Is it normal…

Is it normal to have your life feel like a TV drama? Usually, I feel like my life is too boring to really have anybody but me and a maybe a few close friends care about. But somehow, Kunming in the last few months has managed to pull my normally hum-drum life into something deserving of a spectacle.

In my last (substantive) post, I believe I was somewhere in India—roaming around the spice plantations of Goa sounds about right. After that Chesa and I went down to Bangalore, which qualifies as the IT capital of India. Chances are good that if you’ve ever called customer service within the last five years that you’ve placed a call here. Unfortunately, beyond being a liberal bastion of a conservative state, and there being lots of conspicuous wealth, there did not seem to be much of substance in the city. What’s worse, due to train schedules, we were stuck there for several days more than we had originally planned.

To be fair to Bangalore, I kind of lost my motivation to explore when we discovered the TV in our hotel had cable with access to BBC World, CNN, and StarWorld. I haven’t seen such open media since I was back in the US, and being able to turn on the tele and watch real news was fun. Though, I had happily forgotten how the US media runs takes one story and runs it into the ground. All we could hear about was cartoon controversy this, cartoon controversy that. I swear there was more news on their ticker bar than in the actual program itself!

We did have a wonderful time meeting with a friend of mine from the states who is living in Bangalore—her husband is currently a visiting professor at the Tata Institute, a very famous graduate institution in India located in Bangalore. She showed us around campus, and we even got to swim in their newly cleaned pool. The sheer amount of shrubbery and wildness amazed me in comparison to the neat, controlled, and heavily cemented Chinese campuses. We also met up with an Indian friend of Chesa’s who showed us a bit of the local nightlife.

Though we were there longer than planned, it turned out well that we were stuck in Bangalore for so long. The night before we were to leave at just about 9:45PM we decided that since it had been a couple of days we should check our e-mail. We finally found an internet place, and, with fifteen minutes to close, discovered that one of the other foreign teachers, and a close friend at that, was severely ill in hospital. She had eaten something bad and had refused to go to the hospital (because me, Chinese hospitals are to be avoided at all costs). Finally her boyfriend (who is a Chinese doctor) convinced her to go. Unfortunately, by that point she was horribly dehydrated and went into septic shock. That is to say, she lost heart, lung, and kidney function and was in a coma.

Chesa and I were stunned, then paralyzed. The internet café shut down, and though we were able to make a quick phone call back to Kunming to hear the most recent update, we were unable to do anything because EVERYTHING was closed in the damn town (and it was a Friday night!). We went home and tried to distract ourselves from feeling helpless.

The next day was spent making decisions and arrangements. We still had almost two weeks left of our trip in India, and we weren’t sure how effective we’d be back in Kunming. Chesa, whose whole point in going to India was to visit Madurai (our next destination) decided to keep on with the trip, while I decided I needed to be back to help in whatever way I could. I think it was the right decision, and because of that, the universe stepped in to help.

After discovering that Cathay Pacific had no available seats until our reserved date two weeks later, I decided to drop the return portion of that trip and see what else I could find. Things weren’t looking good until Chesa casually suggested I try JetStarAsia, a discount Asian carrier based in Singapore. As it turned out, one of their two ports of call in India was Bangalore. I booked the way cheap 4:30AM flight for the next morning, and thus started the fun adventure of getting home.

I dropped Chesa off at the train station at nine that night, and dawdled there reading until I was chased away by people with big hoses getting ready to clean the platform. Then I waited for forever in the airport (one of the nicer ones in India from what I can tell, though it’s nothing to write home about), until I squeezed onto the plane and sat down in front of a screaming baby. Luckily, the baby scared off the other passengers from my row and I was able to stretch out for my trip to Singapore.

The problem was, I had no confirmed onward booking from there. I couldn’t get in touch with Singapore’s China Eastern office, so I couldn’t check the price of the direct flight back from Singapore to Kunming. I, therefore, hedged my bets and bolted that afternoon to Hong Kong, again on JetStar. I spent the night in Kowloon, hopped the ferry the next morning to ShenZhen, and successfully changed my flight back to Kunming. It was a long trip.

I arrived that night to find my friend’s boyfriend at a bar in quite the state of despair. I’m generally a good listener, but I frankly don’t know what to tell this man when he says that he doesn’t want to be a doctor anymore because he can’t do anything to save the person he loves. I know less what to say when he insists that he wants to “go with her.”

The next day I went to the hospital to visit her for the first time. She was still in a coma, her face swollen from a buildup of bodily fluids due to her non-functioning kidneys. Her eyes were crusty and half open. Her head jerked the respirator tube every time she breathed. It was a hard sight, and the other friend I was with who was also just back in town broke down in tears. She, or so we were told, was looking much better.

Now, Chinese hospitals are different from American hospitals. Though she has had a team of three American doctors working on her in addition to another three Chinese doctors, things just never seem quite right. As one of the American doctors assessed the situation, “the nurses are doing the big things, but there is more that could be done to make her more comfortable.”

The docs didn’t (and still don’t) know exactly what infection she had, but they were hoping to run blood tests while she got her first dialysis. The hospital kindly refused to perform the tests Sunday night at 10PM until the money that the university had promised they would give them THE NEXT MORNING when the banks opened was in their possession.

When walking into the ICU, visitors are required to don slippers and scrubs. Of course, everyone must share the limited selection of jackets (that the Chinese toss casually on the floor), and given the number of stains on them, I’d guess they haven’t been washed in years. Great germ protection I feel. Maybe I shouldn’t mention the blood-stained bed cum waiting room seats that we must wait on before going to the ICU as it’s the only thing available to sit on in the wind-tunnel (I keep trying to figure out how to say ‘vestibule’ in Chinese so I can suggest it to the doctors there…) of an entrance hall.

Right now our friend is doing better. She actually woke up last week, and has been able to since respond to yes/no questions, but she still has a long way to come. Today she seemed to relapse a bit, but we’re still hopeful.

And this, my friends, is but one of the many sub-plots of my current life.