Actually Finding a Burns Hospital

A week and 3 days after my burn, one of my classmates, Blake, offered to accompany me to the hospital. He got a taxi to come to the back door of the dorm although they are not usually allowed inside the university, I hopped down the stairs and into the cab and we set off. As we pulled out of the university the driver asked where we were to go. I said the name of the hospital from the day before - the one with the microwave for human flesh - but Blake thought that was not a good idea. He then talked with the driver about which other hospitals were okay. There was a burns specific hospital however it was a long way away. In the end the driver said he would take us there anyway.

Eventually we arrived and I was seen rather quickly. They were shocked at the prior treatment and said that it had been treated as a much smaller, less serious burn and that I would need a skin graft. They then debrided the wound, which includes removing all the dead skin and flesh - in this case, skin and flesh that had started to heal incorrectly. This hurt quite a lot. They then washed my wound and dressed it. Again the pain had changed and become more evident so I was a lot more on edge. When everything was done I hopped out to wait for a taxi back home.

I returned two days later. They opened the wrapping and started to wash the wound as before. This time, however, after washing it the first time, they poured alcohol over it to ensure it would not get infected. There was no warning and it was quite painful, perhaps the most painful part of the whole experience. After that they rewrapped it and we talked about healing times. They expected it to take a while - 5 weeks to a few months without a skin graft and only 2 or 3 weeks with a graft.

My parents were still worried about this whole thing and to add to the confusion they were travelling separately in different parts of the world so communications were poor. They were trying to find out if someone could give us an idea of whether I needed a graft or not and how it should be dealt with generally. Our doctor friends in the States and Australia agreed that it was being dealt with well and that it would probably heal without a graft although a graft would speed things up. They thought if they were treating it they would not graft because there were still visible hair follicles in the photos I had sent. This meant the skin had somewhere to start growing from.

I went back to the hospital every two days for a few weeks eventually to find that it was improving rather well so the doctors said I did need not a skin graft. I was, however, still not walking and was hopping everywhere instead. In China they do not give you crutches or wheelchairs unless you really need them. The burns hospital was filled with patients who were hopping around because they had burnt part of their legs or feet.

Because the hospital I was going to now was more burns-oriented, there were more burn victims and everytime I went, I would see young and old with burns more serious than mine. It was also surprising to see that, on ocassion, a woman with child who had been scalded all over and was screaming continously would be ignored and made to wait until the doctor had free time, even if he wasn't dealing with anything particularly urgent at the time.

This is a small library of images from my legs recovery

Spilt Tea

Finding a Burns Hospital

The day after being burnt, I returned to the school hospital. This time, I was just accompanied by a western friend who could only speak some Chinese. This did not turn out to be a problem and the nurse redressed my wound. The next day, I was to redress the wound myself as that part of the hospital would be shut so she gave me the appropriate materials. This also went to plan. The following day, Monday, I returned to the hospital and the same procedure whet forth. At the time she expected me to be healed in about 2 weeks. A few days went passed following the same pattern. On the Thursday of that week however she scowled at my gamy leg and sent me to see a doctor who said I had an infection and that I would need antibiotics. They then redressed my wound and gave me a prescription to take to the drip room, a room full of sick people connected to drips hanging from metal hooks in the ceiling. It went on like this for a few days.

In the meantime, I was not going to the lab as I could not concentrate very well and I was still shaking from the shock. I was eating okay and have a few friends who were eager to take care of me while I was less inclined to walk. To avoid staying in my room all the time I went to a few relaxed places around Hangzhou and went on my first boat ride there. I was so ill at the time that I spent most of the trip sleeping or at least in an immobile state.

After 3 days of penicillin, I decided it might be a good idea to search for a English speaking doctor at a different local hospital. This proved an interesting effort because although when I arrived at the hospital I was was seen to immediately ahead of the other 20 or so people waiting for attention, I was not led to see someone who actually spoke English. Instead I was taken to a doctor experienced in another area who could speak about 10 words of English. He said that the previous hospital had been using a drug that was too weak and gave me a stronger antibiotic. He also prescribed something he called microwave treatment. This involved placing something like a griller near my leg. It then made my leg feel really hot as though it was re-burning it. I think to some degree this is what it was doing but I think the object of the device was to dry the wound. As well as this I was asked to stop walking on that foot. So the hopping began. At any rate it hurt quite a lot and that evening I called people from the lab to ask if they could accompany me the next day to ensure we were all on the same page.

At the same time I had told my parents and started they had contacted a few doctor friends. I had sent a few pictures home and they had been comparing notes. No-one seemed to know anything about this microwave thing but they said medicine in China was older than the most western medicine so perhaps it was quite an effective method. I also heard from the supervisor of one of my friends from UTS that when she she scalded her foot in China a few years ago, she was also given this microwave treatment.

Spilt Tea

Shortly after being moved into Lab 318, I was taken to a prototyping company for a meeting and to check up on some work they were doing for us. After seeing some of their model making spaces, we went into their meeting room and sat down. As is customary in China, they brought tea out to us in disposable clear plastic cups. At the time, I was looking at the furniture and thinking how it was so uniquely Chinese and I was trying to work out some characteristics that could be represented generically.

One of the secretaries (or something like that) came out with the first two cups of tea and placed them on the table. The cup that she put in front of me was a little crushed but I did not react to that. I then considered sliding it over to one of the people sitting further from the door but I did not, I just listened to the Chinese as they talked about they work going on between Lab 318 and this company. I could not understand much as my Chinese was still quite poor at that time so I was listening carefully for any word that I could pick out.

Suddenly there was a sound as the cup of tea in front of me keeled over and spilt its contents on the glass table. The water spilled off the table and down to my left foot which was on the ground directly under the table’s edge. At first I moved quickly to avoid being in the way of the water but my sock was already soaked. I was asked if my foot was okay and I responded that it was not too bad. I calmed myself and decided that the pain was not significant. I have done this in Kung Fu quite a lot so it was not completely new. As I sat I decided that it did not hurt enough to be serious and decided that I could ignore it. I think they offered to let me wash my foot or at least take my shoe off but I did not want to disrupt the meeting and I did not think it was very serious so I just told them it would not be necessary and went back to trying to listen for Chinese words I knew and trying to extract the meaning of their conversation.

As we left I noticed that I was a little more shaky than usual and on the drive home I decided that I should have a proper look at my wound when we got back to the lab. In the car I sent a text message to a friend back at the international dorm saying “tea no foot, pain!” I meant to write “tea on foot…” but the predictive spelling on my phone is not always accurate. After that, we discussed finding apartments in Hangzhou because at the time I was thinking of moving out of the dorms to cheaper accommodation.

When we arrived at the lab I walked in and sat down as quickly as possible. I then removed my shoe and on of the guys from the lab who spoke better than average English came over. He was outraged when he found out that I had been so burnt and not done anything. As I removed my sock I managed to also remove most of the affected skin. The lab members then decided I should go to the school hospital so I gathered my things. They found keys to Ying Fantian’s car and Blake, the boy with good English, drove me there.

The hospital smelt strange and a few people let me go before them in line as they thought my burn looked serious. The doctor agreed that it was not a good idea to have avoided washing it. I then went to a nurse who dressed my wound and told me to return the next day for redressing. My colleagues then drove me home. They had to go back to the lab so they left me at that point.

After settling in to the new pain, the dressing had reminded me of what I was feeling, so I called the friend that I sent the text message to and explained the situation. She went and bought me a few things and then came to my room. One of the things she tried to get me were some flip-flops. However, when she went to a nearby supermarket and asked for the appropriate size, she was laughed at and told that no-one needed shoes that large. She then explained that I was tall and western and then they understood how such a large foot could exist but the still could not help the fact that their shoes were all much smaller. As a band-aid solution, she bought me a pair that were a few sizes too small but still the biggest that were made. We thought I could get some larger ones latter on and the ones she bought were quite cheap. I am actually yet to replace them but that is another matter.

The day went on and we went to a restaurant for dinner, but the food was not that good. At that point I could still walk, just not very fast.

Photo Management Software Lecture

I have been running tutorials and subbing for teachers of CAD and a few other software packages since high school because it is something I love doing. In China, most of the people I worked with were quite good with CAD programs but were interested in photo management packages. At the time I was testing out the Adobe Lightroom Beta and Apple's Aperture and a member of a Photoshop training team, Jiang, asked me to do a guest lecture on these packages and how they can be used.

My role was to demonstrate the use model and then show some quick work flow techniques.

This was an interesting learning experience because in some ways it failed to work as expected. First of all, I was presenting about 2 Apple-only packages to people who had no interest in ever using Apples and secondly I was speaking about photo management packages to a crowd of people interested in image manipulation and generation in Photoshop. These photo management systems are designed for photographers and studios and all the tools that I was talking about were oriented toward that sort of work flow. I think that the talk I gave was dry and perhaps a bit boring but the real problem was that my audience was interested in something quite different.

At the end of it Jiang came up and said, "I guess I expected something else, but that software seems interesting." What I learnt from this is that it is much more important to know what people are looking for than to do a good job. I also learnt that it is a lot harder to listen to someone speak for a long time when you only understand half the words they are using - not that that is a surprise, but it was the first time that I had talked for an hour and then found that most people were still thinking about the beginning.

The Real Introduction to Lab 318

Lab 318 is essentially a commercial design studio based within ZJU and run by members of the design department. It is populated by students from the fourth year of the undergraduate program and masters students, as well as including a number full of time employees. We are made up of a few core teams that generally participate in different kinds of work. However, we often cross pollinate and most people work on at least 2 teams at any one time. The focuses of the teams include electrical, manufacturing, innovation, commercial work and competition work. During different times of my stay I worked on 4 of these teams but spent most of my time in the innovation group. We would often break a major project between the teams to either get multiple outcomes from one brief or to build parallel work flow. Out clients range greatly but during my stay we were gradually moving toward a more innovation centered work flow so we held preference for jobs that would call for this.