Medical Preparations

August 20, 2018 to August 22, 2018

Monday - Wednesday

Since a semi-random and completely unpredictable selection of Chinese provinces have made all Sudafed compounds prescription only, on Monday's visit to the International Clinic, I got a bunch of those. Unfortunately, they weren't able to help me with Diamox for altitude but I've still got a few more channels to try on that. Who'd've thunk that a beach city hospital wouldn't carry a medicine that is mostly used to treat acute mountain sickness?

Per my visit to the International Clinic, my little stash of pain medicine has now grown to include Diclofenac. I'm going to try not to need it but it's definitely nice to have options available that are stronger than my OTC Naproxen while not being my very definitely not at all OTC Tramadol.

I can not even begin to express how much I hate Tramadol. No matter how low the dose, I don't think I've ever managed to take it and not gotten—at least a little bit—high. Take it at night and I'll have very weird dreams. Take it in the morning and I'm basically guaranteed to do something stupid and hurt myself or continue to wear myself out to the point of injury.

Given the choice, when it comes to heavyweight prescription painkillers, I'd really rather have codeine or one of its analogs. These are both significantly more physically addictive than Tramadol and, unlike Tramadol, have a broad range of recreational uses so—especially what with Chinese hospitals being positively paranoid about narcotics—they are a lot lot harder to get. Which is not to say that it's easy to get Tramadol from a Chinese hospital. Cause it's not easy. It's ridiculously difficult. Unless you've got x-rays as beautiful as mine. Then it's merely "difficult".

If I were to desperately insist on having codeine, they will give it to me. I can get it. I have gotten it. More than once. It's just enough of a hassle that I'm not going to try to get it for my medical kit. Besides which, even though they are annoyingly high dosage for something that cannot conveniently be broken up into smaller pieces, I still have a few codeine dispersibles left over from Vietnam.

Best highs I've ever had were oxygen tanks. Absolutely no idea what's in the drip. More than just saline though.

Wednesday morning I woke up at what many people would consider a civilized hour (9:51am) and got my ass over to the big Hainan State Farms hospital only 43 minutes later than I'd promised to be there. (Me + mornings, never a good mix). One of the Ghanian doctors who did his residency here thought that his hospital had Acetazolamide in stock and had agreed to see me, confirm that I'm also modifying my behaviors to avoid the possibility of actually getting sick, and get me a scrip.

Acetazolamide is a 50+ year old medication which was mostly used to treat things like glaucoma and surgical edema but which also had a whole bunch of side effects that made it the perfect drug for treating altitude sickness. It turns out they didn't have Acetazolamide in stock but instead had a newer class of drug called Methazolamide. This had me somewhat concerned but a quick google once I got home indicated that even though altitude sickness is mostly considered an off-label usage, it was already recognized as being an effective treatment as far back as 1983.

This is kind of important since one of the places I specifically plan to re-visit as part of retracing past trips is the clinic in rural Gansu where they put me on oxygen and about seven different holy fuck what the hell do we do medications while periodically reading my vital signs over the phone to someone at a hospital in their provincial capital.

This is literally all of the staff of the entire hospital (+ a random child), some of whom came in on their day off to get in on the group photo with the foreign patient

And then, after a lot of arguing that I really was perfectly fine to bicycle, they put me in the ambulance and took me downhill. The difficulty I had getting into the front seat of the ambulance finally served to convince me I wasn't fine.

This was my first time going to the big HSF hospital as a patient (mostly because it's 40 minutes away from my apartment by taxi as opposed to 15 minutes by foot) and wow, other than being full of Chinese people and Chinese language signs, it was hardly like being at a hospital in China at all. I even saw a staff member wearing scrubs. (Okay, so it was a singular staff member and I've seen at least three people wearing scrubs at my usual hospital but still....)

It was especially cool that a helicopter arrived while I was there. I'd seen the helipad at my usual hospital (it's in the middle of the parking lot; it usually has cars parked on it) but I'd never actually thought that there were hospitals in China that had gotten up to the level of actually having helicopter service.

Wednesday evening, a 'lucky' bout of stomach upset caused me to realize that I hadn't found (or packed) the Pepto. Sometime on Thursday, I'll stop by the English speaking dentist who is advertising in the Pocket Guide to show them their ad-copy and to get my teeth cleaned.

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