Beijing Hospitals

This is Katie 3 days after "the Incident". The short-story: Katie sliced a nerve in her hand, had to get surgery, & spent the night in the hospital. More details of the story are below...
On Friday, Jan. 2, we all decided to go out dancing. For some reason, Katie thought it'd be smart to start a mosh-pit during a Nirvana song. After wild-banshee-body-slamming anyone/everyone on the dance floor, she bit it. hard. A big hunk of glass (we think) broke her fall. All I remember seeing was blood spraying out of Katie's hand. Cary, Katie, & I proceeded to throw ourselves into a cab. (meanwhile, Quan remains completely oblivious to our disappearance for the next 12 hours...). I'm sure the taxi-cab driver wanted to smack Cary, as she decided to repeat the word for "Hospital" over & over again "Yiyuen! Yiyuen! YIYUENYIYUENYIYUEN...". She also attempted to give Katie mouth-to-mouth resucitation, even though Katie was shrieking & rolling around in her own blood (generally loud noises & body movement indicates that a person is breathing & does not need Cary's well-intentioned-but-unnecessarily-forceful-blows to the lungs...).

Not that I was any more help -- I ended up crying like a prissy in the hospital lobby because the surgeons wouldnt operate on Katie's hand until we paid $$$, but my Visa wouldnt work, the taxicab driver ran off with my ATM, we had no working cell phone, and the hospitals wouldnt let us use a phone or internet. That was funnnnnnn. The good thing about having Katie's blood smeared all over us was that when we'd wave our bloody hands around, the nurses seemed to be more willing to help us -- even though they had no idea what we were saying. (Eventually another Williams classmate who was in Beijing came & bailed us out.)

Katie now has her stiches out, cast off, but there's a bad-ass scar & some big chunks of scar tissue. (She's also lost some feeling in her hand...but they say nerves grow back a millimeter a day...)

Oh, and hospitals in Beijing are pretty interesting -- aparently people are allowed to chain-smoke in the recovery rooms (which consist of 40 people in the same room, all hooked up to IV's. Then again, they're all used to that Beijing air. So yeahhh, light that ciggie up!)