I did something dumb and landed myself in hospital, only my second medical incident in China since 2018 which was also finger related.
I foolishly ran up a flight of stairs whilst at work, the kind of behaviour I would normally reprimand students for exhibiting. I hobbled, I fell and immediately felt a weird sensation emanating from the finger region, I looked down and with a twist of my stomach I saw my ring finger shaped more like a caterpillar at the midway point of a crawl.
Cursing my stupidity, l abandoned my students and was shortly in a taxi to the hospital accompanied by an English-less school nurse. My finger slowly started to swell; the pain was nasty but not unbearable. I felt relief as the taxi pulled up in front of the hospital, my discomfort growing to the point where I was completely ready for a doctor or nurse to yank my dislocated finger back into place. But it didn’t quite go down that way.
It turns out Chinese hospitals do not lift a finger (hah-hah) until money is dealt with. I stood at the A&E desk sweating with my deformed hand, answering questions about insurance and immigration status. The woman behind the desk barely seemed to register my discomfort while she busied herself with totting up expenses. “Hey your Chinese is pretty good” she giggled. I grumbled out an annoyed “thank you” in-between pain-relieving swearwords. My frustration bubbled as a brief odyssey around the hospital followed along with another round of insurance questions, my finger continually swelling and throbbing in the mean time.
Finally, the doctor saw me, took another few minutes to input information into a computer before going for my finger. I felt that I was fairly brave though I did more than a little swearing and shouting until the doc concluded that it couldn’t be done. I probably had another few attempts in me before I would have tapped out, but he decided to spare my suffering and recommend theatre, possibly in a thinly veiled attempt to rinse more insurance money from me. I endured all that fun to be sent to a hospital bed to be operated on later – though of course – not before another round of form filling and bill paying.
Do I blame the hospital staff and their “money first, care later” approach? A little bit, though I presume that it is a necessity when some of the population cannot afford hospital bills. Chinese hospitals are BUSY. l suppose that if people who can’t afford care are getting it then someone’s head is for the chop. Medicine is business.
Not to completely stamp China’s medical system into the mud, my real goal is to give love to the NHS and be grateful for what it represents compared to some other countries. I remember an even more stupid, UK based medical incident in my past when I was blasted on gin and ended up slipping on wet decking before promptly leaking blood from the back of my head. A 999 phone-call later and I was whisked away in an ambulance before coming to in a small room, cared for despite the pure idiocy of alcohol that got me there.
I will never again take for granted being cared for without a single outstretched palm, especially when it was my stupidity that landed me in there. I had health insurance and a decent job in Beijing. Without that, who knows how far a person or family could slide with some rotten luck or illness?
Maybe we would take better care of ourselves if the result of injury and illness was more costly. I didn’t spend a great deal of time in Chinese hospitals, but the time I did was enough to reassure me that having an NHS is a blessing. I now walk up stairs instead of bounding up them like a dog.
