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 
An unhealthy obsession with the death toll question
Within an hour of last Friday’s catastrophic tsunami in Japan, I was tuned into a live press conference with Prime Minister Naoto Kan that was being aired on CCTV here in China. The tsunami struck our neighbor at 2:46 pm Tokyo time (1:46 pm in Beijing), right around the time I was preparing to head over to work.
Kan opened the conference by making general statements about the event, stressing that while not much information was known, Japan would do everything it could in its rescue efforts. Then he began fielding questions from the press. The very second question, from a journalist whose organization I’m unsure of, disturbed me: “Is there an estimated death toll?”
All I could do was shake my head and think, “Really? You’re asking what the death toll is when aftershocks are still being felt and tsunami waves are still rolling?”
Kan, of course, gave the expected answer — that there was no way of knowing how great the death toll would be at that time. And how could he — or any other government officials, really — know that number just an hour after the quake struck?
The question disappointed me. In our digital age where news spreads at breakneck speeds, the press — both in America and abroad — seems eager to get the “official” numbers out as quickly as possible. Competing news organizations all want to be the first to report the right information. Yes, the organizations have a responsibility to accurately report information and constantly search for updates, which includes death tolls in cases of natural disasters and other deadly events.
But in this case, the death toll question was premature and, given the timing, inappropriate. And it made me all the more worried about how sensationalistic — and perhaps inaccurate — the coverage would become in the ensuing days and weeks.
It reminded me of 9/11 and how, at the age of 14, I was constantly searching for online news updates that day in my high school’s computer labs. I remember how terrified I was to read the initial reports — that up to 50,000 people may have been working in buildings of the World Trade Center. That the National Mall was on fire. That one of the planes reportedly made it out as far west as Cleveland.
Some of these pieces of information would turn out to be true. Some were slightly accurate. Some were simply ridiculous rumors. And it would take months for the American public to finally learn the true death toll (which is still changing).
Obviously the events unfolding in Japan are on a much more disastrous scale than those of 9/11. But I worry that the media and their audience have an unhealthy obsession with getting the official numbers. This obsession often leads to sensationalism in news coverage.
Like the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, we may never know the true death toll from last Friday’s disaster. But just because we may never have an “official” death toll doesn’t mean we won’t be able to understand the extent of the damage.