Second Full Day In China

Today has been quite a day. Linda met with Dr Wisdom and Dr Hu. They are the TCM doctors and they did acupuncture and massage for an hour. Than after the massage came occupational therapy, than physical therapy. While Linda was doing that Diana found me a bike to ride around. She had a fit at first when I told her I wanted something to ride, that the cars would kill me. I told her I rode a bike at home all the time and could handle cars. Ha. So we went out to this bike lot and she gave me a set of keys for the locks. This bike hadn’t been ridden for a while and was covered in dust and the tires had little air. But it was mine to ride. I knew that up the corner was a used bike lot where a guy sold a couple hundred bikes so I went to see him. It seems that an American wondering around is a pretty rare sight around here and an American riding a bike is out of this world. Thru a lot of sign language I was able to get across that I needed his pump. OK, he watched thinking I wouldn’t know the first thing about this and was amazed when I hooked the pump up pumped like hell and got the tires hard. Than this bike had been ridden by a short Chinese guy and the seat was on the ground, so I asked to borrow a wrench, he didn’t know what I was talking about so I showed him the nut and tried to bite it with my teeth. Out came a wrench and up went the seat and I was off. A quarter tip and everyone was happy.

Back at the ranch, Linda was back in the room after a morning of fun. I got there just in time to see a gaggle of doctors checking her out. The head of the department and 5 other doctors and a few nurses and a gal with a video camera were poking and prodding and talking 90 miles an hour all at the same time. The head guy told us he studied in San Francisco 5 years ago so that was a good sign. Later. Linda is hooked back up to the IV’s when she started to turn green. Up comes yesterday’s dinner, breakfast and anything else for the past month. You would have thought this was a code blue. In came doctors and nurses and Diana and the cleaning lady to empty the basket Linda used. Only one not there was the dog. Dr. Amy is Linda’s GP on the project and she looked like it was all her fault. They took a blood test and found an infection, so out came the antibiotics. Than Amy and Diana stayed with us the rest of the afternoon till they were off duty. Dr Amy is 30 years old and married to a computer engineer who is working for Bill Gates in Washington State. Diana is 37 and can’t find a boyfriend even though she is a real beauty and sharp as a whip. The girls started to let their hair down and it was so much fun. I showed them all the pics on the computer and they told us about their life. Amy said around Chinese patients she must have a very stern face because that is what they expect from their docs. But she and Diana were laughing and joking and trying to teach us new words and soon Linda was feeling good again. We feel very well taken care of. Where else would the doctor stay with the patient for over 2 hours just because she was nauseated.

There is a school down the street with a thousand kids. I saw something today I have thought of but never had the guts to try. If I did I would be in jail. The kids were walking down the street and a car was behind them trying to get thru. The kids didn’t move fast enough so the guy in the car started to nudge them out of the way with his bumper. Didn’t run them over, just moved thru them. Try that at home.

Here are a few pics from today:

School Children

Not Your Average Wal-Mart



















Street Scene