When we last left our intrepid and possibly contagious heroine, she was sleeping twelve hours a day, but she was doing so more comfortably given her new Taipei surroundings as opposed to her previous Hsinchu ones. Tirelessly, Mark doted upon her, providing her with Coke Slurpees and unimaginable quantities of duck and bread, demanding the consumption of ludicrous quantities of water, earning himself many boyfriend-points in the process of tending to my every need and whim.Anyway, I recovered. I kept taking my medicine, except the foul-smelling Chinese syrup stuff which I eschewed fairly early. I was still too sick to work--and I didn't have any classes anyway, since mine had been given to co-workers who were doing, with their free time, something other than coughing their lungs up--so Mark and I got to spend more time together than we would have thought. We went to the Planetarium and watched a ridiculously awesome early-2000s made IMAX film about weather patterns. We juggled in the park (well, I watched juggling in the park). We took silly photos in touristy locations (namely Taipei 101, the now-second-tallest building in the world).
In some ways, the timing of my sickness was an immense blessing. At any other point during the summer, weeklong unemployment would have engendered serious discontent, but I actually couldn't have been happier about being underworked during Mark's visit. Though I lost a fair bit of what had promised to be a sizable paycheck, that proved to be a relatively minor drawback. Being sick sucked, in short, but the timing ended up OK.Anyway, Mark's visit was lovely and wonderful in every way and already Taipei seems a little less bright and exciting with him away from it, et cetera et cetera.
A day or two after he left--by this time, I'm entirely better except for a bad-sounding cough--I started to have some serious abdominal pains. I did exactly what I always do in these situations: I ignored it and hoped it would get better. I drank a little more water than I normally would have.
But it didn't get better. Soon I couldn't sleep because I would have several-hour-long intense pains. So, after a few days of this, I used my free Saturday to go to the Taipei City Hospital. It was already closed, so I had to be seen by the emergency room personnel. They concluded, after blood and urine tests and lots of loud Chinglish from both sides, that I had a massive infection brought on by a pretty terrible immune system after my illness.
Nobody speaks English at the Taipei City Hospital, but everyone is really freaking helpful anyway. Doctors and nurses and info-desk personnel and laboratory technicians and some particularly sympathetic fellow patients were all really invested in pointing and shouting and getting me where I needed to be. It was adorable and then annoying, but mostly adorable.
Anyway, to shorten what is not a particularly interesting story, I have spent three afternoons in the last week and a half in the city hospital, waiting around. The hospital system here is extraordinarily confusing: you walk in and you have to grab a number. It's like the Department of Motor Vehicles. A cool female voice comes over the loudspeaker and tells number 906 to proceed to desk eight for check-in. Except that's all in Chinese.
And that happens lots of times. I had to get a main-desk number, then a urinalysis number, then a urology number, then another main-desk number. Each of these times involved a fair bit of waiting and also confusion: the hospital has, like, twelve floors or something? And, as aforementioned, very few English speakers.
Sigh. I was on one kind of antibiotics then another. But I'm finally done! And better! And working all the time.
Hooray!
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