Trouble has come once more to our street. Old readers will remember our next door neighbour, BJ, who lost his wife a few years ago in tragic circumstances. He subsequently remarried, this time a Chinese lass he met when he was working abroad, based in Dubai. Over the weekend, they returned to England after a stay in China .
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, he had to get an ambulance out to get her into hospital. She was burning up.
It turned out that she had a kidney infection. After treatment she was moved to the ward. BJ was shocked. His first wife had died as a result of a kidney infection, & here now, in the very same ward, was his second wife, also with a kidney infection. He feared the worst.
Fortunately his wife was able to come home late in the afternoon. I've just been round to wish her well. It must have been very frightening for her. Her English language is poor, so it must have been difficult to understand what was happening around her in a system so very different from her own.
I gather from BJ she's brought with her a suitcase of Chinese food delicacies & medicines, things she's not able to buy here. In the English hospital she gets pills & injections rather than herbs. As for food, that she asked BJ to bring in. He's no Chinese chef. He ends up taking in a KFC bucket of food & she doesn't even like chicken!
Still she's home. She's still having pain & not feeling entirely well, but she thinks she's over the worst. I hope so. She's having enough problems adjusting to England.
She finds it very cold. This seems surprising when in the part of China she comes from their winter temperatures are well below zero. The difference is that she's never experienced wind on the scale we have it here on the Irish Sea coast. That blows straight through her. As for the culture, she still cannot understand a culture in which the old & disabled are shovelled off into nursing homes rather than being looked after by the family in the family home.
There's only one good thing about England in her opinion. In China you live in an apartment flat in a tower block - very comfortable with all mod cons from the photos they've shown me - rather than a house with a garden. She does like the idea of being able to step out of your own door into your own garden. But that is little consolation for being away from her family & in the cold.
The only thing is, for BJ, no matter how little time he spends here, he ultimately feels England is home & he wants to keep his roots here. A dilemma for them both to solve.
No comments:
Post a Comment