Stinky Pile of Poo

LÜN, Mongolia — I don't need to say what's absent from a Mongolian rest stop, but I will anyway. No McDonald's, no Sbarros, no chain restaurants selling foot-long sandwiches, no refillable Big Gulp glasses that hold more than a liter of soda and cost under a dollar, no windshield wiper fluid or premium grade gasoline, no friendly Mexicans who wave as they mop the filthy floors. This is not a place for swanky service - here, a rest stop is classy if it has a bathroom.

(Disclaimer: The following post contains some frank discussion of human bodily functions. If offended, please don't continue — but keep in mind Everyone Poops.)




There's no room for the picky eater on the wide open Mongolian transportation system. On our first day, we left Ulaanbaatar in the mid-morning and were off the pavement less than half an hour later. When the sun made it to the highest point in the sky, Bobby, our de-facto guide, turned around and posed a question.

"There is a place where we can have lunch. It may not be open. Should we stop?"

Our stomaches, rattled though they may be from our van's questionable shocks, demanded nourishment. And since we had not passed an eating establishment for hours, we could not be choosy. Fortunately, the small wooden house optimistically called a café was open, and we took seats at the largest of three tables inside.

Traditional Mongolian dishes were served, or more to the point, a traditional Mongolian dish. After having the group study the menu for five minutes, Bobby emerged from the kitchen to inform us that we would be eating mutton stew with a side of rice. We stopped by on New Year's Day, and were not surprisingly the only customers. That meant freshly prepared food, and we had to wait for the stout chef to cut every hunk of meat and simmer an appropriate amount of time. Mongolian wrestling, live from Ulaanbaatar, was the only distraction on the television. I watched for several minutes as two obese men attempted to force each other out of a ring. I now understand why many top sumo wrestlers are Mongolian.

The rumbling on the set caused a rumbling in my bowels. This was a bit unusual, as I believe my intestinal track has a sixth sense and intuitively knows when I'm entering a new territory. I normally have two, sometimes three days in unfamiliar ground before I need an outhouse. Out on the steppe, I got just six hours.

Asked about a bathroom, the chef pointed out the window towards nowhere. I walked outside, expecting to pop a squat in an open field, but instead I followed the specified plane and saw a small brown shed a couple of hundred meters in the distance. On closer inspection, the structure used the same primitive log cabin design as the restaurant, except here the boards seemed thrown together rather than carefully laid out. The latrine had three sides, an open entrance which meant relieving oneself while facing The Great Outdoors, and a low ceiling. Once inside, I surprisingly smelled no odor; the waste was frozen solid.

I did my business, and then looked down into the hole. In a hole that appeared eight feet deep, there was a long, thin pile of poo reaching six feet back toward the earth. It was the refuse of thousands of protein-rich meals, all ejected in the same alignment.

I did some quick mental math: at this rate, the latrine could be overflowing before spring. And then I had a new candidate for world's worst job: knocking down a frozen pile of feces in the bottom of a cesspit. What tool would be right for the job? A hoe, maybe a spade. Maybe that wouldn't be enough to cut through the solid matter. Perhaps an ax would be needed, or pots of boiling water to soften the mound.

I should be thankful. The latrine's three walls protected my nether regions from the biting winds, and there was no chance that any fecal matter would accidentally wind up on my shoes. Mongolia isn't the most developed country in the world, but they haven't let the shit overflow — yet.

Bandages, Thermometers and a Spider

MENGLA, China - Under most circumstances, I would invite the two young and attractive Austrians out for a Tsingdao or a couple pieces of fried tofu. But I needed an ATM and then had to get to the hospital.

 

Zack's still sick. His symptoms include fever, headache, body chills, body sweats, difficulty breathing and a pain in his right foot. We took a rest day in Luang Prabang and then another here in Mengla, but he doesn't feel any better. As Mengla has no airport and Zach really didn't want to begin the six hour bus ride to Jinghong, the nearest city with one, that meant when Zach felt even worse during the evening, we paid a visit to Mengla Country Hospital.

 

We never found an ATM, and went to the hospital with 300 RMB between us. That's about $40, or $460 less than required to walk in the door in an American hospital. Of course American hospitals treat and then send the massive bill through a collection agency several weeks later. Here in China you pay for the treatment even before you receive it.

 

Mengla County Hospital is three buildings arranged in an open square. Two are built in a Southeast Asian style, concrete boxes with pointy roofs and a yellow paint job to show they are from Yunnan Province. The other was two story and brick, and this is where the taxi dropped Zach and I off.

 

My Chinese is better than Zach's, and with his illness he was talking less coherently than normal, so I did most of the talking. I explained to the nurse on duty that he'd been sick for a few days, feeling worse and want to know what was wrong.

 

The nurse took a thermometer out of a metal box, filled with disinfectant I hope, and stuck it under his armpit. One-hundred and four degrees: Not too good. His blood pressure and breathing tests came back fine, but they took one look under his foot and sent him to the dressing unit.

 

The story of Zach's foot wound is this: on our second day in Vang Vieng, the same day our tuk-tuk crashed, Zach, myself and the Australian-New Zealand duo of Chris and Veronica decided to celebrate our good fortune in emerging from the accident uninjured by drinking ourselves silly. On the Vang Vieng are a series of riverside bars, where tubers can stop and enjoy a $1 Beer Lao, $1.50 plate of noodles or a $1 joint, and then help themselves to unlimited jumps on a high rope swing. This sounds incredibly dangerous, but only a couple people have died in the last five years on this river. Given the drunk, high debauchery that occurs everyday here, that's a minor miracle.

 

Anyway Zach didn't injure his foot by going head long into the river or passing out from too many Beer Laos. He scraped his foot in the most mundane way, on a rock in the river, walking back to the shore after a jump. It looked a normal cut, a few inches across, red, but after a week it hadn't healed. Zach changed the bandage daily and started applying liberal doses of First Aid cream, but it still looked white and pussy when the Mengla nurse opened it up.

 

The surgery room was disgusting. Zach sat on an operating table covered in a cloth with several blood stains. A large spider crawled around the closest wall. The surgeon, who spoke no English, wore a dirty coat. First came the infection test, a few drops of blood drawn from the finger with an incredibly long needle. Then the surgeon cleaned, cut and dressed the wound, all while Zach winced in the pain of hydrogen peroxide.

 

Before any of this began, I was dispatched to the payment counter and ordered to pay $3.40 for the wound care and blood test. Only then did the treatment commence.

 

The blood test came back normal - no infection - and the surgeon sent us to the brick building. There I talked with the nurses about what we should do now. They wanted to know how Zach felt, when we were returning to Beijing, and how I spoke Chinese so well. I waved this off, as there's scarcely been a less appropriate time for faux-flattery then here at the hospital. They decided to administer a couple intravenous medications, and dispatched me to the pharmacy to pay and collect them. They came to $7.50, and I had to be careful with the small glass bottles as I carried them between the buildings.

 

They put Zach in Room 101, perhaps the best room at the hospital. There were two beds, and the man in the next bed didn't look well. He grasped in stomach and shook his head when I said hello. I think he needed an appendectomy. Later his son came to visit and the nurses hooked him to some kind of pump and he felt better.

 

The room had bad fluorescent lights but cable. For two hours, Zach watched a CCTV-9 documentary about children trying to escape the Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese War (or the War to Prevent Japanese Aggression as the government puts it) and slept. It was after midnight by the time we walked back to our hotel room, through dark streets and a beer garden.

 

Zach looked better after his visit to the hospital, at discharge his fever was only 99 degrees and his headache had gone down. The Chinese staff had been prompt and friendly in servicing us, obviously favoring us over other patients. They ran a number of tests and administered themselves in a professional manner, except when they bothered me about my Chinese skills. The total costs were just over $10 - essentially nothing. But Mengla is no place for a serious illness. I wouldn't want to go under the knife on that bloody table, or have one my internal organs explode while hooked to that strange pipe.

 

Our visit to the Chinese health care system was informative, but next time I'd rather not have the health of a friend be at stake.

Can We Get Back to the Surgery?

ALBANY, N.Y. - After my dentist proclaimed my mouth cavity-free, I had to the courage to ask a question I'd been curious about for months: Do I need to get my wisdom teeth removed?

"I don't know," he said, and looked at me blankly. "Go see these people." He handed me a business card for the Adirondack Oral/Maxillofacial Group.

Three weeks and one canceled appointment later, I turned off an office park cul-de-sac and parked at the oral surgeon's lot. The practice shared an operation with a deli, which I walked into by mistake before rounding the building and finding into the right office.

A woman with a fixed cleft pallet and still evident lisp took an X-ray, and then took me into a small examination room. Five minutes later the doctor walked in, dressed in scrubs and still wearing a face mask. This was 8:30 in the morning. Unless this doctor performs dawn surgeries, he's so much of a germophobe he wears these as a matter of course.

The doctor used my EMS approach to making his job more interesting: changing the subject. He took a print of the X-ray, put it front of a light, and then asked a question.

"So, what do you do with your life?"

I told him that I'm leaving in a few weeks for language school in Beijing.

"Cool," he said, a bit informally for a doctor but he was under 40. "I have a cousin who spent a year in Beijing. He met a Chinese girl and they married."

"So, what dialect do you plan on studying?"

Mandarin, I said. No one studies anything but Mandarin. I didn't say that part.

"That's like the main dialect, right? The Communists forced everyone to speak that after they took over?"

Well, no. I could have told the dentist that standard Mandarin is derived from a standard Beijing accent and the language of the Imperial Court. The Communist government has been more effective in promoting a centuries-old policy that people should learn Mandarin. Chinese isn't unique in having so many dialects. Lots of languages have dialects.

I didn't really want to get into it. I wanted to know if I needed oral surgery in the next two weeks. Would I be setting off on my journey east with a bleeding mouth?

Thankfully, the removal of my wisdom tooth (I've only got one) can wait. The impacted tooth is asymptomatic, and besides, if it became infected, the dentist suggested I could get it removed in China.

"They've got excellent dental care there. We've had some of their dentists come over and speak to us. Where are you going to be studying?"

Amazing. It was all-China, all-the-time with this guy. He went on about studying Chinese was a smart career move, problems I might have with learning the language, and the experience of having a Chinese cousin-in-law.

The dentist is a good example of a group of people I run-into from time to time: the China Crazies. They've got a lot to say about China, and they don't get to talk about it very often. When they hear I'm going there, the floodgates open. It's very flattering that they want to talk my destination, but sometimes inappropriate. Let's save the China chit-chat until after surgery.

Drove to Chicago

CHICAGO – This blog has had two interruptions of more than a couple days since its inspection this past spring. Both times when I've reappeared it's been here.

The reason is traveling, and the stresses and illnesses that seem to come when one does it. Rest assured I'm feeling better at the moment and will be lingering my way back home. Maybe it'll take three days, maybe three weeks, but I hope either way I'll be blogging about it.

A Brave Blog

WICHITA, Kan. – In my last post, I rather ridiculously admonished a 91-year-old woman for straying from her mother's story in her self-published biography. That might have been slightly tasteless. Today, perhaps as a form of redemption, I wanted to highlight a piece of a writing that's completely serious and incredibly brave.

Tamara is a local woman, probably in her 30s. She's been through some hard times. A decade ago, she was addicted to cocaine for a period. But she cleaned herself up, and married a by-all-accounts decent man. They live in Wichita.

A few months ago, Tamara started throwing up frequently. She couldn't keep anything down, including her anxiety and depression medications. She become jittery, nauseous. Her husband took her to a doctor, who referred her to a specialist. She saw doctor after doctor. Tamara wasn't getting any better. By July, she was having trouble breathing. She was admitted to the hospital.

Doctors continued to examine her. For a while, they thought it was a case of pneumonia. But she kept getting worse. She needed a breathing tube, and later a feeding tube. She wasn't responding well, so she had to be restrained and sedated. Then, the doctors came back with the final diagnosis: advanced cancer. Her doctors believe she has months to live.

I've never met Tamara. I know what I do about her because of her husband, Josh. He's transformed his blog, "I Got The Poison", (a line from a Jason Mraz song) into a log of Tamara's illness. He's been incredibly faithful in updating it. His entries have only gotten more frequent in the last couple weeks, as Tamara has been in and out of the hospital.

I don't want to say much more about it. The journal is online, and deserves to be read. My interpretations of it, what it means, why it might exist and how it helps are all beyond the point. What matters is that this journal exists and makes for sobering reading on the often-frivolous Information Superhighway.

Go here to read it.