).  They looked concerned, so I asked them to wait, knowing that in a moment everything would return to normal. With practiced hands, they quickly propped up my feet on a chair.  Within ten (?) seconds or so I came to my senses and was fine.  The ENT doctor explained that my reaction was not unusual (especially among young men she says), and was just my body responding to stress.  They offered me a wheelchair back to my room, but I declined and walked down the hall. Although the experience was curious and unnerving, once it had passed, I felt totally normal.

Now I’ve finished my lunch, and I’m just waiting for my last bag of antibiotics before I can go home this afternoon.  Norm will be tested to determine his pedigree and make sure that he was harbouring no ill intentions.  Results in a week, when I go back to get my stitches out.

The doctors seem competent and knowledgeable, and the nursing staff has been kind and considerate.  The facilities are modern and clean.  Of course, we are in the VIP ward of a foreign hospital, so our experiences are not typical for China. All in all, it hasn’t been a particularly unpleasant experience, and has actually given us more faith in the Chinese medical system, or at least this particular hospital.