Sorry to keep you waiting but Kwan Yin was calling

Every day when Richard and I ride the elevator, a disembodied female voice pleads "sorry to keep you waiting" every time someone presses the "door close" button. It is no exaggeration to say that each of the eight elevators at Nanshan is packed to the gills most hours of the day. (and night) During rush hour, the elevator stops on every single floor in this 21 floor building. Jockeying for space is not for the timid. But what struck me is the serendipity that I'm hearing an English speaking voice in a Japanese-made (Mitsubishi) elevator in China.

Richard received his first lumbar puncture yesterday afternoon. The stem cells arrived around four o'clock. Richard was one of the six or seven patients scheduled for the procedure. Everything went very smoothly, he was in and out in less than half an hour. Afterwards, he had an IV in his hand from which he received growth factors to help the newly injected stem cells "take" to his body. He spent the next six hours flat on his back. At 10:30 that evening he wolfed down the takeouts that I've warmed up for him.

Today he woke up refreshed but somewhat groggy from having slept so much. I noticed that there is a rosy glow to his face and his eyes looked exceptional bright. He said he felt rested but other than that, he did not feel anything different. Big Dr. Lee and Dr. Ye both have the day off, so we did not have acupuncture, PT and OT today. Richard rested on and off while visitors like my mother, sister-in-law, cousin and Mary Ann O'Donnell dropped by. Mary Ann discovered our blog and mentioned it in one of her posts which in turn led to the Salon.com article. She came by to talk to us and other patients on the floor and was also given a tour of the facilities by the Beike staff.

Richard had a tough time resting during the day because of the noise from the construction site across the street. We were told that a new Shenzhen Metro stop is being built there. The hospital is very close to the city government center. The Chinese restaurant at the Xin Tao Yuan Hotel across the street is apparently the preferred place for power lunches of the city's bureaucrats. From the window in our room, we can see lots of new buildings and a highway overpass in the distance. Shenzhen is growing at an enormous pace. Its labor is supplied by young people from all across China. I read somewhere that the average age of a Shenzhen resident is 25. This melting pot of migrant workers results in restaurants serving virtually every regional cuisine imaginable.

A few nights ago we went for a stroll with my mother who is visiting us from Hong Kong. We saw two men dressed in Buddhist saffron robes squatting by the sidewalk near the hospital. They were talking in an animated fashion with some pedestrians. My mother said that the monks were telling the fortunes of the passersby for a fee. The Goddess of Mercy, Kwan Yin, is believed to whisper secrets of the future to the monks whom she favors. It is these secrets that the monks are now divulging to their paying customers. Apparently the goddess was a lousy judge of character because my mother saw these holy men last night eating BBQ meats, chugging down copious amount of beer and chain smoking in the restaurant at her hotel.