I am so happy to be feeling better today, but it was a little dicey there for a while last night. I don't know what hit me, but it feels like an 18 wheel semi-truck. I went with a friend to climb the red mountain to a pagoda on the edge of Urumqi and then to lunch before a visit to the regional museum. Lunch was pullo with carrot salad (cooked) and yoghurt. Okay, so maybe the yoghurt was homemade which makes it a little suspicious, but it tasted fine. And the carrot salad was cooked. And it was a nice clean restaurant (by Chinese standards). So that's the thing. We're told as foreigners "if you can't boil it, peel, it or cook it, leave it", and I'll admit that I'm not always as diligent as perhaps I should be. But it gets exhausting after two months, and you get a little careless sometimes. I do avoid most street food (except kebab and fresh cut watermelon). I eat in nice modern restaurants. But I think the biggest problem in this country isn't even the water or the street food versus restaurant food. It's the distinct lack of soap anywhere. It is very very rare to find a bathroom in china with soap. I carry a little bottle of hand sanitizer, but that's just me. The guy cooking my food doesn't have his pocket cleanser. And if he happens to have an infection, goes to the bathroom, rinses quickly with water (at best) and goes back into the kitchen, well, that's when all hell in my digestive system breaks loose.
I started feeling unwell in the evening, and then everything in my stomach came back up. I called a friend to come over, and she brought me some bananas to ease my stomach and try to soak up the grease from the pullo thinking it just hadn't settled well. Pullo is rice with lamb, and it's boiled for a long time in a big metal wok with oil. So it's kind of greasy and heavy and sometimes doesn't agree well. But an hour after she left, I lost about 2 liters of fluids and suddenly got dizzy and parched. I called her back because by this point I had lost so much water and wasn't able to keep anything in my stomach and knew I was in danger. I travel with antibiotics, so I popped a couple of those but knew I needed an IV to replace my fluids. Mmm, that's fun. Needles in developing countries. So when that friend arrived, we called my other friend, who runs the foreigner bar, to ask about hospitals. He's Japanese and also lived in the states through high school and college. In fact, it turns out that we were both at Cornell at the same time. And he's been living in Urumqi for 6 years. So not only does he know the good hospitals in town, he also knows my western expectations of medical hygiene. So we hopped in a cab and met him and his girlfriend across town at the ER. Well, there was no hopping involved. There was me doubled over with stomach cramps dragging myself into the cab.
I got checked in, and the doctor, who spoke decent English, started asking me questions. "Have you been drinking?" "No" "Is your heart pounding" "Yes, a little bit". So she hooked me up to a heart monitor. "Hooked me up" is a very accurate description. I felt like a car battery. She took four clamps and connected one to each of my wrists and one to each of my ankles. Then she lifted my shirt and put five little suction cup electrodes in various places over my left torso. I'm not sure what she read, but I guess it was fine. Then they did a blood test, which I guess came back fine. Most of this got explained in Chinese to my friends. I just sat and let them poke me and stick me hoping that eventually I would rejoin the world of the healthy. But I did see needle packages opened in front of my eyes. Very good.
After the blood draw, I was moved back downstairs where we were told there are no beds. Instead there was a big room full of sick people sitting in uncomfortable chairs hooked up to IVs. Then all of a sudden there was not only a bed, but a bed in an empty room. Apparently Hiroshi's girlfriend knows someone on the staff at the hospital. That's how this place works. You get things far easier if you know someone or have money. So I got a bed, hooray. And 1 ½ liters of saline plus glucose and an anti-nausea drug which rocked my world. I started feeling better almost instantly. Well, almost instantly after the nurse actually found a vein. My veins are very very small as it is, and I was dehydrated to the extent where they were almost non-existent. She stuck me in my right hand but missed. I can't watch when they do this, but after she withdrew the needle and I saw that she was switching to a smaller guage, I said "*I* could have told you that was too big." Second attempt worked, and by 7 am I was discharged and on my way back to the hotel. I'm feeling a little weak and empty, but my veins have all reappeared, I can eat small bits of bland food, and my "functions" seem to be slowly returning to normal. Hooray…
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