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Week 8: 5/22/05

Hello Friends and Family,

So this week is going to be short and sweet...

Fever Dreams

This week was all about being sick for us. Nathan started it off with a late night visit to the bathroom and then appearing in our room saying he couldn't pull his pj's back on. I reached down to help and the inside of my wrist touched his belly and I was nearly scalded as he was burning up. The ear thermometer registered 104.5, so we loaded him up with Tylenol and Motrin and water and sent him back to bed. A few hours later he made a second trip to our room, just in time for us to steer him towards the toilet where he threw up. The next morning I had to figure out how to tell the school bus company not to pick Nathan up (amazingly they are one of the only places I haven't been able to find an English speaker!) and called the school to let them know not to expect Nathan. Then we called the pediatrician's office for an inaugural visit. This doctor was recommended by a couple of the other Disney families, and we got in right away so that's a plus in my book.

Getting there was crazy, I brought the stroller to help Ben stay in one place, but Nathan was like a melting hot string of cheese, requiring me to carry him while trying to keep his long limbs wrapped around me as I tried to navigate the busy lunchtime sidewalk in the heart of Hong Kong Island. Somewhere along the way, I managed to lose the key to our house and a beloved toy (the toy easily replaceable but still a pain, the key an extremely expensive loss as they have to re-key our flat). At least I retained my sanity and didn't lose the children! The waiting room was filled with every imaginable toy you can find at a toy store, yet my boys managed to fight over just one, a dirty broken car that Ben called a train and indignant Nathan insisted on correcting at the top of his lungs. The wait was stretching, so the extremely helpful nurses turned on the television to a children's program on a Cantonese station. We watched a little boy and his mom go to the grocery store and practice their English, and then the show started to just get weird when we were treated to the dad's day at work where he was dissecting a furry animal, and he was practicing his English, pointing out and saying the names of the internal organs "this is the heart", "here are the lungs". By this time there were a couple of other families waiting and we all sat there staring at the television with our mouths slightly open, and our stomachs slightly turning at the quick segue from delicious food at the market to the lifeless intestines of what could have been someone's furry pet. One mom who arrived in Hong Kong the day before looked at me and asked if we lived here. I said yes. She asked if this was what all the children's programming was like. I said I had no idea! We aren't big TV watchers, but I sure hope it's not all like this! Finally we were called in to the exam room and told it would be just a few more minutes, the doctor was with another patient, a newborn baby with a heart defect and it was taking longer than expected. The door to our room was open, so I saw the family that shuffled out of the other room, the mom, clutching her tiny baby, the dad clutching the mom, a set of grim faced grandparents clutching one another, a tissue in grandma's fist. I recognized them the way you recognize your own face in the mirror... parents of a baby with a heart problem... the look on their faces a nauseating mix of fear and terror, love and hope. Then we finally met Dr. Leung. Trained in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and practicing in Hong Kong, he specializes in children with heart problems and wears a sassy bow tie and mustache. He examined Nathan from head to toe, proclaimed his ailment to be a virus and was happy to hear we had brought a medicine cabinet full of drugs with us from the U.S. He advised us to give Nathan Motrin every 6-8 hours, and shook his head and said he wished they sold it here in Hong Kong. As a parting shot, he recommended lots of fluids and to keep the boys separated, lest Benjamin contract the same infection. Oh sure, I thought, as on the taxi ride home Nathan sat limply against the door while little brother Ben found that Nathan was not resistant at all to Ben snuggling right up into Nathan's armpit, cooing soft baby words of love and admiration for his sick sibling. There's no way to keep these two separated!

For three days we kept Nathan home from school, and then it was my turn to get sick. Out of nowhere I got mowed down by a fever that left all the colors too vivid to stare at and all the noises too loud to handle. I don't remember much except that we had seen the latest Star Wars here at a movie theater, and I had these crazy Star Wars themed dreams where the six movies kept getting out of order and it was up to me to get them back in sequence or the galaxy would be destroyed. And on top of that, an Australian pop star named Kylie Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer and had surgery the same week. Being extremely popular here in Hong Kong (although I've never heard of her) she was front page news almost every day. So late at night as my temperature rose, Kylie's name kept going through my mind over and over. It was maddening! Like an annoying song stuck in my head, all I could think was "Kylie Minogue, Kylie Minogue". I felt like the scene from The Aviator where Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes keeps repeating a phrase over and over, only this was in my head so I couldn't even put my hand over my mouth and stop the stream... Later I discovered that Kylie Minogue became famous for a song called "Can't get you out of my head". I know the feeling.

N for Night

When Mike started feeling a little achy and Nathan's cough worsened, I knew it was time for all of us to go see a doctor. We ended up back at the hospital where Mike had been admitted a couple of weeks before. They have a daytime clinic where you don't need an appointment, so we went and sat with all the other coughing people and waited our turn. My temperature was still pretty high, so the doctor said he'd look at me first. Strangely enough, it was the same doctor that had taken care of Mike while he was hospitalized. Or so we thought. We made small talk and said, "Nice to see you again" and he nodded and said, no, he'd never seen us before. I thought that was interesting, since believe me, this doctor is pretty unique, very dark skin, dark curly hair, both on his head and sticking straight out his ears, and huge hands. He stands out. And the name on his name tag, Dr. Fernando, was the same name on the business card I had in my wallet. Then he laughed and said we'd seen his identical twin brother, Noel. His name was Merlin. He said we could count on seeing Noel at night (think N for Noel/Night) and him in the morning (M for Merlin/Morning). I was tripping between cold medicine and my fever, so it was a little too much for me to handle. We all got put on some drugs I've never heard of before. Not antibiotics since what we had was viral. I researched one of the drugs called Tamiflu on the internet. It had a little video of influenza cells being inhibited from destroying other cells. I was really tripping at that point, watching this cartoon of the human body fight off germs! I ran down the list of side effects and it said the most common was nausea and vomiting. Now please know this about me... like everyone else in the history of mankind, I don't like getting sick. But if I could chose any illness over another, the very last thing on my list would be to have nausea and vomiting. I had wicked morning sickness with Nathan, all nine months of my pregnancy, throwing up on average 8 times in every 24 hour period. Severely allergic to the most common (and safe for pregnant women) anti-nausea drug on the market today, my only recourse was to have a weekly (or more) trip to the hospital to get an IV to be rehydrated. I lost 25 pounds during my pregnancy, walking out of the hospital weighing less than I did before I got pregnant, much to my friends' envy. I fought throwing up with all my strength, which admittedly, was pretty weak from having lost all that weight, and I still would rather do anything than throw up, fighting it with all I have. I'll take a case of strep throat for a week over throwing up just one time. So guess what? Of the four of us who were all taking Tamiflu, guess which one of us were among the 16% of patients reporting nausea and vomiting as a side effect? Bingo. Me. All night long I'd lay in bed, feverish and delirious, chanting No God, please don't let me throw up (and then in my head I'd chant Kylie Minogue, Kylie Minogue). Michael amazingly took an unprecedented two full days off of work (or rather he worked from home) to see to it that I laid in bed and got better without "help" from the children. I only made it three days on the medicine and then stopped taking it, but it took almost three more days for it to get out of my system so the nausea could subside. Holy cow, what a total nightmare! So to everyone who wrote and then wondered why you didn't hear back from us, now you know why!

On Sunday, since both Mike and Nathan were relatively healthy, they had a "date" at the local theme park on the south side of the Island called Ocean Park. Divided into two sections, one full of rides, the other full of marine life exhibits, it's a fun way to spend the day. Season passes were purchased for all of us, so I'm looking forward to going back. The pictures Mike took were amazing, making me sad I was too sick to enjoy what was surely the most clear and beautiful day in Hong Kong all year long.

Playing Catch Up

It's amazing what taking just a few days off of your normal routine does. We have the tiniest washer/dryer on the planet... if the four of us all stripped down and put the clothes we are wearing right now in a pile, that would equal three to four loads of laundry. If you don't do the laundry four days in a row, you just got behind by at least 14 loads of laundry. One load of laundry takes about 3.5 hours to complete. There aren't enough hours in one day to catch us up to having more clean clothes than dirty ones. Our washer/dryer machine is in our kitchen, and it's very loud. Adding to the noise pollution is our refrigerator which has been given a matter of days to live. The replacement will be here in about 24 hours, brand new but about 1/3 smaller than the already tiny one we have. Small price to pay for some quiet as right now our current one sounds like a plane forever trying to take off and never quite making it. I don't have any clue what we did to offend all the appliances in our life, but man, they sure have it in for us! Anyway, we are still working on catching up on email and the very overdue website (we just entered week 10, but are only now sending out week 8). Thank you to those of you who wondered why we were so late, now you know! I hope this finds all of you healthy, happy, and well. If not, you can at least cheer up a little by looking at some photos which will bring a smile to your face.

Happy traveling!

Heather, Michael, Nathan, and Benjamin Chase

Sick Nathan and Snuggly Ben	Darth Vader is just as evil in Chinese!
Ocean Park Cable Cars	Tong Po Chau, a tiny uninhabited island off the south coast of Hong Kong Island, as seen on a really clear day from Ocean Park.
The Highland section of Ocean Park, lots of rides that Nathan is too short to go on. Tiny Ngan Chau Island in the distance.	Nathan made two friends at Ocean Park. Nathan and Mike hung out with this little five year old boy and his dad all day.
Double the trouble, double the fun! Burgers and blueberry shakes at Triple O's.	Here's "our" hospital as seen from our bedroom window. The two long tall buildings are known as the "Chopstick Buildings".