In my previous article, I described the four-week stint in Hell that began with a minor injury in Thailand, continued as the injury was exacerbated by a foolish decision to fly on it, and the nightmare I endured in a Chinese hospital afterward. At the end of the article I stated that I was awaiting skin-grafting surgery the following Monday (supposedly). Well, the surgery got postponed until Tuesday, then Wednesday morning, and then Wednesday afternoon. When the skin-grafting surgery finally came, it was a complete debacle from beginning to end (as all things are when they are left to the management of the people of the self-anointed “Central Nation”), but despite the hospital's best efforts, I survived.
The surgery started the same way as the previous: local anesthesia only, no general anesthesia, since I was not confident in the anesthesiologist's ability to do his job properly and ensure that I would live. By the time the surgeons were finished that day, I had ample reinforcement for my distrust in the competence of Chinese medical personnel. It began by strapping my arms down with restraints, which struck me as odd and more than a bit unsettling. They followed this up by sticking a three inch needle into the lymph node of my right leg, which is weird given that the surgical areas were my upper left and lower right legs, but I digress. This needle, allegedly, was the primary anesthesia. Meanwhile, the doctor started "measuring," if that's what you want to call it, how big a patch of skin they needed to cut. This was done through the scientific process of guesstimating by handspans and fingerwidths.
After that was a secondary anesthesia in my left leg do deaden the nerves before they started cutting skin. In typical Chinese fashion, they started slashing my skin off before the anesthesia even began to take effect, and when I started pulling at the restraints that they had my arms strapped down with and snarling through gritted teeth, the doctor's response was "stop it! You are making me nervous."
Oh, sorry doc. You're ripping my skin off with no proper anesthesia and I'm making you nervous? Oh, well by all means, let me calm down so you can continue your butchery in peace.
Anyway, after they took a slice of the epidermal layer, the doctor informed me "the skin we took is not enough and we need to take more. Can you endure?" Oh gee, you mean guessing and eyeballing the amount of skin needed for a surgical procedure didn't yield the proper result? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. After snarling a few epithets in several languages (those Russian lessons finally paid off) through gritted teeth, I answered his "can you endure" taunt with "seems I have to."
Well, repeat previous step.
Afterward, they started sewing the skin over the wound and of course the anesthesia here had not taken effect either, so I felt every stitch, and felt the slash when they realized they'd used the wrong kind of surgical thread and ripped the entire seam out. The doctor then instructed me "lift your right leg." I tried, and lo and behold, I can't. Why? Because the anesthesia they injected into my upper right leg (the one place they were NOT slashing at) is actually working.
All the while, the nurses were taking selfies (one of them actually took one with my ripped-open leg in the background), another doctor was gleefully snapping photos of the leg in all its gruesomeness and showing them to me (I was not allowed to bring my phone into the OR or I'd have taken a video myself to document the jackassery of the staff) and the doctors were taking phone calls. My Mandarin is substandard but it sounded to me like one of them was arguing with his wife over what was for dinner, and another was having some kind of debate about his kid's school. Given the barbaric character of the surgery being performed, I could not help but be reminded of Shiloh Wallace's phone call to her father while he was at work in “Repo.”
Three hours of slicing, stitching, slashing and ripping later, every minute of which I felt in its full detail, the doctors informed me that the surgery was complete. After removing the coverings from the surgical bed, they discovered that I'd apparently ripped the cushions off of the appendages they had my arms strapped down to while I was clenching my teeth from the pain. Their response was to calmly inform me that these "damages to the OR" will be added to my bill.
The only thing that prevented me from kicking the lead surgeon's teeth out the back of his head was the fact that this was just about the moment the anesthesia finally kicked in and my legs went numb. Recovering my wits quickly, I smiled and said “I'll be sure to note that in my report to the embassy.” At the word “embassy,” the doctors exchanged a few semi-concealed nervous glances, and one of them later came to my ward and informed me there was no need to worry about the cushions.
Gee, how kind of them.
Anyway, they hooked me right back up to the damned saline-in-blood-out machine as before (informing me that it will come off next Wednesday) installed me in a new ward (the exact same floor plan as the old one but five floors up), with six other patients (count 'em, six: three of them are on fold-out cots) whose average age appears to be measured in what Dynasty was in power when they were born, and whose snoring makes the Uighurs in the previous ward seem quiet by comparison. This began the series of events which earned this hospital the nickname “the Meiyou Clinic.” 'Mei-You,' pronounced the same as 'Mayo' but with equal emphasis on both syllables, is a Mandarin phrase which, if translated directly, means “don't have.” In context it is analogous to a full sentence: “we don't have that.” When my legs both began to ache horribly from the surgery, I called one of the nurses (of course it took several times pushing the button before she finally answered) and asked if I could have a painkiller for them. The answer was “meiyou.” When 4AM came around and I had been completely unable to get so much as a wink of sleep between the pain from the surgery and the elephantine snoring of the occupants of this waiting-room-for-death, I called again and asked if I could have a pill to help me sleep. “Meiyou” was the unsurprising response. When my IV ran out and I alerted the nurse that it needed to be changed, when the collector on the machine filled up and needed to be changed, and when the vacuum device that draws blood out broke and needed to be replaced before the pouch attached to my leg filled up and burst, take three guesses what she said on every occasion.
The next day, bright and early at 7:30, the panel of doctors from the surgery gathered around my bed to shout “wake up,” which was laughably redundant given that I had not yet succeeded in getting to sleep over the noise, and informed me that I would be released from the hospital next Friday if all goes well. They also proceeded to give me a list of excuses (one excuse per doctor) for the catastrophic surgery. These excuses ranged from “it is operation. There is no way you make to feel nothing” from the lead surgeon, to “we are not accustomed to foreign skin” from the anesthesiologist. Remembering that these doctors are PLA personnel (they wear their uniforms under their lab coats to remind you of that) and they would not have a moment's hesitation assassinating an American and making it look like it was a result of complications from the surgery (for which there would be no consequences whatsoever to them), I pretended to believe this bullshit. Once I smiled and shook hands with these butchers one-by-one, they called my agency to inform them what a “wonderful success (those exact words, in English amid all the Mandarin claptrap)” the operation had been. And speaking of the agency...
The surgery was Wednesday, and I am writing this on Sunday. It was Thursday when the doctors informed me that I will finally be released from the hospital next Friday and called the agency. Hearing this news, the teaching agency I've signed on with (under duress) sent a representative to the hospital saying “we need to help you find n apartment now.” After hours of discussion, during which every idea I proposed was met with “I don't think that is 'sue-ta-bo (suitable),' “, the agency rep finally asked “by the way, what is your price range?”
I was a bit confused by the question, and answered “well, the housing allowance I was promised is 4500 RMB a month, so I'm guessing my price range is that.”
The agency rep looked at me with a wrinkled brow and said “I'm sorry... housing allowance? No, no. No housing allowance. Your contract is written with allowance included into pay.”
I sat, dumbstruck. Not only was the salary that they offered (15,000 RMB monthly) an absolute joke by any standard in Beijing, but now I was being told that the housing subsidy, another benefit that is standard fare for any teaching job in Beijing, did not exist either. A WeChat message to the head of the agency to discuss this earned me an explanation that the part-time hours at agency-owned training centers where the agency “allows” me to work after school are, in the agency's mind, a housing allowance. She also insisted she was being quite generous about that, given that the overtime hours can yield an extra 10,000 RMB monthly (as long as I'm willing to work an extra 20 hours every week).
To put this in perspective, I've never seen a part-time tutoring gig for less than 500 RMB hourly, have never seen a teaching job in this city with a salary of less than 17,000 (plus housing allowance or accommodation) monthly, and given Beijing's cost of living (rent for a studio apartment a kilometer away from the nearest subway station in a questionable neighborhood is around 4200 monthly), those numbers are roughly the bare minimum with which someone can be expected to make ends meet in this city, and even then it's not easy. Yet here was an agent paying a fraction of that and thinking she was “generous.” Well, as mentioned in the previous article, the agent's tactic of waiting until I was locked in a hospital of their choosing with no way out, and then waiting until the last day on my previous visa before bringing a “take-it-or-leave-it” contract left me with no options other than “sign the contract, or become an illegal immigrant while you're locked in a military hospital.”
I'm about to have an 80,000 RMB hospital bill. I'm locked (due to the serpentine machinations of a devilish agent) into a 2 year contract to work for 15,000 RMB monthly, out of which I'm likely to be spending 5,000 in rent, while I have to send another 7,000 to the Philippines every month for my kids' tuition and care. It's no hyperbole to say I don't know how I am going to survive.
The only good news is that the contract has April 1 as its start date, which means I'm not under contract until next Monday. This means I have a week to do one of two things: find something game-changing, like a better-paying school who can take up my visa right away, enabling me to annul my contract before it takes effect, or decide what I'm taking with me and what I'm leaving (which, though I hate it like poison, is going to probably mean leaving my books and my research materials behind) and hopping a plane back to the U.S. to regroup and start applying for teaching jobs in the Fall around ASEAN.
The former option has a myriad of difficulties, not the least of them being that a week is not enough time to make very much happen.
There's just one thing, by contrast, about the latter option that worries me.
Flying with a leg injury is how I got into this mess in the first place.