Got Swine?

I’m basically living off congee, apple sauce and honey water right now because I have a flu. On Sunday, I was blowing my nose all over the place and hanging around in bed, watching Adventureland on my iPhone. Then all of a sudden, I get a 101F fever. I thought that Swine Flu was like one of those myths the media tell you to get you to cover your face with a mask. The only people dying from swine flu right now are those kids with diabetes or old women with chronic lung cancer. I think I have chronic fatigue so I could be sleeping in the bed on Sunday then wake up on Monday, only to find out that I’m dead and that the news is announcing my death: “14 year old kid dies of swine flu, has chronic fatigue.”

So at this point, I’m calling my mom to save my life and she goes call my dad, who is taking a nap. My dad eventually wakes up 10 minutes later with a bed head and we all go to this private hospital together. When I get into the hospital, this cleaning lady hands me a mask and tells us to wait in line. There’s a bunch of sick people coughing on the sofa, some people look like they’re dying and some people looking like film stars with big sunglasses and rainbow flip flops.

Thirty minutes later, sitting on the sofa and feeling like crap, the nurse tells us to go to the reception and SIGN IN. I waited 30 minutes just to sign in? Aren’t you supposed to do that stuff, like, when you get in the hospital? Then after the nurse punches our names into the computer, she goes, “Yeah, the line is pretty busy right now, so you’re going to have to wait around 2 hours.” OK so I’m just thinking, if I accidentally get swallowed by an elephant and I’m hanging out in the said elephant’s uterus, she’s just going to make me wait there for 2 hours before they get a doctor to get a butter knife and cut me out of there? And I’m in a private hospital, so isn’t there supposed to be a shorter wait time?

Then an hour later, they call me over to check my temperature. The male nurse says that I have a fever. No duh. He asks questions like whether I’ve been out of the country. Then my dad goes and blurts out stuff like how my school has people with swine flu and my math tutor has swine flu too. I decide to play along and make things seem more serious by saying that I’ve closely “interacted” with these said swine flu diagnosed people. The male nurse makes this serious face, which looks more like a gay face. Then he says that he has to take us to a clean room. And my mom is like “WATS DAT?” and he says it’s basically a room that’s clean. So she’s like OH OK.

When we go into the room, I discover that the clean room is basically a rectangular room with 2 chairs, a rubbish bin that can’t close, a sink and a box of tissue papers. There’s a huge window where nurses can see what you’re up to (darn can’t eat snicker bars in there!) and it feels like you’re fish in a tank. My dad sits on one of the chairs and starts watching House on his iPhone with the speakers on loud (watching House in a clean room is a memorable experience on his part). Thirty minutes later, the nurse comes in with this doctor who looks like a freaking intern. He’s like “So what’s wrong?” and I tell him about the fever, the coughing, sore throat and flu in general. My mom asks what the temperature was when they took it just now. He says that it was 39.6 Celsius. I ask what that is in Fahrenheit, since we use F instead of C and his response was: “I don’t know.”

After a bit of routine check ups he says that there’s a 50% chance that I have swine flu, so he tells us to do the test. Then ANOTHER 30 minutes later, the nurse starts dressing up in her gear - the hairnet, green robe and all that enchilada. Then she comes in with, what looked like a long Q-tip. She says “So I’m going to stick this up your nose, it’s going to hurt.” I’m just like I didn’t intend for my weekend to end up in a chair having a long Q-tip stuck up my nose like that troll in Philosopher’s Stone. She sticks it up both of my noses and it really does hurt, she wasn’t exaggerating or anything. When she took it out, I sneezed about like 10 times and the nurse was laughing. Fml.

She tells us to wait ANOTHER HOUR before the tests come out. After waiting another hour on the sofa, wrapped in a jacket. We get the tests back and it turns out that I’m negative for swine flu. The doctor probably lied about the 50/50 thing since the test costed 400 HKD. I didn’t know whether that was good news at the moment since it was basically a waste of time to begin with. Then the doctor writes me a 2 day sick leave (who gives 2 days sick leave for a possible swine flu patient? I got like a 3 day sick leave once because I was dizzy). Then he tells us to collect the medicine which took another thirty minutes.

Basically, we went in at 6:30 and came out at 10:30 so yeah. A total of 4 hours for nothing. Health care sucks. And yeah I realize how long this blog is and how you’d rather watch Obama talk about health care reform. I’m expecting the zero comments because of people freaking out by the amount of words they have to read and whining “NOO ITS LIKE ENGLISH CLASS ALL OVER AGAIN.”