The Hong Kong Hospital Authority manages 41 hospitals, of which 14 have Accident and Emergency clinics. All other clinics in Hong Kong are apparently run outside of the hospital system and are structured for routine medical care. As I made my way towards the airport clinic in search of band-aids, I stopped at several news stands and gift shops hoping to find them on my own. At each stop the salesperson was polite, friendly, helpful and eager to point me towards the medical clinic.

The clinic waiting area was much like that of a doctor’s office anywhere in the western world. The receptionist first asked me to have a seat and pointed me towards a wall of chairs. Some magazines in both English and Chinese had been scattered around to ease the waiting time, but I really had no interest in reading at that time. I was the only person in the waiting room. I smiled at the receptionist. She smiled back at me. “Are you ready now?” she asked. What? I looked at her quizzically. “Did you want to be seen?” “Well, yes,” I began, “you see I…” She handed me a form and asked me to fill out the nature of my complaint. “We only cater to departing passengers,” she said. “If you are arriving, you should proceed to the nearest hospital.” “I just need a couple of band-aids. My knees are bleeding.” She looked down at my knees briefly and gave me a smile of pity. “Do you have a boarding pass?” What? “Uh….yes…I do…right here,” I handed it to her and she checked my personal information and began typing it into a computer. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said, “I just need some band-aids, and there don’t seem to be any in the…”

The Doctor came out of the patient area and smiled at me, holding the ends of stethoscope around his neck with both hands, like a boxer holds a towel. “How are we today?” he asked, without waiting for an answer. He took my boarding pass and asked me to follow him. A short well-lit corridor, a small office off to one side filled with medical books, and we quickly entered a patient examination room complete with a stainless steel tabl, medicine cabinets and a cute little Asian nurse straight out of one of my son’s manga novels. “Please sit here,” nurse Cutie said as she stuck a thermometer in my mouth. “I don’t have a temperature,” I protested, taking the thermometer out, “I just need a couple of…” “Do you have a cough?” the doctor asked. A cough? A COUGH?! “No, I just need…” The sound of the doctor putting on latex gloves made me turn to look at him. The gloves were a light reddish color. Strange.

Nurse Cutie put a blood pressure cuff around my arm while she smiled and looked into my eyes with compassion. Doctor Strangegloves began to listen to my chest. “Breathe!” he commanded. I did so. Each time I tried to explain that I just needed to get a couple of…he would move the stethoscope and tell me to breathe. He checked my breathing from the front and from the back. He examined my head for bumps. He looked into my eyes with a small light. Nurse Cutie finished taking my blood pressure and removed the cuff. She then started stroking my arm gently where the cuff had been and telling me that “Everything will be all right.”

In retrospect, I could have been angry. I could have exploded. I could have made a fuss and demanded to have a few band-aids. I just found the whole situation to be so otherworldly, so unreal, that I just decided to ride it out. And nurse Cutie was massaging my arm after all. “How long have you been sick?” Doctor Strangegloves asked. “Just since the broken cart flipped me onto the concrete,” I replied. The doctor and nurse exchanged glances. He looked down at my knees, noticing them for the first time. “You seem to be bleeding,” he said. “I AM bleeding,” I replied calmly. “Ahhh,” he said.

The doctor left the room without a sound and only a slight glance at nurse Cutie. She stopped rubbing my arm and went to assemble a tray. I thought, you have got to be kidding. I watched intently as she placed a small bowl with betadine or iodine or some other orange foul-smelling substance, cotton balls, some gauze, and finally…a few band-aids. She placed the cart on a rolling stand and brought it back over to the table.

She looked at my pants and began to blush, pointing towards my legs. “May I?” I assumed she meant roll up my pants legs. “I can roll them up for you if you prefer,” I offered. She smiled broadly in a wash of relief and said “Yes thank you!” I rolled up my suit pants past the knees while she grimaced and winced sympathetically. “It’s not that bad,” I said. She placed her hand on my arm and looked into my eyes. “Does it hurt much?” she asked. Inside I was laughing hysterically. Outside I smiled and assured her I would live.

If I had ever had a fantasy about a cute sympathetic Asian nurse tending to my wounds in an exotic location, not that I ever did mind you, but if I had…this episode would have crushed it. She was gentle, she was compassionate, she was kind, and she was incredibly, amazingly, unbearably sloooooooow. She spent ten minutes washing the wounds. She wiped up every bit of blood anywhere on my legs. She strategically placed band-aids over the scrapes after conducting what must have been five minutes of preliminary mental measuring and adjustments. Finally she was finished. She rolled my pants legs back down for me and in spite of my anxiousness and agitation, I suddenly felt as though we had reached a new plateau in our patient-nurse inter-cultural relationship. “Are you married?” she asked. What? I mean, WHAT?! “Yes,” I smiled. “Very happily so.” I showed her the ring on my left hand, the +5 Wedding Ring of Protection against cute Asian nurses. She pouted and left the room.

The moment she left, and while I was trying to puzzle through what had happened, the doctor returned. “I’m sorry for the mix-up earlier,” he said. “We thought you had SARS.” I looked at him stunned. He was holding two pieces of paper in his hands, a bill, and my boarding pass. I reached for the boarding pass. He handed me the bill. I did a quick calculation at the current exchange rate and it was…WHAT?…”TWENTY-EIGHT DOLLARS?!!” He gently fanned himself with my boarding pass and waited for me to come to my senses.

“I really don’t think I should have to pay for DOCTOR CONSULTATION and MEDICAL TESTS when all I needed was a band-aid!” He smiled at me. Nurse Cutie came back in and seemed to glare at me with a sort of “Did the time we spent together mean nothing to you?” glare. The receptionist came in with the cash box and a complaint form. “If you are unhappy with the service sir, after you pay and leave Hong Kong, you may fill out this form and send it back to the airport authority,” she said. I looked at the three of them standing there. They had had no patients since the time I arrived. My plane was already boarding. My boarding pass was right there. I would write the complaint form to end all complaint forms. I paid the twenty-eight dollars and left. “Thank you for your business sir,” the receptionist said as I departed.

Only two important parts remain to this tale of woe. First, I went through three security checkpoints without ever being stopped, or questioned, or even scrutinized. Seventy-three year old grandmothers were being pulled from the line for full-body searches and small children were being separated from their parents to have their teddy-bear backpacks searched by men with hands larger than their heads. I was wearing torn blood-stained clothing, was clearly annoyed and disheveled, but no one gave me a second look. Within minutes I was sitting in business class, sipping champagne, talking to my traveling companions and getting the sympathetic ear of a former playboy bunny in the seat in front of me, (don’t ask now…that’s a different story altogether).

Second, I did fill out the complaint form and send it in. Normally I suppose, the officials hope that you will never get around to filling out the forms and actually mailing them, but I was moved to action. I wrote several pages about the faulty cart, the vanishing monks, the helpful security apparatus, my ordeal in the medical clinic and sent it via post. Within six weeks I received an email from the Hong Kong Airport Authority Chief of Security and Investigations. Hong Kong was very sorry for any trouble that I had been caused, it read, but after a lengthy investigation involving the checking of numerous luggage carts, no faulty brakes had been discovered. Thank you for your interest in Hong Kong Airport Safety. There was a break in the email and then it began again. In light of the fact that you endured such mental hardship while traveling here in Hong Kong, we wish to compensate you for your troubles. If you will kindly fill out this complaint form and sign the sworn affidavit below that you will never, ever talk about this incident to anyone, ever, anywhere, we will send you (quick exchange rate conversion) sixty dollars. What? The government of Hong Kong wishes to buy my silence for sixty dollars!? Unbelievable!!

As you can see by this posting I did NOT sign the form. Next time I travel, I’m bringing my own band-aids.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Enroute to Serendib, Life, The Multiverse, Everything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.