Déjà vu.
Believe it or not, I’ve done it again.
For the second time in three years, I’ve managed to get my foot in a cast. Thankfully, the circumstances this time around aren’t as severe.
How did it happen? Like my past injuries, the story isn’t very exciting. I was walking down to the subway platform at Dengshikou Station on Tuesday afternoon when I took a wrong step and slipped on the polished stairs. (Sidenote: China loves its polished floors, which I’ve slipped on various times. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened). As I started to fall face forward, I tried to grab the rail to avoid what could have been a nastier injury. Gravity had taken me down about five or six steps when suddenly, my left foot managed to find secure footing. Unfortunately, the landing wasn’t pretty. In fact, when I looked down at the platform, I noticed everyone was staring at me with slightly terrified expressions.
I'm not exactly a stranger to foot injuries. Me in August 2007.
When got back home, I could barely walk around the apartment. Having rolled my ankle plenty of times before, I knew this was not your average injury. The last time I had experienced this much pain walking from room to room was when I broke my foot three summers ago.
I knew I had to go to the hospital, but I’d heard horror stories from expat friends who needed to visit the ER in China. “Useless” and “clueless” were some of the words I’d heard thrown around to describe the doctors here. When I was in Shenzhen, injured friends would just travel across the border to Hong Kong, where they would receive better treatment. But hundreds of miles away in Beijing, I didn’t have that option anymore.
After an hour or so of hesitation, I finally decided to bite the bullet. I called the China Daily’s Foreign Staff Coordinator and asked her to take me to the local hospital. Within minutes a taxi was waiting for me downstairs, and we were off to the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, which I later found out was one of the best hospitals in the city.
When we arrived, I filled out a standard information form. Within 5 minutes, I was sitting in the waiting room for a doctor. And within 15 minutes, I was in his office getting my ankle inspected.
After a quick look, he told me (in clear English) that I’d be needing an X-Ray. So they got me a wheelchair, had me pay the fee (550 yuan or about 81 US dollars), and I was on my way to get my X-Rays taken in about 15 or 20 minutes.
I was in and out of the X-Ray room in another 15 minutes or so, and wheeled back down to the doctor’s office, negatives in hand.
Diagnosis? There wasn’t a fracture. Instead, the doctor explained (again, in English) that I’d injured the ligament (fancy for “sprain”). He then took a few moments to explain the injury to the Foreign Staff coordinator in Chinese. To be safe, they wanted to put me in a “plaster” (fancy for “cast”) to allow my foot to heal.
So, they wrapped my foot up in a soft cast, and I was on my way back home. I was charged an additional 530 yuan (78 USD) for the cast and pain medication. I had to purchase crutches on my own outside. (Luckily for me, there’s a pharmacy across the street from the China Daily. The crutches ended costing me 100 more yuan, or 13 USD).
Total time spent at the hospital: 1 hour and 40 minutes. No unnecessary blood tests, long lines or excess paperwork like I was expecting from a “commie” hospital. I was a little surprised. Comparatively, I’ve spent hours in American hospital waiting rooms just to get an X-Ray.
As for the ankle: Well, it looks like I’m stuck in this cast for four weeks. It would be funnier if I hadn’t just registered to participate in the October Beijing Half Marathon the day before I fell.
Bridget O'Donnell is a designer for