April 7 - Acupuncture with Moxibustion, David's Cold, Qing Ming Festival

Qing Ming Festival is similar to Memorial Day in the US.  We don't know if the university put the flowers there or the people who were descendants of these men that did it to honor them.

We had talked to Ms Jing, the mother of one of the boys that we tutor, and she had suggested that if I wanted to try acupuncture, she knew of the best place to get it done.  It is at a traditional Chinese medicine hospital.  I wanted to see if it might work for me, so we asked her to set it up for us. 

Monday afternoon, she rented a minivan taxi to take us to the hospital, so she came to our apartment and picked us up.  The line of cars trying to drive into the hospital parking area was quite long, so the driver drove around the line and dropped us off before the entrance, and we walked into the hospital.  Miss Jing didn’t know exactly where to go, but she soon found out that we were in the wrong building, so we headed over to the correct building. 

The acupuncture doctor knows a little bit of English, but her student assistant knows more.  Miss Jing was the main go-between, but when I was in the room with just the assistant, she was able to tell me what was going on so that I would know.  I was so grateful for her!  Her name is Kristen. 

 

The needles are in place. 

The doctor is starting to light the "marshmallows" of the Chinese moxibustion herbs.

The whole process took longer than we thought it would.  Miss Jing had told us about a half hour, but it was over an hour total.  David got really bored just waiting.  He had a hard time breathing the fumes.  There was a fan that was kind of taking away the smoke, but not that much.  Kristen did bring us some masks after a while, but we had already breathed a lot of it.  I did feel that the treatment brought me a good deal of relief for the next few days.  Miss Jing also got a minivan taxi to take us home in.

 

David being bored as he sits in the hallway waiting for me to finish my treatment.

After we got home, David didn’t feel very well and after a while, came in the office complaining that he was cold.  We tried to turn up the heater as much as we could, and he had his jacket on, but there just wasn’t any way to get him warm.  His back muscles were also very tight.  He decided that the only way to get warm was to go to bed, so he went to bed about 8:30.  He slept for about an hour, and when he woke up he was warm.  We both went to bed then, but when he woke up at 10:30, he had a fever.  It seemed to come on so fast that it scared me that it might be pneumonia. 

I was able to get him to take an aspirin and an antibiotic about 1:30, and he went back to sleep.  Then I prayed hard and asked our family to pray also.  I was finally able to go back to sleep.  When David woke up, most of his fever seemed to be gone, but he still had a cough and his back muscles hurt also.  He went to teach his classes.  The back-up plan was that, if he couldn’t finish teaching, he was to bring his class into my class, and I would finish teaching for him.  We do the same lesson plans, so they wouldn’t have missed anything.  He made it through teaching, so we didn’t have to use the back-up plan. 

Tuesday afternoon was our afternoon to go to the massage, so we went there. David mentioned it to Xiao Ya, the girl who usually works on him, that he can a cough.  She suggested doing a cupping and some guasha on him with a little thing that looked like a mini chimney.  Since the cupping on my legs takes an hour, he figured that he would have time to do it and be finished about the same time that I was done.

This is the cupping on David's back.  First the cups are put on certain areas that will effect the muscles that need to be worked on.  Then they are moved back and forth over those muscles.  After you are sufficiently rubbed raw with the cups, then they place them in certain areas. When the time is up on the cups, Xiao Ya placed a "chimney" on top of David's back with some Chinese herbs and he had to lay with that on his back for about 20 minutes.

David's back after the cupping, but before the moxibustion heated herb b\poultice.  It looks like it hurts, but at this point, it doesn't.  It sure took the soreness out of his back muscles!

I finished with my treatments and then waited for David.  Xiao Ya came out of the room that David was in and said in her little bit of English, “Wait a moment.”  WeChat has a feature that you can translate what people are writing to you. Xiao Ya had sent some pictures of what she was doing to David on our WeChat group with Carol, David, and I, so I asked if he was still alive.  Xiao Ya thought that was pretty funny, so she came out of the room and laughed.  She had to tell the other people at the massage place what she was laughing at.  We entertained ourselves with comments back and forth until David was finished.  He did start feeling better, and the tightness that was in his chest from the night before was mostly gone.  He still has a little cough, but he feels a lot better.

David had planned to have an English Corner with his students on Wednesday evening, but as we were having our usual Wednesday afternoon lunch with Eva, he got a message from his class monitor that was setting up the classroom for the evening.  He was trying to tell David that he couldn’t get the classroom for some reason.  We didn’t quite understand, so he showed the message to Eva, and she didn’t understand it either.  She called the student and was able to get an explanation from him.  When you book a room for something, you have to have a permit of sorts from the university that it is an event that you can hold.  David likes to have the English Corners on varying evenings, because some students’ schedules don’t allow them to come, if it is on the same night all the time.  He changes it from week to week.  That caused the problem, so he didn’t have English Corner that evening, which was probably a good thing, so he could rest more after his fever and cold.  He now has the classrooms scheduled, so he can hold English Corner on the evenings that he has planned.

David forgot to tell Ray that English Corner was cancelled.  He was the building supervisor from last semester at Qianfoshan Campus that unlocked the building for us.  David invited him over to talk since he had come to this campus for the English Corner.  Ray is preparing for the IELTS test of English.

Thursday afternoon, David and I went back to the traditional medicine hospital for another acupuncture/moxibustion treatment.  He sat out in the hallway, because he felt like the smoke had affected his lungs from Monday.  Kristen and I had a nice talk getting to know each other more, and she also told me more about the little “marshmallow” looking things that were sitting atop the acupuncture needles.  They are a circular stick of compress Chinese medicine that is meant to be lit on fire to release the healing properties.

 

Let's have some flowers to look at after the acupuncture and Guasha!

The weather is starting to warm up! 

Friday was Qing Ming Festival.  We have never been in Jinan on a day when there has been a festival, we were always traveling with the BYU teachers somewhere.  There were plenty of people out and about.  We didn’t have our massage on Thursday, so we went for our massage on Friday morning.  After the massage we went to see if we could get some nutmeg from Mike Qi’s baking store.  He speaks a little English, so when we have things that we can’t find for baking, we ask Mike, and he can usually get them for us.  He didn’t have some in the store, but he can get some, but not on that day, because it was a festival day.  He said he could get it on Monday for us. 

David invited Jackson over to talk that evening.  The nights are still a little cool here in Jinan, and the radiators are all turned off.  These cement buildings get pretty chilly.  Not everyone is willing to turn on the wall heating and cooling units in their apartments.  Jackson’s roommate doesn’t want to turn on the heat, so Jackson is rather cold.  We figured, if he came over for a visit, he could get warm here.  We are not afraid to turn on a heater or two, if we are cold.

A few weeks ago when we had gone to DaMing Lake with the Wilkins’, we had met a family on the boat ride, and the little girl seemed to really take to David.  The grandfather had exchanged WeChat ID’s with David, and we received a message from him, that he wanted to invite us to dinner with his family for Qing Ming Festival.  We set it up for Saturday lunch.  The little girl’s mother and father came to pick us up in their car.  The little girl was shy at first, but soon warmed up to us again.  The husband was the son of the grandfather.  I wish I had names, but I don’t.  The daughter-in-law is “Sunny,” and the granddaughter is “Linli”.  Sunny knew more English that the rest, but she was a little rusty, because she hadn’t used it much since she graduated from college a few years ago.  We had a nice conversation between Sunny’s ability and the use of translation apps.  It was a wonderful dinner and a nice family. 

 

In the car with Sunny and Linli.

Dinner with the family.  David, the grandfather, the son, Sunny, Zina, grandmother and Linli.

Sunday, we had church and a nice dinner afterward.  David wasn’t feeling too well, so we didn’t stay for a long time after lunch.  He came home and feels better after a nap.

This video clip is from the dinner with Linli's family.  The Chinese rhythm talker came in and wanted to entertain us.  It is fun to watch him, but we don't understand a word.  We asked the family what they had said afterward and they just said that he was complimenting David and me.