A Hospital Visit

I have been reading, basically as light entertainment, William S Burroughs's 'The Western Lands'. One of the book's many fragmented dialogues deals with what happens when the public finds out the medical establishment has been suppressing the cure for cancer:

'And mutiny in the ranks: Doctor X a respected oncologist practising in a Midwestern city asks that his name be withheld: "I have seen it with my own eyes...the remission and complete cure of hitherto incurably cancerous conditions."'

...'with the threat of cancer removed the medical centre seems a vast waste "Fifty years the fucking croakers kept the cure from the people."'

I had the 'opportunity' July last year to go to a hospital in Shanghai that Burroughs would have been quite interested to hear about.

I had an infection, a bladder infection - STOP RIGHT THERE - it was not proven to be venereal (although it possibly could have been), and this is not meant to be a gross out post. Anyway, I had a similar condition (again) in Shanghai some years earlier for which I had been prescribed a long course of antibiotics. The doctor's split second diagnosis had been prostatitus. The antibiotics didn't work, but I eventually came right. Some time later I was reading about hospitals in Hangzhou prescribing antibiotics to anybody to make money. Some reporter went in, gave green tea for his urine test and was still prescribed antibiotics for a bladder infection!
After reading this, I wasn't too keen just to go to any old doctor or hospital. To cut a long story short, I found a foreign doctor through a friend. I don't want to talk about the doctor, but to say he was a great guy - and a big help to me.

I was put on an antibiotic drip for a few days. Sitting in the same room were cancer patients, getting a kind of chemotherapy medicine not marketed in some countries, as, apparently, big drug companies couldn't see money in it.

The dilemma of sitting in that room, with the other patients thinking(initially at least) I had cancer too, was this: They were on death's door and I had (possibly) a social disease. What to do, tell them or lap up their sympathy?

After the antibiotics in the drip didn't work, I went on to another kind of antibiotics (taken orally this time), purchased in a western country. There is much talk of the watered down antibiotics in China and their possible effect on the human race - imagine WW III with people dying of minor infections like in WW I - well unfortunately I think I can. This second course of antibiotics saw me right.

I bought amoxicillin in the pharmacy below my apartment in Shanghai once. The translation wasn't too hard, the pinyin being 'a mo xi lin', Chinese is wonderful when it surprises you with something simple like this. Another time trying to buy the same drug at the supermarket the woman at the drug counter told me to get a prescription. She was looking at me like I was some kind of morphine junky. Morality and its inconsistencies...