Elizabeth’s MS Blog

05/05/08

May 5th, 2008

Happy birthday, Rob. Will have to wish you a HB tomorrow…see below. Rosie’s birthday was yesterday. Could you give her a belated treat, Dav, as Richard has not been able to tell you!!!!

It has been quiet over the chinese May day holidays, except for the fireworks which kept going off in various places visible from our 20th floor window.  Did a ‘bit’ of shopping. Found an ATM machine in the Supermarket to pay for it. There is a button on it for ‘English’, and you put your card and pin in, and, lo and behold, chinese money comes out. Great!

Had another stem cell LP yesterday. It went OK and feeling OK this morning. Chatted with a USA couple, Butch and Alice, where Alice has MS. They have gone down similar routes to us but no luck so far. We are all hoping for stem cell miracles. Told that the Beike stem cell activities are blessed at the Chinese Government level i.e. in suitable hospitals anywhere in China.

Learned yesterday that we are having to go to Haikou for my Bone Marrow extract and stem cell culitivation. They were trying to start to do this here, and got the OK to do it, but, in testing, one of the machines used is not working properly. As it takes 7 days to cultivate the stem cells from bone marrow, we cannot wait until things get fixed up here to catch our going home flight…hence Haikou. Hoping our luggage has not grown too much!!

Thus we had to work out how to say goodbye to all the super staff , nurses and our room cleaners here. Who to give something to individuallly and who collectively. So we finally worked it out with a big cake, chocolates, bottles of booze and envelopes.

Hard to leave our clean, friendly and sociable environment, with the super staff. Would have much preferred to stay in our  nice room with a great view and wander down to the SM each day. Said goodbye with lots of photos taken by nurses and taking emafrom fellow sufferers.

Journey to Haikou with wheelchairs went OK until got off the plane in Haikou. Last off as usual. Helped down the steps, with the usual male chinese offering of his back and cling on round his neck. Again I declined. The bus to take us to the terminal had decided to park 50 metres away. Everyone else was sitting on the bus waiting for me, and the bus was not capable/allowed to drive close to the plane. I thus, in full view of the bus passengers, had to race across the intervening space. This I managed, with a little help on either side, without stopping. Well done!! The passengers seated by the door were cleared out by the air hostess and Richard grudgingly accepted a seat beside me. Well, he is getting on a bit.

Arrived at the hospital at about 10.30 after a tiring day, well sweated up in the humid tropical atmosphere. Some like it hot, I don’t. Needless to say, our new room was not quite up to the standard of our old one. The mattress was as hard as iron, there were 2 hard chairs in the room( I didn’t want to spend the next 9 days just lying on the bed), there was no table to use for eating or laying stuff on, and the shower floor was bare and slippy, and how many mossies were there, just waiting to eat me up. I must admit, we should have been flown down earlier in the day. The staff produced a softer mattress, we put down a towel on the floor in the shower, and finally got to bed at 1.30. I’m afraid this was not my finest couple of hours. BUT…the aircon is blissful.

Entry Filed under: ms,Uncategorized