October 29, 2008
Nanjing, China

Dear Friends,

As I lie in bed tonight in agony, aching and coughing, I am amazed to find that I can put together coherent thoughts. Since I can, I have decided to share them with you.

I haven’t been feeling well for about two weeks now. Yesterday I taught because I thought I could do the stiff upper lip thing and manage six hours of teaching. I coughed through the whole thing and came home really sick.

Today I decided that I would finally listen to the advice of other people and see a doctor. Okay, it probably can’t hurt any worse than feeling like I am at death’s doorstep. The pleasant surprise was that I saw my first woman doctor in China. She is apparently either the campus doctor, or one of them. I also decided that since the college pays for a certain amount of health care for me each year I would just make it easier on myself and get someone to walk across the campus with me to the health care center instead of taking several hours to go downtown to an English speaking clinic. Good call!

She had me open my mouth. I thought she was going to take a swab to have me cultured—when am I going to learn that Chinese doctors have other ways of diagnosing? Instead I had to make the obligatory “ah” sound. Then she listened to my lungs. I had told her my lymph glands are swollen and I am coughing—I wanted the whole-nine-yards exam to verify the truth of my misery. And of course I had already made my diagnosis.

I’m going to go on a rabbit trail here. I am learning that even as Chinese doctors have their own ways of diagnosing aliments, so too I have become quite the pert little expert at diagnosing my own. I of course had decided that I had strep throat. My face doesn’t ache so it wouldn’t be a sinus infection. I don’t think it is tonsillitis because I haven’t had that since I was a child—the last time I got it was when someone finally threatened to take my tonsils out, never had them again. But I had strep throat in December of 1996. I had just come back from a trip to Israel/Palestine. Seattle, home, was experiencing ice storms, what?  Seattle, metropolis of weather moderation?  Ice storms? Yes, enough to bring down boats in marinas and collapse roofs all over the city. So going from the relatively warm Middle East to frozen Seattle was when my body decided to get Stage 4 strep throat. I got to the doctor who said, “This doesn’t look like strep but we’ll culture it anyhow,” and then the contrite phone call a couple of days later, “Well, this is why we always culture….” My throat felt then just like it feels now.

I also watched a movie two nights ago called “The Children of Huangshi” in which a British missionary in China who was not a doctor was behaving like a doctor. She laughed when someone questioned her and said, “When a leg has to come off no one seems to ask about the credentials on the other end of the arm that is going to take the pain away.” Aha! So, there is a tradition of being in China and learning how to self-diagnose!

Coming back to today, I never did find out what the doctor thought I had because my interpreter did not know how to say it, or what the medication was, in English. I did however feel satisfied that the doctor had understood the extent of my misery. She drew little pictures on a piece of paper and when people mysteriously came and went I was handed traditional Chinese medicine in the form of two types of tablets and cough medicine. I double-checked that there was no alcohol in the cough medicine—traditional Chinese medicine does not use alcohol. I keep checking and it remains a fact. I would like to know how China produces alcohol-free cough medicine that tastes reasonably good (compared to the American version at least) and works. This one is making me cough so I suspect it is designed to get stuff out of my lungs.

I do not know if I am on anti-biotics, although I doubt it. I called a friend in Nanjing tonight on my cell phone and she wouldn’t let me talk for long because she said I sound too terrible. I can probably live in this agony for two days and after that I may seek out traditional Western medicine (tongue in cheek).

Yes, living in another country on foreign soil can change us—sometimes it can even give us insight that we didn’t get by going to medical school. Of course, I would think it was hilarious if it turned out that all I had was a really, really, really, really bad version of the common cold. Oh no, don’t tell me this is common. I wouldn’t want people to suffer like this on a regular basis. Make it rare and make it exotic, make it….

Many blessings,

Debbie

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 99