Hospital Experience

3.9.2009 von Ines.

Due to the bike accident I had 2 weeks ago and my concussion I went to hospitals. First I went to the Chaoyang hospital that got extremely upgraded with the newest equipment before the Olympics. In the emergency area you buy a ticket for 5.5RMB so that you can talk to one of the emergency doctors. Then you just walk to one of them and stand “in line”. Well you just have to shove yourself forward and start talking to the doctor. The consultation “room” of all the doctors is open so anyway everybody hears whatever you are discussing and some people are very interested in what a foreigner has. The doctor immediately sent me to get a computer tomography (CT) of my brain done. But you first need to pay the 288RMB for the CT - that is so amazingly cheap. After that is done you just go back to the doctor and try to shove yourself in front of the doctor again. As I said my jaw hurts and my ear hurts I had to pay another two times 5.5RMB to see the ear specialist as well as the dentist. The dentist said for the x-ray I would need to come again in the daytime. So the next day I went back to the dentist floor. Again the “treatment room” with all the doctors is just a huge open room and you can walk up to any of the dentists and watch how he is currently working on somebodies teeth. It was 3pm and the dentist said it was too late to do an x-ray as they are going to close at 3:30pm. Wow, I am not sure how they do the x-ray. The CT took about 30 seconds. But whatever, I decided to try a different hospital.

This time I went to the Dongzhimen Hospital as it is said to be a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Hospital. I wanted someone to look at my in total and not just one section at a time. So here you have to buy a “notebook” for the doctors to write their notes for you. That was 0.5RMB. Then you have to pay to see the doctor which is 5RMB. Here the doctor is actually in a room, despite the fact that the door is open. He said that I have to go and see a brain doctor instead. But that doctor will only be back tomorrow. So he sent me back down get my doctor ticket refunded. So I got my 5RMB back. The next day I had to pay 14RMB because the brain doctor is a specialist. And there were many people waiting to get her consultation. So I read a book for about 1.5 hours to finally be almost called up. The doctor said with a shock in her eyes “oh, what is this, a foreigner, can somebody translate!!!” to which I replied “Don’t worry I can speak Chinese”. So she looked at the CT listened to what I said and then said “mei shirrr” in the typical Beijing dialect. And that means roughly “ahhh nothing”. She recommended that I rather see an ear and nose  doctor to look at my ear and also my nose. So I had to go back down and get my doctor ticket refunded (so I got my 14RMB back) and then buy a new ticket for a standard doctor 5RMB. The consultation room looked like 1950’s and I could not stand watching her treat the girl in front of me who had blood running out of her nose like a waterfall with mechanical devices. When it was my turn she had a look and then suggested that I come back the next day and do a hearing test. So she sent me back down to get my doctor ticket refunded and receive back my 5RMB. So despite the fact that it should be a TCM hospital I ended up in the “Western Style” part and knew not more than before. So after more than 3 hours and being consulted by 3 doctors (and they wrote things in my notebook) I left the hospital only having spent 0.5RMB.

Then I decided to go and see my favorite doctor that actually runs a massage studio. When I entered he only said “Did you fall off your bike again?” I had to smile. He sat done next to me, put his fingers on my wrist, closed his eyes and listened to my heart beat. Then he said I need acupuncture and special head massage. My main worry is that I realized that I do not smell anything since my concussion or trauma. And guess what he said? “Mei shirr”

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