Saturday, June 14, 2008

Last months in Hong Kong

So poor mum had to amuse herself most of her holiday, only seeing me the day she was leaving! Clement's next 'inducting us into Chinese culture' meal outing was overdue, so he escorted all 3 of us to a nearby Dim Dun cafe and we nibbled a huge and shockingly cheap assortment - most were yummy. But they didn't do my faves, the crispy coated turnip ones that look like cockroaches. Mum loved it I think, and got off to her plane OK.

Dim sun in hong kong
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.


Oh incase I have never said it - all HK cafes etc, you order (either at a booth or to a waitress) and your order slip is left on your table with an illegible total, to be added to if you ask for anything else. Either its all delivered to you or you go and collect it; utensils are either in an end drawer under your table or you collect them. And you get up with your slip to pay at the end. Works well, no hanging about!

Its really monsoon/ typhoon season now, hot and steamy and horrible. I stayed indoors in our new room unless I had a medical appointment or work.

We had a special advisory interview to discuss Downs Syndrome testing, and opted for the detailed scan (something to do with measuring the babie's neck as an indicator of the condition) first. Very uncomfortable experience, with a public Doctor who spent the whole time muttering in Cantonese and jiggling my belly painfully to try to get the baby to turn the way she wanted it to. A week later the results came in as negative, thank goodness.

We had another visit to the nice private Doc as he actually talks to us like we have a brain, AND gives you pics of the scans. Pete had me convinced it was a girl (I had names sorted and everything) as it was so big and mobile, and this time it was old enough to try to see its 'bits' in the scan. Nothing, nothing, nothing (legs tightly crossed) when all of a sudden it did a star jump, and all 3 of us went- ' WAH!' (traditional local sound of surprise). Definitely NOT a girl! The Doc also did what he called a 4D scan which created a lumpy brown moving image, far harder to work out whats what in, compared to the X-ray like moving ultrasounds. Made the baby look like a deformed ear wax sculpture rather than a flea drawn by Geiger...




The next non-birthday booking I had was at the opening morning of the massive new Arts Centre for the Canadian International School over by Aberdeen. Typically a black rainstorm started over breakfast, and at once half the transport shuts down and everyone mobs the few taxis braving it. Rats. Pete & I staked out different sides and streets. I was a drowned one, frozen and dripping by the time we managed to get one an hour later!!! He paddled off to work in his flipflops, shorts and huge brolly, whilst i shivered and dripped in the taxi in traffic jams. I'd been told I had to paint 6 girls as marble statues, white (as had white dresses) to be the 6 muses posed int he entrance of the new school building with other student's artwork. I'd said, fine, 1 hour each should be more than enough to do limbs & faces. Only to arrive really late, soaked, and to find they were women not girls so a LOT bigger! I ended up getting them to paint the white base on each other, and spending as much time as I could doing the fiddlier faces and all the marbling effects.




As I had said might happen, chinese kids in school bands and dragon/ lion dancing teams kept coming in screaming, or asked what the ghosts were for, as white is a dead colour in their culture. Oh well! And the muse of electronics, clutching a computer mouse (?) was a new one on me - don't recall her in the myths I used to read!
Still they looked good, but I had no time to take any decent pics as the event started earlier than expected so I had to rush away before they stopped me using the lifts to haul my kit out (lift noise interfered with the main stage sound). I wasn't going to haul it all up 18 flights of stairs! So I only took a quick snap of one side of the 100's of traditional congratulation flower bouquets lining the entrance as I left.


A fun day was the RHKYC's Middle Island (where we moor/ Pete mainly used to work) Big Day Out. They wanted a marine biologist to do a lesson on rockpooling and I got hired as thtas part of what I used to teach in Dorest. Hmm....all the rockpools here are tiny, precarious places on the mainland side, and all are scoured clean of anything alive (and therefore edible) all day every day by locals. After a few days searching I said best bet would be if I collected anything remotely interesting to do a show & tell with, then let all the kids loose on the island (nice beach and some life under rocks/ on the docks) with a worksheet I made, full of related quizzes & colouring. I also made sure I knew EXACTLY what the poisonous stinging cone shells looked like! Had a fright when i turned up a big bunch of cowries but they are safe.

Cowries in an HK rockpool
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.



Queue an uncomfy morning of trying not to heave (still getting sickness!) whenever I leant over to look for stuff! I whipped a couple of bailing pots out of some of the clubs dinghys to put things in, and had a heavy book on top of each as they were expert escapologists. But I had a surprisingly respectable haul - a nice big urchin (locals can't collect them off the club dock), assorted molluscs and hermit crabs. And the prize, a very aggressive swimming crab (lacking the warning red eyes of the UK's Velvet Swimmers but just as leary). He easily did the old pencil-snapping trick and needed a metal spoon and a length of perspex to let me turn him over to show how to sex crabs.


The rest of the day the critters sat on a table beside me as I face painted (finally the club hired me for that!!!) so I could answer questions on them and stop excessive pencil snapping. What was very annoying as all the parents wanted to know if they could hire me/ why i hadn't been used by the club before, and I had to say we were leaving in a month! And of course the GM turned up to watch a a kid asked for an impossible face I'd never done/ heard of and bodged a bit...

This was closely followed y the clubs annual staff party. Its all paid for by the members, starting with weeks of karaoke competitions torturing Petes office, as the finalists are chosen to perform at the banquet. All chinese staff start playing a majhong tournament with free booze around lunchtime, so are very merry by 7pm when the rest of us turned up at the banquet venue.


it was supposed to be fancy dress but like last year, the few staff who tried changed into their outfits just before the fashion 'show'. Pete refused to even wear a colourful tshirt of mine; I had a fairly flower power top on but felt to ill to poaint myself like I had meant to. But the new GM turned up in full hippy kit and wig, brilliant! So all of us gweilos (basically most of the management) settled into the 2 last tables left free for us, and the food started. Its the old 1 course every 20 mins, where each course = 1 mouthful. With pints of what Pete had thought was beer but turned out to be fizzy wine! Not that i drank anything exept water. The entertainments went on throughout - the singers, egged on by pissed napkin waving colleagues, and raffles and games. Our table (with no help from us) won the guess the total of all these products game. Then Pete, Johhny and Fleur won the roll-the ping-pong-ball down strings and drop into score pots game too!
They gave that money prize back so a staff team could win it (spurious excuse being they had seen the game being devised and so had practiced beforehand). Also several managers won stuff and money in the raffles but returned them too, which was nice.

It took several hours to get though the courses - we boycotted the sharks fin soup but most were lovely.


That week, after 1 of my million doctors visits, there was another rainstorm so I couldn't get a taxi back home. Despite extreme care and my grippiest rubber soled shoes, I took a flyer on the pavement as I walked home. Scared the life out of me but apart from scraped hands and arms (it was more a rapid ungraceful slide then a flat out fall) it seemed OK. So that scared me into staying indoors unless Pete was around to go out with me, as the streets were nearly always soaking. Poor thing - he'd get back from work late & tired & I'd make him walk me round the block a few times. If nothing else we spotted some interesting shops - dog bootees or nail varnish for your cat, anyone???



A couple of weeks later, Clement, some other instructors and a couple of members Pete had taught to sail invited us for a farewell banquet at the HK Cricket Club. We'd managed the starters - jellyfish, etc (not my favourite but passable - cold crunchy jelly). All very exciting for me after weeks of hospital food and months of nothing but porridge, tuna sarnies and mash for tea! Anyway, just as the really yummy stuff started arriving, I had to rush to the loo. Luckily 1 of the lades came to see if I was OK & I asked her to get Pete so we were rushed off to A&E.
I got seen immediately which was good as it was really scarey, and they could still hear the babies heartbeat so after a while sent me home saying there wasn't much they could do, but I should just stay in bed and come in for an emergency scan the next day. Petes friends were lovely - they turned up at A&E with doggy bags of the meal (unfortunately just after we'd left!) and met Pete outside our hotel to give him those, some music CDs for the baby and a traditional chinese baby present. It made me cry when he ought it up - really sweet, a tiny silver expanding wire bracelet with little bells on it. You put it on babies ankle or wrist, like a rattle.

The emergency scan on Monday couldn't find anything, but said my placenta had jumped to the right place - before the tail of it was low and covering the escape route. as 3 days is a bit fast to move it that much, I wondered if maybe the tail end had ripped off or something. My respect for the public Doctors fell even lower, as despite giving them the letters from the private Doc, his scans, telling them AND the nurses(the student Docs and nurses were having panics trying to find the babies heartbeat when I was in the wards as with it being in the slightly larger right hand uterus, it wasn't near where it should have been), they had no idea I had 2 uterii! I was NOT impressed, considering all the scans and me mentioning it....So I was discharged with 'missed miscarriage' on my notes and told to stay in bed.

More big typhoons - one night, Pete (checking the HK Observatory website every few hours as he had to keep an eye on things incase he needed to cancel sailing lessons the next day) recorded 1300 air-to-ground lightning strikes in 1 HOUR!! One of Petes adult students was laughing her head off as some took the tip off a church steeple outside her shop, and she was convinced there was a terrified sinner in the middle of confessing when it happened!

Sat June 7th there was a HUGE Black-coded rainstorm, that started in the wee hours with rattling thunder that shook buildings more than the earthquake which had devastated China a few weeks back. Then the rains started. Pete got to lie in all day as he had to cancel everything - in a Black code, public transport stops, business's don't open, school kids are kept wherever they are, if its at home or at school, etc. The news was shocking - taxis being pushed backwards down streets by the force of the water, people trying to wade from their cars and ending up swimming, sewers and drains blowing their covers and erupting as 2 story geysers....all this in the city centre! Most of the villages mum and I visited last year were cut off with landlsides and lost all power and water. Mad.

By evening it had died off, and we ventured out to see huge potholes had suddenly appeared in our road, and the chandeleir shops on the corner were all flooded. Pete decided to come with me to my evening booking - face painting 6 ladies for an 'Out of This world' Ball. Their husbands were all going as Men In Black (suits & sunglasses) but the ladies had different coloured ball dresses and wanted alien faces and shoulders to match. This mainly turned into beautiful nothings in co-ordinating colours, with a bit of shimmery scaley effect (sponged through punchinella) to give an alien skin background, and a few stars and loads of glitter. I didn't realise they wanted me to do their fake lashes too - fiddly things, hate them. But they looked fab and off they went.



The thing that we saw on the way home from the taxi that really brought the force of the rainfall to life, was a row of garages. Not many people in HK have the space or money for cars, let alone space in their flat block to store them, so you often see small single rows of garages along quieter roads. This road was curling around the contours of the Peak Mountain about 1/2 way down (as in higher than the 50 storey tower blocks in Central). Somehow the water had filled the garages to their roofs, and as we passed, water was gushing out of one as a crew from Porsche winched out a Porsche soft top with water gushing from all its doors. There was a team and van from Ferarri waiting their turn too! Wow!...


My last kids party was sweet, held in the ice rink of the Aberdeen Marina Club - that place has a block with whole floors devoted to kids - 1 was all motor sports, from remte control cars to mini-go-karts, etc....

Petes bunch had another go at giving him a leaving do but it was the evening after the last kids party and he forgot to tell me, so I'd gone to bed. Sounds just as well - he loved it (beer was involved this time) but said it was in the oldest banquet house in HK, very very noisy with locals, etc.
He was kind enough to bring me back a doggy bag of the chicken but nearly got a slap when I saw the perfectly dissected chicken head included!


We had our 1st & last hi-res scan at the public hospital, to see if they could spot any deformities etc in the babies organs which are likely due to my high sugars.(I quite like the name Finlay even tho cousin Johnny just named his wee one Finn!). All seems OK, we counted the proper fingers & toes (tho that doesn't mean they will all be right - could be fused etc). Pete decided baby looked more like a roast chicken now, tho at the length of a hand maybe its more like the wee song birds we got fed with grandad's school boys in France when I was a kid. What surprised me was the doctor describing the poor wee lads tackle as 'looking like a Christmas tree'. !!!!
Posted by at 39 comments:

Surprise Surprise...and more of the hated HK hospitals

Hmm, well I think I mentioned about the cold/ being ill keeping me bundled up in sleeping bags with the cat a lot, very sleepy all the time.
Well, for various reasons around the start of April we got a test and it was positive! It was funny as i'd gone alone to the private Canossa hospital (you pay & get seen immediately) and just sat there in floods with a tiny wee nun patting me when they told me. Pete had to come get me (after a sudden sit-down when his knees went after I rang him)!

The 1st scan was a shock as it turns out aside from being 'old' and diabetic, I have double the normal of female internal bits (too small for babies)so am on the high risk pregnancy list for a 3rd reason. Whoops. At least it explains why we didn't guess before.


Anyway it was very cool to see the inch long squiggler and hear its wee heart. We got to see this all straight away by going to a very nice (and pricey!) private doc. Tho it sounds as if if I have the baby here there is no point paying the cost of a small house in the UK to stay private, as with all problems I would definitely get transferred to the public hospital where all abnormal cases go ANYWAY! ho hum.



So, the reasons for me thinking the boat was being especially rough and wondering why a few weeks of not doing much had made me so fat were explained!!!

What with it starting to get hot, being rough and me having about 4 early doctors appointments a week (before the ferry started), we decided to start looking for a flat. I told all the agents our budget, and that we wanted a proper bathroom (had enough of the chinese style aged toilet cubicle with a hose on the wall and a hole drain in the floor on Lamma) and a proper kitchen, preferably all not grotty.
Wow, what an education! I suppose most flats I have been to have been the millionaires ones - any with more 'normal' lives held their kids parties at venues. Also, we are realising the reason we have not been to anyones houses is its just NOT DONE - you meet up out in cafes or clubs where there is space & facilities, and only the rich have entertaining space at home. Well, I picked all the slightly LESS crowded/ vaguely nicer looking places I knew to go see. Um...
So I hadn't realised how SMALL flats really were! Most 2 bedrooms had 1 with a big wardrobe (only storeage in whole flat) and a built in bed which was too short for me but filled the entire room.

hmm. I then added in they MUST have a lift - with a baby on the way I was not going to be climbing up to 15 floors!!! We finally found a nice but tiny flat (as in 2nd bedroom wouldn't fit even the length of a single, and the kicthen was the usual cupboard size but at least looked OK) in the far north-east of Hong Kong Island. New & beautifully decorated, even with some fairly nice furniture! It was an odd very tall very skinny development, so we'd have had windows on 3 of 4 sides (the 4th was the lift shaft) which I expect means it would be roasting in the sun all day. And it was in a very chinese city area - all fish markets - not that that bother me! But, wow, the price - over our budget, over 2000UK a month! But it was the only thing we saw we remotely liked. well, we went home to think it over, when Pete suddenly turned round and pointed out we'd always planned to be living the 'Goode Life' if we had kids, in our wee eco-house somewhere rural. Which is NOT the case in hong Kong - no gardens, pollution so bad they keep school kids in half their playtimes.... so complete change of plan, we would go back to the UK if Sue said it was OK to crash at the farm till we got sorted!


So, back to the boat. Then, as its now the season, warning of a bad typhoon coming in - and boy was it windy & bumpy! So the next day I started a mad hunt for a serviced apartment or room we could rent for a couple of months. Nightmare...nothing free and hotel rooms all around 400UK a night in the city. I insisted on being on HK island, near taxi/ transport incase of any baby problems and because of my by now 5 times a week clinic visits. In the end Pete joined me and after a last ditch effort begging for help from the Tourist office, we found Regency Heights, near the central library by Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, with 1 room free. Again pricey, but nice - like a big white hotel room with a sofa, huge shower, fridge & microwave. And tv. And A/C - luxury! Culture shock! I was cold, wet and ill so basically sulked until Pete signed for it. Good job we did - he left just before the start of a Black rainstorm (worst code they have here) to get emergency clothes etc from the boat. Then we sat guiltily in a nice, still, dry bed whilst the thunder & lightning got going, worrying about the cat (no pets allowed so she stayed on board).

The day after, the Saturday, the storm died a bit so Pete drove Naughty Boy around to Aberdeen typhoon shelter before the main storm hit. I was terrified - we were getting chased by huge gusts of sea water whipped up by the wind! I had to do a party at Aberdeen Marina club, and keeping my outfit in bags, changed when I got there, soaked. Luckily the kids birthday had been moved up into a spare ballroom, as when I arrived the gazebos were busily blowing into the pool.
As it was all doors and windows were covered in big X's of tape, like you see in films of the Blitz, as the last typhoon many of them shattered from pressure drops and wind strength! All a bit scarey.... I waded back to the boat with the help of the last brave sampan driver, who luckily waited to collect Pete & I so we could grab a taxi back to our room. The cat was freaked by the new surroundings but had never been very bothered by extreme weather, so she stayed onboard.


The next week I tried to go see the cat every day to feed and cuddle her, but my morning sickness got so bad some days I stayed in bed and other times I'd get onto the boat just to lie on deck, hang over the edge and be ill! She was moulting insanely now it was finally warming up so the whole boat was getting fluffy and I got too hot to send much time packing. So it became Petes job and he dropped to every 2 or 3 days - but Domino still seemed fine, poor wee soul. By then he'd handed in his notice and we were advertising for a home for the cat and trying to sell the 2 boats. So, I got into the luxury of all day inetrnetting in my underwear, whilst being seraenaded by the girls brass band (and accompanying flag twirlers) from the convent school I could see out my window accross the road.


mum arrived and Pete slept most nights back on the boat if it wasn't stormy, so Mum & I had the bed. Not that I slept much, feeling ill and having lots of hypos all night! Poor mum didn't see much except the Tin Hau temple around the corner from us

Tin Hau temple, Hong Kong
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.

and the inside of 3 different hospitals her first week. The 2nd week, the 1st time I got seen by a public obstetrician, I was ordered against my will into the public ward as she thought my daibetc control was bad. I was mad - my original diabetic specialist, dietician, AND the private Obs/ gyn had thought I was Ok and were working to sort my sugars out with me at home.


Thus began 3 days of them taking blood from me every 2 hours, which i HATE as my elbows kill and as its a teaching hospital some of them really gouged my veins! After that they just copied down my own blood test results, so i started asking if I could go home. i hated the food, especially the fish congee slime at breakfast, and was so ill I wasn't eating much anyway. Also the lack of sleep from screaming babies/ labouring women and chattering staff did not help. Pete & mum came in 1 night for their whole 2 hours visiting (maximum allowed, 6pm every night - I was so bored I read 16 books in 1 week), found me in tears (had been all day, tired & depressed) and finally got me a night's leave. After that I was allowed home every few days overnight. But I hated it - the staff were generally lovely, and the ward bright & pleasant enough, but they treated me and most women like idiots. Despite being checked by the diabetic nurse, soemone decided I was not allowed to do my own injections, and also needed to have a professor tell them the dose I should have before every jab, based on my sugar results. Which meant instead of having sliding scale (ie if sugars are 10, inject 122, if 6, inject 8 etc) I had to wait up to 40 mins for an answer so the food was even less appetising by then. When morning sickness finally died don a bit I was so hungry I kept waking up whenever I fell asleep (I still have to set alarms to get up and test sugars every night). And the tiny chinese lady next to me was on the same diet as me despite being about 1/3 my body size. Hmmm......


There was 1 other western lady in for 2 nights, and all the staff and other mums were in shock at how 'huge' her 7lb baby was. Mum was in shock at how tiny all the chinese babies were - 5lb seems the biggest! I was getting wound up by the seemingly Victorian attitude t men - several dads waiting in the outside room were not even told, let alone allowed in to see, the birth. And 1 got thrown out for taking a photo of his newborn in the privavcy of their bed curtain cubicle!!! I was allowed out for a couple of 2 hour parties but not allowed to let anything pass my lips 9food/ drink). From what parents said, private hospitals are much les 'chinese' towards men...but i hope the UK is better!


The final straw a week later was me asking all day to be discharged and finally seeing a Doctor asking why I had ASKED to be let in. Um, I asked NOT to be admitted! Then she said my sugars were better when I was at home (YES as I'm allowed to get out of bed - I got glared at if I did more than 12 turns round the ward, but my legs were dying for exercise). And I slept better/ looked better when I'd been home. Yes. And my insulin levels were probably more sited to me when before I'd been admitted than after all the mucking around - my sugars were still up & down and all over the place in hospital! Ok, so can I go home then please? And she said NO!!!! Go figure.

luckily Pete arrived then and with the pair of us insisting I was finally released against their will. The only thing i gained from my stay was a lot of stress and constipation - which went as soon as I could get fresh fruit again.




I saw my own dietician the day after and she was not impressed that I had last 1 stone in the 6 weeks since she saw me the day after we found out......

Still, happier. Took 3 days for my shoulders to relax. Relif!
Posted by at 1 comment:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)