Mmm where to start…..
Normally my visits in China are quite successful and very exciting to explore new places as part of my research but this summer has been one of my worst illnesses that I have ever experienced in my life.
The story of my Illness goes like this….
Well… it all started from flying to China, as soon as I landed in China in Wenzhou city, I began feeling a bit uncomfortable in my bowel area. I felt as though I could not stand for long but I knew it was a long flight so I blamed that instead. After meeting my girlfriend Wei Cheng there at the airport we normally get a hotel so that I have the chance to recover from jet lag and getting my sleep back. However this was not the case when I reached the hotel at all, all I wanted to do was just use the toilet as soon as I could reach it in the hotel…
What Happened and what kind of Illness this may be?
I could not stop going for the toilet and altogether I had been 7 times already for that evening in the hotel and the days to come after that and I believed that I had some kind of inflammatory bowel disease which I thought had started on the airplane. I felt even more tired and felt as if my whole body was draining away from inside of me and I just wanted to stop it but it kept going on all the time.
Did it get worse? Stay the same?
Yeah it got potentially worse because I kept on losing weight making me lose 7 pounds in total and after going for so many times in the end I started seeing blood in my stool and then after a while it was just blood and mucus on its own. Now this made me very scared as I was across the otherside of the world where I might not be able to be helped enough in China because medical services are different to our free NHS Service. I felt very helpless and all I kept on doing was complaining everyday of my pain that I had in my stomach and bowel and getting sleepless nights also.
I felt like I just wanted to switch off completely because nobody believed me it was this serious! I thought I was going to die or something because my girlfriend keep saying to me she knew a friend who had a bad stomach for some time and keep saying to me not to worry but i never had this before in my life…
Me and my girlfriend argued almost everyday because of my bad illness that I suffered in China and when I keep asking her to take me to see the doctor at the proper hospital, she would not do it because she had to work during the day and she thought it was not serious enough because of her friend suffering from it. All I could do was drink the chinese medicine that they bought for me which had a lot of salt in it and herbs, hoping it would go away soon… The amount of salt content in this medicine might have resulted me to not sleep very well as the salt boosts blood levels!
How did I resolve this problem?
Well… in the end it did get worse that I could not move very much and just felt stiff all around my bowel area and very painful that my girlfriend finally listened to me and not her friend and decided to take me to the Doctor.
At that point I felt so relieved and and safe that something was finally gonna happen about my bowel problems. I never seen a hospital that was so busy in all my life! there were just full of people everywhere… and I had to cue to try obtain one of their health cards first before I can even see a doctor… so I did and waited for half an hour to get the health card with my girlfriends help.
In the end I saw the Doctor and his office was like one I never seen before, at least more than 6 different patients are waiting right next to the doctors desk waiting to be seen with absolutely no confidentiality whatsoever compared to our NHS services.
Anyway he saw me and examined me by touching me around my bowel area to see if hurt anyway and I did hurt on my left side more than my right side. He booked me in on the same day to have the CT scan, blood tests and I managed to get them results the same day! was such a quicker service compared to here in England.
Good News? or Bad News?
Well… it was not good news at all, when he saw on the CT scan, he said apart of my large intestine is too narrow which meant that I could not digest food properly resulting me to go toilet too many times and losing weight. He said to me it was either Crohn’s Disease or a Tumor! I felt so guttered and frightened if this could be true or not…. So I had no choice but to persuade my girlfriend to help me go home early to get this treated properly in the UK to make sure if the Tumor or Bowel disease does not get worse.
My girlfriend was very supportive to me once she heard it was more serious and in future she said she will listen to me more and not other people all the time. So I catched the early flight back and i missed one month of staying there out of the three months but I got enough research and time with my girlfriend to have a successful trip in the end.
A Missed flight…
The first plane come in to Hongkong 2 minutes late and I missed it and I felt guttered that I would have to wait longer for the next one… I managed to get another one at the helpdesk which was Virgin Atlantic airways which i never flew on before and the gave me a free hotel to stay in to get some rest whilst I am waiting for the next 7 hours.
In the end I caught one one time and because of my bowel problems I wanted to spend a bit extra for the special seat which was nice because I managed to get the whole row of seats in the end. Nobody bought the rest of them special seats so I could actually lay down properly on the flight and this gave me about 7 hours sleep which is very hard to get on a plane when you have to sit up right.
Got Back to Home sweet Home
Yeah once I was back I just could not explain how relieved I had felt to see my supporting family again and how they wanted to help me get better quickly. On the day of coming home I arrived back home by 8:00 from Heathrow airport and my father managed to book me the appointment to see a doctor the very same day. The doctor that I saw said he wanted me to go to the hospital so my mother and father took me there to have an X-ray scan done there and they said that my bowel looks fine? what? I was thinking…
They done all the blood tests X-ray and even a Colonoscopy test few weeks later and all the tests came back positively that I had no serious tumors or Crohn’s disease but they did say that I was a bit inflamed inside the bowel so maybe it was just the tail end of my serious infection that i suffered in China.
Some of my recent art work started from my Medical problem this summer but my whole summer vacation in China was not all bad as I managed to visit Beijing with my girlfriend and got a lot of art ideas.
