The art of tripping, falling, and landing on your jaw

Youth ministry has drawn its first blood from me now.

What happened was that last week Kara and I took a day trip "Happy Valley," which is an amusement park here in Beijing. We went with a bunch of homeschooled students from our youth group.

Towards the end of the day. I was watching something and then turned around to go the other way and didn't see the donut shaped rock outcropping that was right behind me. It was about knee level high and I tripped right over it and landed on my jaw on the opposite side of the donut. I scraped up my knee, shin, chest and hand along with getting a really good gash in the underside of my chin. (All of the other injuries are pretty minor, just scratches and bruises).
One of the families had a first aid kit with them and we bandaged up my chin as best we could and someone was able to give Kara and I a ride home.

It actually didn't seem like a very serious injury at first, it actually didn't hurt much so we didn't go to the hospital right away. Later that evening I took off the bandage to try to clean it better and bandage it up again and realized that there was a lot of dirt in there still and the gash was much deeper than I thought, so we decided we needed to get a doctor to look at it and clean it out properly or risk an infection. I actually tried cleaning it myself and almost passed out at the mirror in the bathroom.

Kara called a friend of the family who was a doctor, but he wasn't available.
We were actually in sort of a bind because the status of my insurance coverage was unsettled. The paperwork had been taking a long time to get worked out and my application form had only been sent in the day before. So we weren't sure if we would need to pay for the full cost of any treatment I received. Which led us to the next series of events.

It was about 8pm by this point. We called up a friend who spoke some Chinese and went first to a Chinese clinic near our house that someone had recommended.

When we got there it was just closing and all of the doctors had already gone home. There was one security guard wandering around, and a TV on in a little couch pit area. The place didn't seem much like a medical institution actually. Kind of dirty and old and I couldn't figure out where they did any of the treatments. It was surreal in a soap opera sort of way. We finally caught a glimpse of one person in a lab coat down a hallway, which gave it just enough credibility that we could conceivably suspend our disbelief and accept it as the clinic it claimed to be. But with no doctors we decided to move on.

The next place we went was a Chinese Hospital. As far as we could tell there was one emergency room doctor and about 10-15 people hanging around waiting to see him. The reason I saw hanging around is that you sort of have to stand by the door to his observation room to convince him that you are actually injured and hold your place in "line." After a couple minutes at the door the doc motioned me in and had me sit on a bed across the room from his desk at which he was looking at the MRI brain scans of a child who was, with his family, also in the room. The doctor motioned for me to remove the bandage that I was holding on my wound. He sort of glanced at it from about six feet away and informed me that it would be two hours before he could properly look at it. This is not an uncommonly long wait, but it was already after 9pm and I had sustained the injury at about 5pm so were ready to get it treated, so we decided to move on. Upon leaving we saw a middle-aged man stumbling around the hallway with his hand holding a bloody bandage to his left eye. There was blood all over his face and on parts of his clothes. Our friend Rich made the observation that it can always be worse.

Our final stop was Beijing United Family Hospital. An American run hospital that was in all noticeable ways the same as any small hospital you might visit in America. They brought me right in, the ER doctor looked at my wound and explained that it would definitely need some aggressive cleaning and sutures. He gave me some grief for waiting so long to come in. Some topical anesthetic, lots of water and scrubbing, four stitches, a tetanus shot and a war-hero like bandage around my head and I was done. I was very happy to be dealing with an English speaking, western doctor. Kara was happy too.

Afterward: I had a wound check two days later and the stitches taken out three days after that. I was actually the last person to be treated in that ER area and BJU was opening up a new ER ward the day I got them out. The insurance stuff worked out fine, the church will reimburse us for the cost of the treatment so its all good.