Warning! The following post is rather… ‘rough’ and makes multiple use of the s-word. And the d-word. Now you’ll probably want to read it even more, huh?

So this whole mess started almost a month ago, but I didn’t want to write about it before it was over. Now my stomach is back in order, I can eat whatever I want whenever I want without having to run to the nearest toilet within minutes after shoving food down.

I think it was June 26th. I woke up with a stomach ache that made me think that somebody cut out some of my internal organs while I was sleeping. Diarrhea followed eventually, and, obviously, I thought the meat from the muslim where I often eat 8 kuai noodles was a sick dog or something else then whatever is normal. Stomach ache in China is not uncommon, especially if you live on a budget and don’t go to fancy clean restaurants every day. So I ate nothing but rice, manto (this disgusting chinese bread) and salty crackers for three days. Didn’t help, stomach was still moving a lot, diarrhea was still there, too. So I made quite possibly the worst decision in my whole life: I went to a chinese hospital from the government. NEVER! AGAIN! It is called the ‘Shanghai Oriental Hospital’ in Pudong.

This is probably worth a article itself, but needs to mentioned: When you go to a hospital, you buy in advance the ticket for your doctor’s check. In advance! What! How the hell are they going to know how much time I will use, how difficult it will be to treat me - in advance? Are you kidding me! That’s how they treat you there, like you buy your ten minutes of care and then they send you to do something. It’s really like on a farm there, the customers are cows and the doctors the farmers. Horrible.

Then it got worse. They gave me a small cup, like twice the size of a Maotai cup, and told me to shit in there. Of course they didn’t have western toilet seats but these horrible old ones where you have to bend down in order not to shit on your pants, so I was looking like a chinese acrobat, trying to aim for the cup and not falling backwards into the shit-hole at the same time. After minutes of pushing and keeping the balance I managed to fill it. So I went back out, hiding the cup with my hands. Why would I hide it? Because it was friggin’ transparent and I felt horribly embarrassed to show my diarrhea shit to the other sick people in the waiting room. I headed straight back to the people who gave me the cup and wanted to give it to them. ‘You need to buy a ticket for the shit-checking analysis.’ What! YOU TELL ME THAT NOW?! If my wife wouldn’t have been there with me, I would have had to run back to the counter in the main entrance hall to buy that ticket - with my shit in a cup! INSANE!

So my wife went instead, came back 10 minutes later, and they finally took that cup away from me. Goddamn you! I went there for getting better, and the more time I spend there, the worse I felt. After they analyzed my shit and my blood they told me that I’d need a injection of some salt-water or whatever that was. Also, they made me buy medicine for 80 kuai. Later on I would find out through a german doctor that one of the medicine tablets they gave me was antibiotics and completely wrong, only worsening my diarrhea. They thought I had salmonella but I didn’t! All I had was some sort of stomach disorder. You can imagine that over the next two weeks I didn’t get better at all, only worse. So I googled up a german doctor who actually took the time to check me out with her hands, trying to see if one of my organs hurt. Nobody even dared to touch me in that messed up hospital. The german doctor also took a look at the shit analysis from the chinese hospital and started wondering why they would give me antibiotics - the analysis showed perfectly clear that I had no bacteria at all in my stomach!

In the end, I got medicine for 6 kuai, 6 kuai! from the german doctor. That was all that I needed. Not a injection with salt water, not 80 kuai antibiotics, just some stomach-calming pills, that’s all. But I guess it’s better to f*ck up the complete system with antibiotics then to actually use a brain. Thank you again, chinese hospital, I’ll never see you again! FYI: The german doctor’s office name is ‘Body and Soul‘.