A new prescription

My days in hospital

In 1985 I had an opportunity to experience the Chinese healthcare system from the inside, when I contracted type-A hepatitis. A doctor friend, who had noticed that my skin had begun to turn yellow, plucked me from my hotel room. As the daughter of a high-level military officer, she dared to risk more personal contact than most locals would with foreigners at the time. When she called to check on me I was barely conscious, and she had me whisked off to the officers' ward of the army's infectious diseases hospital.

At that time the hospital was still sparsely equipped technologically, but during the month for which I was restricted to the isolation ward, I learned how unbelievably caring the doctors and the nurses were.

Although I knew I was getting special treatment - because I was a foreigner, because I was a trusted supplier to the army's healthcare system, because I was brought in by the general's daughter and because I was in a special officers' ward - the concern that I was shown could not have been invented for me.

Although the doctors of that time and even today are sometimes greatly lacking in tools and the hospital environments are less than ideal, there are many dedicated and devoted individuals who have soldiered through very difficult periods but have never lost their commitment to healing or their sense of caring.

In 1989, I was once again inside a Chinese hospital, but this time as a patient advocate rather than as a supplier or consultant. A good friend (a young official at a Chinese foreign trade corporation) was pregnant. Due to the severe overcrowding of Chinese hospitals at the time, everyone needed all the help they could get to secure a bed in a top-rated hospital and, given our relationships, this was something I was able to help with at the obstetrics hospital in Beijing.

However, because she lived far from the hospital and we lived close, she came to stay at our house as her due date approached. When her labor started in earnest, my fianc and I drove her to the hospital. What then ensued was what I can only describe as a humiliating experience both for my friend and her husband.

It was 6 pm when we arrived at the hospital and the dusty, smoky haze of a typical Beijing winter sunset gave way to the dim and dreary hallway of the hospital, already abandoned by the daytime workers and the hoards of clinic patients one would have seen just a few hours earlier.

As my friend entered the intake exam room the nurses, who a minute earlier we could hear cheerily chatting with each other, became suddenly and completely absorbed in some piece of paper on their desks, and it took several knocks on the open door, a number of throat clearings and finally the surprise of me, a foreigner, tapping on a shoulder to get their attention.