Once again the suspicious-looking lump on my skin is no big deal and can be easily frozen off. That’s a relief. And it turns out the skin department of Chaoyang Hospital is just as good as its counterpart at the Air Force General Hospital. And cheaper. All up it cost seventeen kuai and five mao to see a specialist and get the lump dealt with. You read that right. 17.5. Pretty good, huh? And they used good old fashioned liquid nitrogen, which is much, much less painful than that horrible electric zappy thing they used at the Air Force General Hospital. So all round, it was a surprisingly good trip to the hospital.
That’s one good thing about living in Beijing. It’s reasonably easy to get reasonably decent medical treatment. Can’t say the same for the rest of China, although I suspect cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou are on a par with Beijing, a friend of mine got pretty good care in Taiyuan, and I had a good experience up in Dalian with a local GP fixing up the worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had.
And yes, I know I’m overly paranoid about my skin and any mysterious lumps, bumps, moles, freckles or anything else that appears on it, but I have fair skin and I’m from New Zealand. I’d much rather be paranoid and get anything suspicious checked out and dealt with as early as possible than sit around pretending nothing’s wrong and it’ll go away- with the obvious result.
I was interested to see a UV lab in the skin department, though. It is, after all, excess exposure to ultraviolet radiation that puts me at such an absurdly high risk of developing skin cancer. Still, a little poison is often a good thing in the right time and place.
I was also interested to see that the UV was referred to as 黑光 in Chinese. I thought 紫外线 was the more normal word. But I guess, just as in English, different circumstances call for different words. I mean, those two words look like more or less direct translations of the English words, which are also used in different circumstances for what is more or less the same thing.
Anyway, the main lump was too big to freeze off in one go, so I have to go back in two weeks time for them to finish it off. But it’s all good. The lump was just a wart, caused by a virus, easy to deal with, nothing to worry about.
At least it wasn’t malignant ‘cos the next thing you know they’re explaining that they need to snick your head off as well. To save you, of course.
The said it ws only a wart, even though it didn’t look like any wart either lzh or I had seen. Anyway, I’ve never heard of a malignant wart. Good job it wasn’t a malignant wart, too, I kinda like my head just where it is. Weird experience, though. I spent more time in the office than any of the patients before me cos the doctors wanted to chat about everything. Took them all of 30 seconds to diagnose and prescribe the treatment, but they were so keen to chat it was quite some time before I was allowed upstairs to have liquid nitrogen applied to my back.