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Published: January 2nd 2011
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After walking 25 minutes with my broken collar bone to reach the hospital, we were greeted by the problem of not having any idea where the emergency department was. It doesn't seem obvious to this hospital to put a sign up, so we were walking around asking random patients, who also didn't have much idea and seemed to send us walking around a maze of corridors for a long time before we found it.
At the emergency department there was no clear front desk or waiting system, just a small table with a nurse and a gaggle of people standing around trying to get seen. Eventually we managed to 'push' through (not easy with one working arm) and showed the nurse the problem. The way it works is that before they will do anything for you they need the payment up front for whatever treatment you are having.
Not only that, but in order to pay that money, you have to walk all the way to the payment desk which is situated conveniently at the opposite end of the hospital from the emergency department and even more scarcely signposted. So off we went around the maze of corridors again
emergency room
the first room you go into to get looked aT for 15 minutes. Once at the payment desk, there was the usual stupid amount of paperwork, and delays and problems that come with that (requiring a passport to continue, or the nurse not knowing how to enter non-Chinese names into the system etc.) Luckily a Chinese friend, Justin, was able to lend 8000 kuai (£800), otherwise I'm not sure what my £20 would have bought me. Maybe a sling? In actual fact, even a sling was too much to ask in this place, as they claimed they didn't keep any slings in the hospital, and even the downstairs pharmacy and six of Sanyas other pharmacies all didn't sell slings. What do people with broken arms do?
Finally the sheets of paper were stamped and we set off on our journey back to to the other end of hospital again to wave the paper in the doctor's face and ask him to have a look, now almost an hour after falling. A long wait, finally an X-ray that graphically established the fact it was broken in two places, and the suggestion was to go home, have a good sleep without moving the arm and do surgery in the morning when the
good doctor would be back from his holidays.
That night after having my T-shirt cut off by Baku and fashioning a sling out of a scarf, I spent some time wondering what would happen in a real emergency. In that little front desk room I saw a woman with a baby with a bleeding head, and it would surprise me if she just happened to have enough cash on her to pay them up front.
In the morning I was a bit worried about getting the surgery, worrying about dehydrating from not being allowed to drink for eight hours, worrying about the idea of being put under anaesthetic in a disorganised and unfamiliar place, worrying about being cut open and fiddled around with by disorganised and unfamiliar people...and then the morphine came.
I woke up actually still thinking I was yet to have the operation. I remember having the sheets over my face in the operation room before the anaesthetic kicked in and i was having a conversation with the nurse and the doctors: one minute I asked them how long it would be until I would fall asleep, and them replying 'not long', and the next
minute asking them again and them replying 'it's already finished and you've woken up!'. Still high and being wheeled through hospital I was greeted by the friendly faces of Baku, Justin and Pablo. I had no idea that 2 hours had already passed and they had been waiting that long.
The recovery period was less than stress-free. Hygiene was a real issue, with my 'inmate' spitting all night, the toilets leaking out onto the corridor and having brown stains all over the floor and walls. I was also amazed to hear that in the entire hospital (know as the best in Sanya) there was not a single sit-down toilet, let alone a disabled one, only holes in the floor. I was just thinking to myself how on earth anyone with a lower body injury would endure the gymnastic balancing act that is squatting on those things, when a man with half a leg came hobbling up the step in the entrance to the toilets on a makeshift walking stick, and nearly fell over at the door to the cubicle as his stick slipped on the soaking floor. The stench all down the corridor was horrendous from bins not being emptied,
and mosquitoes were flying around the room.
Disorganisation, however, got to me more that the hygiene issues, as we spent hours on the phone or talking to nurses and receptionists trying to sort out the payment issues. The hospital repeatedly phoned up my friend, convinced that he was the insurance company, despite him telling them every time he was not insurance, and to delete his number. Later I was refused my medicine by the nurses for a day, because the payment apparently hadn't arrived. It turned out my insurance had transferred money to the hospital days before but the hospital just hadn't communicated from office to office to say that the money had arrived, so they were refusing me the medicine for no reason.
Other annoyances that I never anticipated were that I could only lie in one position, flat on my back, for the entire week, so after a while my bum was killing from taking all the weight for so long, and I had itches and spots all down my back from the sweats, which were pretty hard to clean one-handed under the rusty shower without getting my wound dressing or homemade sling wet.
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Dad
non-member comment
Wow!
I'm glad we've seen this after the event and you're ok. Amazing how respectable some parts seem like reception and others like the toilets are so bad. Maybe it's the more public areas.