Grammar and Tones

We were on our babymoon. The last time we went on a holiday to a beautiful sunny place to have a good time as couple without a baby sucking up all the attention. We had gone to the beautiful Chinese island of Hainan, where we stayed in the middle of rice fields, banana plantations and coconut trees.

My wife’s belly had just begun to show. It was in Hainan that for the first time a lady in the neighbourhood asked if it could be that we were expecting a baby. Things were getting exciting.

One day my wife complained about a belly pain. So we went to the hospital. They couldn’t do much in the moment but they asked us stay for the night for observation. I remember my wife saying that there was no point in staying at a hospital just because of some pain, if there were more problems, we could always come back. In the end, my wife did follow the doctor’s advice, though. Luckily. In the evening she suddenly started bleeding a lot and was dashed to the ultrasound. I was sobbing next door all the time as I was sure that we had lost our baby that night. After what felt like hours, the doctors brought my wife out again and said that their ultrasound device wasn’t very good and they couldn’t really see anything. But at least they did see a baby in there.

This was surprising because a week earlier we had been to an ultrasound in Beijing where they had been counting the tiny little fingers of a baby that wasn’t bigger than a walnut at the time! There are huge difference between the hospitals in the major cities and provincial hospitals.

It was decided that my wife should get a course of medicine over the next few days and so both of us had to stay in hospital for a few nights.

Yes, that’s right: both of us.

In Chinese hospitals, there is no one to provide you food, no one to help you get to the toilet if you’re unable to get out of bed yourself, no one to help you with anything, no matter how sick you are. There are doctors to treat your condition, and nurses to take blood samples and measure your pulse. That’s it. The hospital wasn’t barrier free either, so at the toilet door their was a 15 cm high step that my wife had to lift her drip over, but wasn’t able to since it had some rather heavy IV control device attached to it.

It seems like you could literally starve in a a Chinese hospital while they were trying to cure or actual condition, if you didn’t have a family member to help you.

So my job was that of a nurse for the following week: I helped my wife get to the toilet, I brought her food, I helped her take a shower. Don’t get me wrong, of course I’m more than happy to support my wife in any way I can. It just seems so ironic to be doing the job of a nurse in a hospital while the actual nurses sit around doing nothing.

So I prepared myself for a longer stay, got some clothes, my tooth brush, and some snacks – basically the same stuff as if I had been the patient. However, we needed more: as it turned out, Chinese hospitals don’t provide anything. There was literally no toilet paper in the bathroom. There was no soap to wash your hands. There were no cups or dishes to drink water. There weren’t even tissues to stop the bleeding after you got an injection or had a blood sample taken: after one blood sample the nurse asked my wife to press a tissue on it, but was baffled when we didn’t have any with us.

So we got everything, tissues, toilet paper, shower gel, hand wash, desinfectant, bin bags, everything. Every day it was my job to lift the drop over the step whenever my wife had to go to the toilet, to get drinking water, and to get her food, which my parents in law insisted should be homemade, so three times a day I cycled home to pick up freshly cooked food by mum and dad in law to deliver to my wife.

While I was doing this job, the hospital gave me 2 options: I could spend the nights on a wooden chair next to my wife or I could pay to sleep in another bed in her room, as long as no other patient needed it. It cost the equivalent of 1.50 pounds per night. I think I’ve never slept cheaper in my life. Two years later I came to appreciate this one aspect of a Chinese provincial hospital that was actually true luxury. In Britain, where my second son was born, hospitals are so overcrowded that even the patients can be happy if they get a bed. Family stay on a non-reclining chair, and nurses, while they do come, are so overworked that you literally have to be spitting blood for them to come any time soon. But this post is not about Britain…

Eventually her condition stabilised – and sure enough we now have the most wonderful son in the whole world – and we got released. Here, yet another surprise was waiting for me…

The packing! Of course you pack up your stuff before you leave. But the toilet paper? I literally got told three times, once by my wife, once by my mother in law and once by my father in law, not to forget the toilet paper! It was half a roll left, and I thought that the next patient to come might be very very relieved to find half a toilet roll before he had the time to send his or her relative to the shop to buy some. But my three Chinese family members were adamant: no one would use the toilet paper that was left by someone else, anyways, it might by dirty, old and used! Used? Anyways, I didn’t discuss this. Same for the soap: no one would use soap left over by someone else, because it might by dirty soap. Yes, that’s right: dirty soap!

Anyways, lesson learned: Don’t forget the toilet paper.