Eric's Beijing Diary

Cut my head open yesterday. We had a faculty outing to a resort area north of Beijing. I had just come off the water slide on a tube. When I rolled off the tube into the water, my head hit the edge of one of the steps. When I got out of the pool, someone noticed that my head was bleeding, so they took me to a first aid area, where they poured some peroxide and alcohol on the cut, and also put some powder--some kind of TCM stuff. The bleeding stopped almost immediately. They assigned a student to help me go to the clinic to get a shot after we got back.

By the time we got back to the campus, it was getting late, and I remembered that I had gotten a tetanus shot before coming to China. I couldn't see the cut myself, but it wasn't bleeding, and people who looked at it didn't seem to think it was too bad. So I told them I would probably be alright. When I got home, I decided to have a look at the wound. Since I could not view it directly because it was on the top of my head, I held my camera behind my head and took a picture of it, then put the jpeg on my computer and blew it up so that I could examine the wound. Looked like a nasty gash, so I felt along the cut with my fingers and noticed that the cut itself was sticky. Not good. I called Wang Lihua and told her that I had an open wound and it really should be sutured. Fortunately, she was still in the office, so I went back there and she took me to the emergency room at the Peking University Health Sciences Center right across College Road from the east gate of my university.

The young ER doctor looked at me and sent me to the CT room. I really didn't think that was necessary, because I had no symptoms of a concussion. Not only that, but if I had hit my head on that sharp edge hard enough to have a concussion, the cut would have been a lot deeper than it was. But procedures are procedures, so I got on the table and let them slide me into the doughnut. I have no idea how to read those things--don't know what brain damage is supposed to look like, so I couldn't say anything for good or ill, but apparently there wasn't anything that concerned them too much, so the doctor took me into a small operating room and stitched me up.