Day and night, for weeks on end;
Always the damn cough.
Nope, my state of health is not good. I'm actually starting to get rather worried about it. And, in general, I pay no attention to health problems unless they seem potentially life-threatening. I've had a persistent cough, wretched sore throat, intermittent fever, and hugely swollen neck glands for, oh, getting on for two months now. I took a course of antiobiotics last week, which seemed to ameliorate the problem slightly, but hasn't put an end to it. Bottom line: I don't trust Chinese hospitals to be medically competent; I don't trust foreign hospitals not to be commercially ruthless. In fact, I think I probably have a pretty fair chance in either kind of hospital of being both misdiagnosed and egregiously ripped off. And I just don't have the spare cash to run that gauntlet. (Health insurance?? Hollow laughter, breaking down into sobs.) I think my only recourse may be to head back to the UK and try to get a free examination on the NHS. I'd been planning to visit home in December anyway..... so, I guess I'll try to hang on until then..... and hope for a spontaneous resolution in the meantime.
Hawk. Spit. Death-rattle.
3 comments:
Part of me wants to ask what happened to all those mystical-magical Oriental healers who are the stock in trade of many a Hollywood epic, and why haven't you visited them for a plaster of ground rhino horn or something.
And part of me just wants to say, uh, please do not put this off. No way at all to get home before December, I guess? (Not counting tramp steamer.)
Free examination on the NHS? You may be lucky if you have been savvy enough to retain a UK address via a friend and hence stay on a UK GPs books - but in theory only UK citizens resident in the UK are supposed to have FREE treatment nowadays...
Oh, of course - there IS another way (smites head at own stupidity)...you could learn Albanian and smuggle yourself in from Sangatte. You'd probably get family benefits and free schooling for your numerous non-existent children then...not to mention a large cash sum to go back to Kosovo so you could try it all over again...sigh...
Well, I am still registered with the old college docs in Oxford, Mothman. I can't remember which long-redundant address they have for me, but they don't usually enquire too closely. Not a terribly busy surgery, that one.
Mind you, I like the idea of a sponsored holiday in Kosovo....
Traditional Chinese remedies you can buy over the counter, JES, can be quite good. There's a thing called a 'fat seed' which you put in tea; in hot water it slowly opens out into a gelatinous web - it looks absolutely disgusting, but it's extremely soothing for a tickly throat, and it is supposed to have preventative properties too. Thanks for the reminder - I should probably lay in some more of this.
I have in the past, back in the UK, tried both acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. Acupuncture I have quite a lot of time for. Herbalism - while it almost certainly encompasses a few (largely accidental) wonder drugs - is, I think, mostly mumbo-jumbo.
The real problem is finding a practitioner you can trust. As with regular Western medicine practitioners, a large number even of the appropriately qualified ones are dangerously lazy and incompetent. And with TCM, there's a huge number of outright charlatans as well. And when they see a foreigner approaching, they're all going to try to hike their fees through the roof.
It's only recently that I've been getting desperate enough to consider any kind of professional consultation at all, so the TCM option hadn't really entered my thinking yet. I may look into, if I can get a reliable recommendation from someone.
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