Thanksgiving and Christmas Trees

I can't even count how many times I have started an entry saying something like, "It's been way too long. I've been meaning to start writing regular blog entries and I'm starting now!" Well, no promises but I'm going to try. I've been bad about posting pictures of my son online so my family in the US and the UAE can see how he is growing. And boy is he growing! He's more and more independent and can play in his room while I type around the corner on my laptop so that's another reason I can do this. I CAN do this. My sister has an awesome blog where she posts recipes and gorgeous pictures of her daughter and I've enjoyed it so much over the past year and am inspired to try to do the same.

Before I talk about Thanksgiving, let me just update you on Ollie. His favorite breakfast food is eggs. He can easily finish two or three scrambled eggs and since I've begun to wean him 2 weeks ago, he's enjoying a cold glass of milk more as well. He also loves crackers and bread and after talking to others with kids his age, this is the norm. He loves ice cream so every time we go to the grocery store across the street and pass the Coldstone Creamery, he has to go inside and look through the glass at the different colored ice creams and make a little whining sound. Don't worry, Mom, we're not feeding him ice cream all the time but on occasion let him share some with us when it's time for a treat. If we had good ice cream over here, I'd be eating by the gallon for all of my meals which is a good reason that I don't live in the States right now. He loves "The Wheels on the Bus" and "My God is So Big" and he loves it when I pray for him before he goes to bed. We aren't quite sleeping through the night regularly although last week there was one night where he slept through the night. I think I can count on one hand the number of times he has done that and I would only use 2 or 3 of my fingers. I left a pot boiling the bones of a chicken to make some chicken broth and when I got up at 5am this morning to get Ollie some milk, saw that the pot was black and the burner was still on. Amazingly enough, since the fan was on, there was little smoke and the smell of burnt pot stayed confined to the tiny kitchen. Unfortunately the pollution was so bad int he night that that was all I could smell in any of our rooms. Obviously it is time to buy some serious air purifiers. Stat.

So last week was Thanksgiving and our good friends Wes and Kasha invited us over for a vegetarian meal. Wes is a master when it comes to making fake meat and he came through again with a tofurkey. Yes, that's right. He made a "turkey" out of tofu and it was good. Oh so good and healthy! Everything was delicious and I was so full I couldn't even fit any wine although I certainly tried! I ended up just feeling disgusting but I kind of expected that would happen. My contributions to the meal were some sickly sweet sweet potatoes, dry stuffing (I later realized I had used two bottles of sage and no thyme to season it which explains why it was off this year), a pumpkin cream cheesecake with a ginger cookie crust and salted caramel and pumpkin spice cupcakes with cream cheese and maple frosting. Yes, I know. They were good. I will try to find the recipes and post them soon but in the mean time here are some photos. I didn't get a chance to get a photo of the cheesecake once it was cut on plates but it wasn't very pretty anyway as it was too soft, but it tasted good! I swear!

Caramel and Pumpkin Cheesecake

Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes with Maple Cream Cheese Frosting


Anyway, as soon as we had celebrated Thanksgiving, my plan was to put up the Christmas decorations. The decorations are tacky in the Chinese malls and obviously we all live in apartment downtown so there are no houses covered in lights so decorating our apartment is the only way to really feel like it's Christmas sad as that sounds. We had a fake tree from my parents which we used last year but as soon as we had it decorated, I knocked it over and then broke the top of it off. It's a long story, well not really, and it doesn't need to be told here. The main poibnt is that I ruined the tree so we had to throw it out and get a new one. The new one that my husband bought the next day was pricey but it's bigger and nicer although much harder to set up than the last one. Anyway, it's done now. It's beautiful at night and Ollie loves it (probably). So far our cat has been entirely uninterested which is obviously great.

Now for the photos.
Ollie decorating the tree with Baba

This is Ollie and I right after we decorated the first tree. It was perfect...

This is what it looked like without the top part after I had started taking off lights and ornaments.

The final tree all decorated and pretty

Party in Chaoyang Park

Birthday Jess and Cupcakes

I've been meaning to get back to blogging for a while now. My sister has an awesome blog where she posts recipes and photos of food and Lucy. While it's hard to live up to that, I have really wanted to try and do something as well so that my parents can see Ollie grow up over the next year. It's not easy being a family that lives in 3 different countries but luckily we have the internet now and with blogs and video skyping, it doesn't feel quite as far as it would otherwise.

We are on the tail end of an amazing summer in the US and in 11 short days it'll be time to head back to Beijing. I've been in Beijing since 2004 but I'm still struggling to call it home. It sounds cool and exotic to tell people here that I live over there but what I really crave right now is a stable and uneventful life in small town USA, raising Ollie. I'm not looking forward to being back in the real life and having to figure out jobs. It's going to be hard going back to public transportation and people everywhere you look. I'll miss being able to open the front or back door and stepping out onto a patio or grass and looking out over the trees to the lake. I don't care how low the water is- I'd give anything to be able to drive down to the lake and stumble over the rocks and find my way into that water. I wouldn't even care that there were slices of bread floating past me. I want to write about all the fun stuff we've done while in the States but I don't have the energy to do it so I'll post some pictures instead. Enjoy.

Baby is still sick 14 days later and I believe Amcare is to blame.

My 9 month old son had a cough for about 3 days and when it didn't get better, we brought him to Amcare to see a doctor. She listened to his chest and drew some blood and declared it was "fei yan" or pneumonia. She gave us 3 days' worth of cefaclor antibiotics, some Chinese medicine he was to drink and said we could keep giving him small doses of children's cough medicine.

After 3 days we went back to the clinic. The previous doctor was not there but we didn't think it mattered since a second objective opinion would be good to get. This doctor listened to his chest and said that he should come to the hospital for a nebulizer treatment once a day for the next two days. I just assumed since she didn't mention the antibiotics, that she was going to give the meds to him via the nebulizer (which I now understand doesn't work that way). She sent us home with 2 new bottles of Chinese and western medicine for the mucus and cough. She said if he still didn't sound better, to come back in but no one had us make an appointment.

On the second day of nebulizer treatment, I spoke to my aunt on the phone. She's been a head nurse for 30+ years and she was very upset to hear that they had only had him on 3 days of antibiotics. This made me concerned and I went in to the hospital the day after he finished the nebulizer to insist that they continue him back on the meds as she suggested. They said they couldn't fit me in but I insisted and went in and finally got to see a doctor.

The doctor listened to his breathing, took his blood and said that the white blood cells had increased and said he should have IV once a day and nebulizer twice a day for the next 3 days. They used the same antibiotics in the IV that they'd given us for the first three days. On the third day of treatment, after he'd finished his second nebulizer treatment, a doctor listened to his breathing. She said it did not sound good at all and said that he should be admitted because his breathing was rapid and his chest still sounded full of water.

I confirmed with the doctor that in fact there were 2 days that he was not given any antibiotics and I issued a formal complaint to the clinic. I felt that because of those two days and possibly because no one insisted he have a chest xray to see how bad the lungs were, he had gotten to the point of needing to be admitted. And since they do not have a pediatrics inpatient ward, I was on my own, trying to figure out where to take him, still unsure of how sick he actually was. I was promised a phone call later that day which I never received.

I did receive a call from the second doctor who had not given him antibiotics and she basically defended herself but even tried to say that there were some antibiotics in the nebulizer treatment. She said that I could bring him in to be seen by her for free but that she couldn't make any decisions in regards to other charges. I obviously declined because why would I want to waste my time seeing a doctor who obviously is not on top of things. And I knew she'd just want us to spend more money at Amcare, which I didn't want to do. I wanted to get all the hundreds of dollars I'd spent there in the last week back in my bank account!

We had to go to Peiking Union Hospital (Xie He) the next day to see a doctor. She said that he could either be admitted or not as long as we kept coming in daily for the IV antibiotics and nebulizer treatments. She agreed with the antibiotics he'd been on and he got the IV that day. The next day, we tried to go to Hua Xin which was closer to where we live but it was too crowded, chaotic and dirty so we went back to Xie He.

Except, this time we were told by the nurse that they couldn't fit us in plus, because our child is half American, they couldn't officially treat him.

The real story is this- I didn't know that my husband had had a friend of a friend give him the name of a nurse that works there who was able to "hook us up." The "hook up," apparently, was letting us be seen by a doctor and nothing more. I wasn't satisfied with the conditions, thought the service sucked and was in an all out bad mood from a combination a of lack of sleep and feeling like I had no control over the situation. I was frustrated and angry that I didn't trust the doctors in China who misuse antibiotics and I may have sworn about it under my breath a few times. Well, turns out one of the nurses heard me because when we came the next day, she was like, "yesterday you thought our conditions were bad so you better go somewhere else." We were told to go to the foreign department. Zhang Yang was feeling angry at me that I made him "lose face" but I didn't care. At this point, I was pissed! I had been feeling better that morning and then we get to the hospital and find out the nurse can choose to let us be seen or not be seen. For being in China for so many years, I'm still not into playing the game of sucking up to everyone and basically grovelling to whoever you want to help you out, even if it's their job!!

So, with no other options, we walked to the international department building and registered and paid the 20X-more-expensive-than-the-local-peds-clinic fee. The doctor who saw him completely disagreed with the medicine he'd been on. She said since he'd never had a fever, he should've never been on that antibiotic. She didn't want to give him anything but when I insisted that he shouldn't stop after 3 days, she prescribed another one, azithromycin, which is taken orally. She promised us that if he took this new medicine, she was confident he'd be better in three days.

Yesterday was the first day in over a week that we didn't have to take him to the hospital. We decided not to do the nebulizer treatment since he seemed to be breathing OK and let him rest at home. Today is the third day of the new antibiotics. While he seems to get a little better every day, he's still coughing, is raspy, has diarrhea and won't eat solids (just small pieces of food but mostly just breastmilk)...

I'm feeling defeated and wish I had a doctor that I trusted to give me some advice. I'm feeling ready to sue Amcare as I honestly think if they'd treated him properly, he would've been much better earlier. It's been 3 days and we're still waiting on someone to call us about our complaint. I plan to call them daily until someone talks to me. Yes, if I'd just spent the extra money and gone to BJU or SOS in the very beginning for a consultation, I probably would have a healthy baby on my hands by now. Lesson learned.

Back again

Perhaps I will be updating this blog a little more regularly now that I have purchased a reliable vpn (witopia). A lot has happened since my last post. Wei Hao left and soon after I started to believe that perhaps I was pregnant. And I was right. I am due in March 2010. I still find it hard to believe I am carrying a little baby boy in my belly. On my birthday, in 2 days, I go in for my 24 week appointment at Amcare. What an exciting way to start my birthday (except for the fasting part, ugh)!

Two friends have just had babies in the last two months so while it's nice to be able to read through pregnancy books, it's awesome that there are some people in my life who have just been through the 9 months and are now with their new babies!

I'm a little distracted by Hell's Kitchen on youtube so I'm going sign off for now.

Goodbye

Wow, it's been a while since I updated. And to think I used to regularly update my xanga blog for about 4 years!! This is harder than I remembered but I guess it's just me. Wei Hao goes with his new mom and sisters today. They pick him up this afternoon. The last two weeks have been amazing. Spending time with him on my own and with zy has been really good. It's hard to believe that it has already been 1.5 years! Some day I will tell his story in more detail, hopefully to him, but here is the short story.

In October 2007 I got a call from a woman who knew of our foundation asking us if we could help a little boy in Guangdong. She gave me a link to a blog that had his photo and an article about how sad this little boy was and how he was living in a hospital, four months after his parents left him there. I didn't know if we could save him but agreed to run the tests to figure out if he needed a liver transplant. Since we're doing the short version here, we found out he needed one, the top transplant surgeon agreed to do his surgery and in February 2008, he received his new liver! Before and after surgery there were all sorts of complications but the important thing is that he is now doing wonderfully and today, as I said, his parents are picking him up. The adoption paperwork hasn't gone through yet but they will foster him until then as they will be living in Tianjin, China. When Wei Hao was in the hospital for those 8 months, we visited him 2-3 times a week and when he was discharged, he came to stay at my house for 2 months. After that, my mom (also in Tianjin) offered to take him until he was adopted. He was with them for 8 months. 2 weeks ago he came to stay with us as there was a block of time where my parents were in the States and his parents were in the States. They arrive back to Beijing today and will bring him home. It's hard to give him up not knowing if I will be able to continue to have a relationship with him (I don't see why we won't be able to but it will be different) and knowing that his new family will be replacing my familybut I think it is agreed that this is the best thing for him. He will grow up to do amazing things, I am sure of it. After going through as much pain as he has, the rest of his life should be perfect. :) Good-Bye Wei Hao!