Now we walk through various streets and buildings and corridors until we arrive in an entrance hall where people have to register and pay the basic fee – no: where other people have to, for we only cross it (which is hard enough, for hundreds of people are standing, waiting, pushing) and then squeeze into one of the closest elevators nearby.
Upstairs we find a door before which a guard is standing. On the door there is written clearly and readably (in even for me readable and perfectly understandable Chinese characters) that there is no entry. But after exchanging a few friendly words with the electrician the guard yet allows us to enter.
Our friend the electrician leads us along sickrooms to a consulting room, equipped with four physicians and six nurses. He addresses a doctor who seems to be the boss here, one Mr. Song DeLian. But the other doctors and nurses as well as our friend the electrician call him “Da Song”.
The physician examines my leg, murmurs, wrinkles his brow, asks me where I had gotten that from, and I explain to him in my crude Chinese what had happened. “Didn’t I meet you just a few weeks ago?” he suddenly asks. “In Xia Sha Cun, my native village? Didn’t you photograph there?” And indeed, that is true, but how did he perceive and recognise me?
He had seen me from the corner of his eye, walking around and photographing people who were playing cards or majiang. That does not happen every day, he says, and very rarely foreigners come to his village. We talk a while (as far as my Chinese allows) about the “village”, his parents, his origin.
And after a few minutes he decides that I should get an ultrasonic and an x-ray examination. For that, we have to enter the proper departments and pay in advance. First, the ultrasonics. We arrive on a floor where several dozens of people are standing, waiting, pushing and desiring to deliver payment. Well, that can take a lot of time.… but not with my driver’s friend, the electrician. I handle to him the money, he approaches the cash-counter from aside and chatters to the “nurse” through the discontinuous glass screen. This “foreign guy” (by that he means me) got problems, he must get help, that much I understand.
Suggestively, he reaches my money through the gap in the glass. Two or three patients later he has made it. We gained twenty minutes or so.
The ultrasonic examination is not very spectacular. The result reads “blood bulge”, if I interpret that correctly. I know those characters. That is a blister in which blood has accumulated, in other words, an impressively huge haematoma. It is quite hard, not as soft as the other swelling at the elbow that I suffered from some weeks ago.
Next comes the x-raying. We get one floor further and find it thronged with people. Here it will never be my turn. But our electrician squeezes himself through to the counter, and at once things start to look very different. He seems to know the fellow at the counter quite well; they chat, my money for paying the x-ray examination vanishes behind the glass screen at once, and then he tells me that I should not wait here but return to the entrance hall and leave it towards the left where I shall wait before the door. We do so. This door is locked. He vanishes.
After a few minutes the door opens from the inside. Lo and behold! there is our electrician, smiling. How did he do that?
Now I am inside the ultra-modern x-ray department, let us say: stepping from behind right into the centre. Each room that I can see at passing it by on the corridor is cramped full of the most recent devices. We enter a room in which the x-ray physician is monitoring everything. Someone is lying on the examination table, and of course we can hardly send him down from there (though our electrician seems to ponder even that). But just after the examination that was already taking place is finished it is suddenly my turn. And I do have a bad conscious, for outside there are more than 100 people waiting, and with the aid of the electrician I have just overrun them from the rear.…