Dollar Medical Care

Last Wednesday I was worried that my big toenail was finally getting infected from some kind of split that I got a few weeks ago. It's summer vacation now so I figured that the campus clinic would have light waits to tend to a minor injury. Plus, I could visit the Chinese doctors and blog about it! I hobbled there before breakfast with my girlfriend who tried to explaining what I needed to know as simply as she could.
I paid the receptionist eight yuan and she handed me a pocket-sized medical chartbook that I stuffed in my back pocket along with a few other stamped receipts. My girlfriend then led me into an adjacent building whose waiting room consisted of a three-seated bench in a hall outside an administrative office. There were four other men in line with me and I was led into the office within five or six minutes. It resembled strikingly that of my high school counselor's office. Two desks were placed back to back where two women in white discussed things with three patients who sat on nearby stools. After fifteen seconds one of the patients left and I was given his seat. My sock and shoe dangled from laces in my hand while the nurse glanced at it, exchanged a few words with my girlfriend, and led me around the corner to a larger room with a table big enough to lie on that was covered in white butcher paper. So far so good.
The patients outside had been wandering around with tiny thermometers in their mouths but I was neither weighed nor pulse-checked as the nurse got straight to work. Again, there's a certain unfamiliarity with the medical system here that prevents me from calling my caretaker a doctor. She wore no nametag and I've gotten into the habit of identifying doctors by their stethoscopes and starched collars. She wore a simple white smock and spoke to me in English as she rummaged through a tin toolbox on the counter. "You're a big baby," she said, "you need a mother to cut those toenails."
"That's not something that my mother ever did," I chuckled.
"Call her up and tell her you have a new one," she squeezed my nail between a pair of scissors that would have had trouble with a manila envelope. On good days my toenails are hideous yellow crinkled scoops that I attend to with a variety of power sanders. Cutting close to the toe hurts a bit, but by the time she had cut enough away to get at the infected cut I had swooned and was delivering short, rapid breaths. The nurse administered iodine and bandaged the digit up snugly, dabbing away the fresh blood that she had spilled. I was allowed to recover in the adjacent room and while my mind was hazy at this point I don't recall her washing her hands before the next patient came through the door.
The term 'developing nation' was dropped a dozen times a day while discussing things with the Party officials and their lackeys, an asterisk that accompanied admitted moral or procedural shortcomings. But seriously, how developed do you need to be to wash your frigging hands? My mother would have washed her hands, even if she would have done it with recycled bathwater. Yeah, I know I should stop complaining and visit Wenchuan where things are now completely undeveloped.


I met a couple of Canadian folks yesterday up in Zhongshan Park at the expat coffee get-together. They'd arrived from BC on Friday and for a while I was the only other westerner they could talk to about the lay of the land. They were the classic mech-e/schoolteacher combo with matching forest green shirts and a pair of toddlers poking around. Yeah, I've been here for seventy days and I could tell them about what to pay for food, taxis, how to get around and find a good illegal cab and cheap handsome suits. I told them to enjoy the weather now that the rains had passed and the smog had yet to return. The man commented that so far the air was cleaner than he had expected.
"No, it's really not. My snot has finally turned black. Yours probably will too after a few months."
The schoolteacher blanched as she pulled her son away from the decor. "That... must have been very upsetting. To blow your nose one day and see it turn black."
"Not that upsetting. It's more of a gradual thing," I said.