During this past week, I've made 2 trips to the Huashan Hospital's Foreigner's Clinic. About 3 weeks ago, I twisted my left knee at Ultimate training. It has felt sore since then, and I got tired of the 'wait and see' approach to healing and thought I'd do something about it. With the help of my company's nurse (yep, there are some perks of working in Shanghai), I had arranged to meet one of Shanghai's top orthopaedic surgeons, Prof. Yu. I arrived at Huashan Foreigner's Clinic, filled in a few forms as usual, bumped into a few American interns spending their summer break working at Huashan, and waited. I was introduced to Prof. Yu, and after a pretty personable chat with him, we got down to the diagnosis part. My initial examination didn't last too long - essentially after a few minutes worth of prodding and some extensive note-taking, I was introduced to the queue for MRI machine. At this point, I remembered why medical insurance is a good thing. The MRI scan at Huashan costs between RMB1900 and RMB2200, and despite this being China and everything 'should' be a little cheaper than back home, all I can say is that I'm glad that my insurance covers the entirety of any treatment at Huashan Hospital.
I returned to the hospital this Friday afternoon for my MRI. The company I work for is a renowned manufacturer of such products, so imagine my pride as an employee to encounter one of our models in use in the radiology/imaging department at Huashan Hospital. Given all the hoopla about these highly-engineered medical marvel-machines that my company makes, and my complete lack of prior knowledge to how these things work in real-life - I soon had my world shaken yet again. I was shocked to discover how big, noisy, and clunky these machines were in real-life, and I fully appreciate the stories of people enduring 20 minutes (or more) in these units without moving. I had the short sharp version, I wouldn't like to be placed inside these machines for 30 minutes or so. Not really the 'cool-breeze, margarita in hand' experience I had been led to imagine.
Besides a couple of tiny leg twitches, my time spent in the tube was uneventful. I then popped off to Tima Harbour Cafe on Zhenning Lu for an afternoon coffee & to catch up on some work. I bumped into a few people in real-life and virtually while enjoying a quiet end to my working week.
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