An Airport Is Still Around Me

A Day at the Beach - I Mean Hospital

July 7, 2015

By Sarah Ann

 

Today is really Rachel’s turn but we switched so I could write about my drama today.

 

After eating breakfast this morning, we were talking about our blog. My mom was giving Rachel some ideas of things she could write about since she said, “Nothing particularly exciting is going to happen today.” Because we were just planning to go to the beach in the afternoon – which is close is enough to walk to. Rachel added, “Hopefully.” And I said, “Not hopefully. I love excitement.” Now I understand what people mean when they say to be careful what you wish for.

 

At lunch in the cafeteria, we were all in our swimming suits (under our clothes), ready to go to the beach right after we finished eating. As I walking by a chair that had broke at breakfast, I ran into the sharp metal piece that used to hold up the chair. It hurt really bad and when I looked at my cut, I got freaked out. It wasn’t deep but it was super wide.

 

A Chinese student eating lunch nearby, told us there was a clinic just down the road. He came with my mom and me to the clinic. The nurse there put some medicine on it so it wouldn’t get infected that stung, put a bandage on it and said we needed to go to the hospital so I could get stitches. When I heard that, I was really nervous.

 

The hospital was also just down the road. My dad, mom, and Chinese student who was translating with us came with me. My parents both came because they were pretty nervous too. We hardly waited at all but were taken straight back to a room. The hospital was quite different than any hospital I’d been to before. In my room, there was a pile of used, bloody bandages in a bin at the end of my bed and I could smell people smoking. There wasn’t a waiting room. Instead, people just sat in chairs in the hallway. The doctor and nurse were both nice and came to see me right away. The nurse cleaned my wound with more ointment that stung a ton. Then the doctor came and looked and said I didn’t need stitches because it wasn’t deep. He said I needed a tetanus shot. They wrapped it up with a bigger bandage and lots of gauze and said I had to come back in two days and that I couldn’t get it wet until it healed. They asked if I had any allergies. Even though I said no, they gave me a practice prick in my wrist to make sure I wasn’t allergic. They held the needle in my wrist a long time and it hurt. After waiting 30 minutes in the hallway chairs (and learning Chinese characters from the student who was helping us), we went in again and they gave me the real shot. That one hurt a lot also. Then we had to wait thirty minutes again. We were very, very grateful for that student who stayed and helped us the whole time or we wouldn’t have understood anything.

 

 

 

 

By the time we were done, it was too late to go to the beach. Instead, we (without my dad – he went back to work) visited the Dalian Museum. They almost didn’t let us in because they wanted to check our passports, but then they did. It would have been really cool except the signs were only in Chinese. We walked around for thirty minutes and then took the tram back to our apartment.