Road to Recovery

I looked down and realized all of a sudden that my god! It's December!! So, I thought I would post. I have been here just a little over 3 months now. And I would like to say time is flying, and really it is, but I had a very loooong last week.

On Monday I began feeling sick and by Tuesday afternoon I was in the nurses office with all of the sniffling students trying to take a nap. Luckily another teacher offered to cover my afternoon classes. But that was the end of it for me. Things only got worse. I didn't go to school the rest of the week (although Friday was a snow day, not that I would have gone anyway). By Wednesday I was begging a friend, my Chinese tutor Jack, to take me to the hospital. Let me tell you, being sick in a foreign country is not good. Being sick in a foreign country where they do not speak English, even worse. Being sick in China - miserable. I hated that I could not explain exactly what was wrong with me or what I wanted and I could not understand exactly what was being said. Having a translator with me was nice, but still not ideal. Although I don't know what I would have done without him.

It seems that the Chinese cure for everything is to hook you up to an IV. The sicker you are the more you get. So, my itinerary for the next several days was 2 IV's each day for 3 days. You should see my poor hands, so black and blue and sore from being poked so many times. I'm not sure what finally did the trick, but on about Saturday, I began to have hope again that I might make it through this. It must have been a combination of the IV, the drugs that I forced them, through the magic of tears and a little bit of wailing, to give me, some Chinese herbal tea that Jack swears by, and good old fashion bed rest. I feel like a new woman today, although everyone keeps telling me how sick I look. That can't be a great sign, but things are definitely looking up.

Now I have to begin to deal with my passport situation as I'm supposed to leave for Vietnam in a month and I have neither tickets nor a passport. It turns out that since my residence visa is in Qingdao my paperwork also needs to be processed there as well. There is no straight forward answer to any question in China, and this whole thing is taking an obscenely long time. So I have to now send all my paperwork there and wait and see what happens.