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Heidi, a Chinese friend of ours, came into work today with a bit of a cold.  She wasn’t feeling good, I don’t doubt that, but she wasn’t terribly sick.  A bit of a runny nose and a sore throat were the bulk of her concerns, but she decided to play it safe and make a quick trip to the hospital. When I found her at her desk today she had a tissue in her hand and 6 small boxes neatly stacked beside her.

“What’s that?” I asked her, pointing to the six boxes.

“My Chinese medicine that I need to take because I am sick” she told me.

I figured she was pulling my leg a bit, because medicine in America usually comes in one bottle or a small packet, but these six boxes made a stack higher than her textbooks.  “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, really, this is my medicine.  I have to take each of these a couple times a day“  she said matter-of-factly.

I asked her to pull them out so that I could look and while doing so had her explain how many of each she had to take, how many times a day.  When we added everything together I was shocked to find that her doctor, upon realizing she had a minor head cold, was asking her to take 31 pills per day, plus a liquid cold medicine! And these were no run-of-the-mill small pills, some of these were monstrous pills that would make you feel like you were swallowing an iPod Shuffle.  If she didn’t already have a sore throat I’d say that all the pill swallowing she’s going to have to do for the next week might have done the trick.

So for all of you who question why we bring our own medicine from America with us here to Xinjiang, why we refuse to see a doctor here unless absolutely necessary, or why we will immediately be booking a plane ticket home if we ever find out we’re pregnant, I offer you this story.  I prefer to fight my sickness, not flush it with pills.