Ching chong Chinaman & the MRI brain scan

I see the dreaded abbreviation MRI on the medical form. The Shanghaiese lady doctor gives me a worried look after examining me. I couldn’t stand on one leg, kept falling. And my ears ringing all the time, the whine of electronic gnats. People swim in and out of focus. The doctor patters off something to the nurse in the local dialect, Shanghaihua.

Why speak in the dialect so I can’t understand? Why not in calm English (she could speak some) or in Mandarin, which I had more chance of understanding? Was my condition that serious that it had to be kept secret? Though I can speak simple Chinese, most Chinese people are conditioned to not reply in Chinese even if they understand my questions – which imply I should understand their answers. They mostly just don’t answer. Or they do sign language.

I am rushed to … the Payments Office to ensure that part is sorted out regardless of anything else, my survival of whatever is wrong in my head. Nearly two thousand RMB later (a bit more in rand) the panic — for them — is over: I have paid before the MRI scan. Mind you, I would do the same. Business is business. Two thousand is very cheap: MRI’s are ten thousand or so in the private hospitals in Shanghai.

I am left in a foyer with my receipt, waiting to go to the MRI department. The place is as quiet as a morgue. Now and then a hospital trolley clangs past. I stare at the dusty pot plants, glinting with gratuitous life. Glinting with dust that was once a person or animal some years ago or ten thousand years ago. Glinting with … bugger this, I have been left sitting here for half an hour, they’ve got my money, so can’t someone tell me what the hell are my chances? What is wrong with me?

Slamming my hands on the reception desk, I half yell that I don’t know what is going on, I am scared, you’ve made me pay two thousand and then just leave me alone for half an hour? She apologises profusely in that poignant, self-effacing way the Chinese have and says she will call for a doctor to explain. There was an emergency, she says. An ambulance came in bringing someone in a critical condition. Oh yes, I saw the trolley clattering past, but only saw me. I remember there is not only me around; bad things happen to other people too.

The doctor arrives. A minimal knowledge of English pares things down to the truth: “Maybe tumour,’ he says. ‘Maybe middle ear infection.’ I will take the middle ear infection, ten helpings please. But not the other thing. What’s it going to be? Ching chong Chinaman … paper, scissors, rock … the Chinese kids I teach love that game to settle disputes or who’s gonna win. I get an image of Marion sadly chopping onions in the kitchen. She is standing because there is no need to sit and wait for me anymore.

Outside the MRI labs I listen to the sounds from the torture chambers within: the GUH GUH GUH that sounds like the emergency sirens used to clear a building. I pace up and down and phone Marion every few minutes. She knows a lot about medical care and can say something comforting, lie, whatever. No reply.

Chinese people have no sense of Western privacy. The patients or friends of patients stand close around me and talk with my nurse about me, discussing me and my condition, staring at me, sometimes laughing. This no longer shocks me in China. It beats Western alienation and loneliness: these people seem to care.

The most enlightening moment in that corridor is watching an elderly couple, skins stretched ghost-thin across bones. She is very ill. Hunched, spindly, her husband is pulling a thin, worn blanket around her body. She is calming him as he futilely tries to do things for her: bie ku, bie ku, she once said: don’t cry, don’t cry. They are lovely, eerie sounds: bie kuuuu, soothing mother-music.

I lie on the steel tray outside the MRI machine and it pulls me into its tomb. The walls close. Outside the tomb a nurse holds my ankle. Please don’t let go. No warning when the loud GUH GUH GUH magnetic noises start. I have learned some meditation: I count from forty backwards, focusing on my breathing. The image of Marion, now chopping carrots. Sit down, Marion, and smile. Just wait for me to get home. Make her smile expectantly. Smile. Sit down.

What amazes me is that in the room next to mine men in white suits are sitting before computer screens showing my brain in different colours, but they cannot see what my mind can see: Marion wiping her eyes.

It’s silent again, a cave. Don’t let go of my ankle. Then noises again – no warning — like a stuck CD playing techno-crap: DUH DUH DUH, the frozen note of an electrical guitar and drum over and over. Breathe deeply. Marion is washing the potatoes; she is smiling. I’m coming home. The sounds cease. The hiss of silence and my ears, which are whistling like kettles on the boil. The metal tray starts to slide out the tomb. “Lazarus, come forth!” I hear from an old, long-abandoned religion.

I am left alone again. I am the only foreigner; someone talk to me. Instead, they stare. Then I am taken to an office and the E&T doctor comes in, another woman and she enthuses, ‘No serious. No serious.’ She smiles at me. ‘Look at me!‘ she commands, deep black oriental eyes piercing and consoling. ‘No serious!’ I hold her hand, which she gladly offers me. She has seen the little boy I have become again.

It was not just my imagination or the fear of death that freaked me. It was having no one to talk to in my language, to make me feel connected. Those awful moments walking up and down the corridor waiting for my turn on the MRI: GUH GUH GUH, looking at all those thin, Oriental faces, knowing my death would make no shred of difference. And should it?

After a battery of ear tests I am given several packets of medicine for “vertigo-calming” and a middle ear infection (after first visiting the cash desk). I am blown away by the Chinese hospital’s rigorous scrutiny of my shenti, my health. I step outside and want to laugh. The leaves twitch off the plane trees, golden and russet, yielding with a sigh, twinkling to the ground.

If the results had been different, how would I have seen those leaves? This question has stayed with me for weeks. I ask the question not so much in fear, but in awe.