When you start feeling healthy in China, go to the hospital

Three weeks ago as I was exiting my Seattle apartment building a woman was smoking a cigarette and loudly talking on a cellphone about how she hadn’t had a cold in over two years – “like not even a runny nose” – and how happy she was to have such good genes. I looked at her pale, decrepit body. Her badly tattooed arms were bony and sticking out at the joints and her beer-belly was bulging out from an otherwise emaciated frame like some sort of poorly made balloon animal. If she had great genes, they were currently failing her.

If she took an honest look at herself she might not have misread what her body was telling her. Healthy bodies are supposed to get sick, because they are protected by strong immune systems which react to microbial infections by producing symptoms like sniffles and coughing. On the other hand, when bodies are stressed and weak their immune systems become overtaxed and stop responding to seasonal bugs. Taking into consideration this woman’s age (mid-thirties) and her smoking habit, her body was probably not doing so well if she really hadn’t felt even a sniffle of a cold in over two years.

I bring this up because of a phenomenon I observed in Beijing’s resident expat community. When foreigners first arrive they tend to get progressively more sick from stomach ailments, dry and wet coughs, and pollution-induced fatigue. But then, after this prolonged battle there is a period of calm where people get fewer or no coughs and so are fooled into thinking that their bodies have  “adjusted” to life abroad. To some extent this may be true. However, this period does not last forever.  Suddenly their health gets worse again and this time it stays bad. Ask many long-term expats and they’ll tell you how anything they do “outdoors” like go to restaurants will get them sick very quickly, and by sick I mean so bad that they have to stay inside bed-ridden.

My hypothesis is that lull period in the middle of the two sick stages represents a point when a person’s body has been battling against various disease inducing stresses for so long that it is finally given up on producing outward symptoms of sickness and has just enough fight left to keep bad microbes at bay. This is when a person will think they’ve adjusted to the local conditions because their body has stopped telling them they are sick. The second sick period  caused by immune system completely crashing so that all the body can do is get debilitatingly sick all of the time.

It certainly happened to me and it felt like I needed more than a year to recover when I came back to America.

Am I just imagining this? What else are people seeing out there?

Thank you for making your pictures available on Flickr.