8/17/2009

Blog
8/17/2009

The receptionist at the youth hostel stopped me as I entered the lobby. (Insofar, anyway, as youth hostels have receptionists or lobbies.)
"I called the doctor*," she told me. She was a very nice Chinese lady whose English was only so-so, but she made up for it with friendliness and an earnest (and often very patient) desire to help. "He say, if you have symptom 6 days, you need transfusion."
"A transfusion," I repeated, in disbelief. "I need a transfusion? For diarrhea?"
She nods, earnestly.
"Um," I reply. "I think that's maybe the wrong word."
I try to mime to her-- as I've mentioned before, I've become an excellent mime, though in this case it's mixed with English as well-- that a transfusion consists of sticking a needle into someone, removing their blood, and putting someone else's blood into them. She probably didn't quite understand the specifics of the procedure I was acting out, but she seemed to understand that I thought it was an awfully drastic measure.
"Oh. No, then," she said. But then she mimed the same gesture as I did before, with putting a needle into someone's arm. "But needle, yes. Stick with needle."
"Oh, an IV. He thinks I need an IV."
This at least made some sense. The doctor thought I was dehydrated. This would probably have been a legitimate concern, were I not possibly one of the best-hydrated people in the world when my health is normal.** Though I was not currently at my most hydrated, I had taken great pains to not only drink tons of water, but drink tons of electrolytes as well, not to mention checking myself for any other symptoms.
"No IV," I tell her, and pick up the shopping bag I'd dropped to the floor in response to the word "transfusion." I pull out the two monster bottles of Gatorade I'd bought a few minutes before and mimed gulping them down. "I drink this. Lots and lots. No IV. I just want antibiotics."

We'd been over this. I'd been asking for antibiotics for days, but something just didn't translate for some reason, which baffled me. The receptionists at the hostel didn't know what they were and didn't seen to be able to find the translation online. The nurses behind the counter at the pharmacy didn't seem to understand what they were. I just didn't get it. Wasn't this likely to be one of the most-asked for medications as far as foreigners in China go? How could I be the first Westerner with diarrhea (or, for that matter, any sort of bacterial infection) in China who wanted antibiotics (at least as far as all the people I'd spoken to were concerned)? I'd have thought that would be one of the first words they'd teach you in tourism school, but apparently not.
I took the pen and post-it note she had in front of her that had the words, both in Chinese and English, "Diarrhea" and "Transfusion" on it. I wrote, again, "Antibiotics (penicillin)." I handed it back to her; she smiled, and said she'd try to figure out what it meant. I trudged back up the stairs to my room.



*Have I mentioned that through this whole thing with the stolen purse and the bureaucratic nightmare, I've had really bad diarrhea? No? Well, I have. Apparently it's not technically "Traveller's Diarrhea" because I don't any other symptoms like headache or nausea (thank GOD), but it's been here a long time and isn't going away, nonetheless. It's been very annoying, and I've been trying, unsuccessfully, to obtain antibiotics.
**I drink a shitload of water. Sometimes when I'm on a long journey, by train or whatever, I try to limit how much water I drink. Anything less than 4 liters a day drives me insane. I drink, in fact, so much water that doctors have cautioned me that I might unbalance my electrolytes, and so I have even when in perfect health taken up the habit of making my every third bottle of water an ion drink of some kind. To most Westerners' disgust, I drank about a liter of Pocari Sweat a day in Korea. Yes, it's called "Sweat", but it's like Gatorade without being as sweet and with, I think anyway (it's hard for me to be 100% positive about labels in Korean), fewer calories.