Laughing through the tears

wildhair

There is something about sudden phone calls.  You don’t know their significance until way after, till you’re sitting in the debris with soot-blackened hands and raw red eyes, then you recollect, remember.

 

Wei said – with deadpan seriousness, that the Europe trip would have to be cancelled.  This was at 14:02.  I had just come back from a friendly lunch with FR, the food was over MSG’d but the mood was just right.  There were, as usual, six to eight windows open on my computer, one of them was the dreadful Trenitalia site – I was hell bent on buying the Venezia-Ljubljana train ticket online; there was another--the familiar Boticelli Venus logo of the Venere website where I was attempting, once again, to cement our European accommodation bookings to maximize enjoyment and minimize payment. 

 

I may have hepatitis, he says.  I didn’t want to mock him – with his worried looks in the mirror “I look yellow” and stomach-holding after meals as if he were some dainty Lin Daiyu from the Dream of Red Mansions.  So I say, sure, let’s go to the hospital and check it out. 

 

Before I leave, I google the symptoms and find that Wei has some – but they could just as easily be that of gastroenteritis or a cold. I dismiss it as the thinking of a highly sensitive and slightly hypochondriacal man.

 

The Long March hospital is doing a roaring trade, as usual.  After a relatively brief wait on the absurdly low-ceilinged mezzanine floor, the usual disinterested doctor attended to Wei.  One look sealed our fate.

 

“The jaundice is already there, go to the contagious diseases unit”.  That, as it turned out, was safely outside the main building, an annexe to protect the masses.  Again, one look by the doctor there and he started scribbling on the hospitalization request form.

 

“How long?”  I was still hoping, against hope and common sense and basic health knowledge, that Wei might make a miraculous recovery and we’ll be laughing over Proseco in some Milanese bar in a week’s time.

 

“If he makes a quick recovery and it’s not very serious, then you’re looking at a month.”  From then on it was all moot, then, how long.  What took over was a duel between instinctive panic and absolute calm.

 

The calm is always there.  It is how we deal with bad situations and I have been in my share of Scene One: Bad Situation’s – when you come home to find the windows broken; when you wake up and find the car gone; when you open your eyes to see a strange man at your bedroom door holding up a lighter to illuminate his face (and it’s not some vigil); when you get up from a muddy ditch and watch and scream while a bunch of thugs pummel, beat, kick your husband who’s been pushed into the same ditch.

 

Don’t fuck with me when I am this calm.  It is when I am most courageous, rational and absolutely protective of my loved ones.  The calm helps me give descriptive statements and piece together accurate identi-kits, translate and describe medical situations on the phone to doctors two thousand kilometers away, cancel holiday bookings and insurance coverage with the efficiency of an ERP.

 

But give me a quiet moment, catch me in a corner, say something sympathetic and I fall apart.  FR sounded so concerned when I told her that I felt my voice cave in.  She only had to say “don’t cry” and I wept into the mobile.  Another friend rings and I could hardly get any words out.  But teary wife gave away to packing automatron once I got home.  There was scarcely a moment to waste – wash grapes, bottle hot water, select comfortable clothes, books, shaver, find mobile recharger, toiletries.  For good luck and in case he had an attack of homesickness, I put in a mini monster from Monsters Inc.  The bags are such that when I walk in, his roommate says “are you going to the airport？”

 

He has three room mates – since the single and double rooms are all full.  For a paltry 35 yuan per night, he has a bed space in a clean and bright room and is attended to by doctors who actually look you in the eyes and pleasant-looking young nurses.  Opposite him in bed 21, is a chatty man in his 50s – one of those retirees who turn into old women overnight, he dispenses advice at will and offers commentary on everything from Wei’s bladder to my food preferences.  Next to Wei, though, is a young man in serious suffering, so yellow he could be the poster boy for jaundice, he can’t get anything down and has been there for 4 months already.  40,000 yuan and counting.  Probably his family’s house.  Or years of savings.  Or decades of debt to family and friends.  The only thing worse than being poor in present day China is being sick and poor.   

 

Later at night, Wei and I sms’d each other.  We try to say good night and go to bed but we hang on to our mobile phones.  I can’t ring him because my face is wet with tears.  Then the waterworks get worse when he says it’s times like these he realizes I am the person in the world who loves him the most.  Glad to not have webcams – in my weeping state, I tell him that’s because he’s my “fire king” (alluding to the mini sloth dance of Ice Age 2 which we just saw together last week). 

 

For a second there on this rather below-average Monday – we were both laughing through our tears.