TUESDAY
It’s 6am and my phone is ringing. I’m needed at the hospital. Alex is on an oxygen tube. His mild cough has obviously become much more serious.
As I rushed over, questions swarmed in my mind – What if Alex couldn’t get into a local hospital? What if he wasn’t admitted in time? What if he passed out? What if he died? Then less altruistic thoughts – What about the move? What about my good-bye lunch plans with my friends? What if I caught whatever he had and I died just like in the hypothetical nursing scenario Anne posed to Diana during the infamous red currant wine episode in Anne of Green Gables (a classic novel that all North American girls – and bizarrely my Singaporean friend Shu – grew up to).
I get to the hospital to find a sheepish looking boyfriend with a tube up each nostril watching episodes of Homeland but I had already worked myself up into a mild hypochondriac paranoia and was sure my lungs felt alarmingly unwell the closer I stood to his hospital bed. I spent the morning trying to be supportive from the far corner of the room. After all, if airplane safety videos has taught us anything, its that you need to help yourself before you help others right?
It’s 1pm. We are still at Parkway and no news about Ruijing. Alex is looking less sheepish and more unwell. My double paranoia over my and my boyfriends well being ratchets up to silent hysteria mode (we're talking Ruby Gillis level for the Green Gables fans out there). "I'm going to get some water," I say a bit too brightly to Alex. I stepped outside the room and promptly had a melt down.
I always wanted to be one of those elegant, stoic heroines you read about in Jane Austin novels, gracefully weeping into the crook of her arm. As with many things in my life that happened after the age of 2, I didn't get what I wanted. My face turned splotchy and smushed up in a very unflattering manner while various fluids ran simultaneously from my nose, eyes and face. Really gross.
Just as I would get a grip and stop sweating/crying/snotting, my phone would ring and that would set me off all over again. I cried to my friends, I cried to Alex’s friends, I even cried to Ferasse, the SAE relocation guy who called up to see if we would use his company to move (we did not in fact pick them due to cost reasons but if we could choose based on niceness and most well dressed, he would have gotten the job in a heartbeat). After my rather awkward phone call with him, Ferasse sent me some very nice and supportive emails and texts – to which I cried while reading them. Good ol' Waterworks Ouyang.
It’s 4pm and Ruijin finally called to say a room opened up. My glee at getting admitted quickly turned into horror when Alex promptly had a panic attack that left him gasping for air through blue lips upon admission to the local hospital. His was a reaction that I would have normally ridiculed as bourgeois had I not been so scared. Your brain can only process so much in times of crisis and class awareness wit is apparently the first thing to go. Later it turned out that he turned blue possibly not due to stress but because his lungs were filling with fluid so it's just as well that I hadn't made those witty remarks as that would have made me seem like a giant bitch in retrospect. Loss of face adverted!
The room, in actuality, was pretty good. It had three rooms including a living room with a sofa and microwave, a “guest room” with a small bed and a patient room where above the headboard stood a mounted photograph of a forested road leading off into mist. The image looked like it belonged on a 70’s Hallmark card containing lines taken from a Robert Frost poem. It was calming and unsettling but mostly unsettling when you and the patient are in a troubled state of mind.
That evening, they did an emergency x-ray, which showed that considerable fluid was filling up Alex’s lungs. Lab results also came back showing damage to his kidneys, liver and an extremely low platelet count which meant his blood wouldn’t clot should there be internal bleeding. And so as with many China moments, the situation had escalated way beyond what we thought could have been logically possible.
It’s 10pm and I’m sitting across from a grim faced doctor in a lab coat. As the words float around me, it feels surreally like an episode out of Grey's Anatomy. "The labs show considerable damage to his organs...You should be prepared...You should notify his family.” I drifted back to Alex’s room with a fixed smile on my face.
“You’re going to be fine,” I told him as I sat down on a chair next to his bed.
“My body is in pain,” he replied.
“It’s just a Chinese mattress, you’ll get used to it.”
“I doubt it,” he mumbled.
I rolled my eyes because he couldn’t possibly die if I was annoyed at him. That's not how Grey's Anatomy episodes work.
They put an oxygen mask over his face, an IV in his arm and a EKG monitor on his finger. They tied a small placard around the foot of his bed. It was a small, rectangular card a childish scrawl of a Christmas tree with presents and ornaments floating around it.
“How cute,” I thought.
“This means he could die at ANY time,” the nurse told at me in Chinese. “You better monitor him all night and if his stats fall below this number - you come get us, if his saline drip ends - you come get us, if he needs to use the toilet in bed - you do that yourself.”
And so that was how Alex and I took our relationship to a whole new level.
Read Part Three -
Reinforcements
