Country Driving [80]
MY OWN CHILDHOOD HAD included more than its share of medical problems. As a boy, I’d been hospitalized for asthma and pneumonia, and I was injury-prone—the kind of kid whose parents were always getting phone calls about broken bones and bad injuries. Part of the problem was size: I was always one of the smallest children in my class. In 1974, when I was five years old, I weighed only thirty-five pounds—not much bigger than Wei Jia. My nursery school teacher recommended that I repeat the year, to give me time to grow.
Wei Ziqi and I are almost exactly the same age: I was born two weeks ahead of him, in June of 1969. Once, we discussed our educational experiences, comparing the years that we had entered various grades, and after a while he looked shrewdly at me. “Did you flunk?” he said.
In all my years of American education, I had always been a year older than my classmates, but nobody ever asked me that question. Back in 1974, my parents referred to it as “being held back,” and they always stressed that I was undersized rather than stupid. But there is no such euphemism in the language of the Chinese countryside.
“Yes,” I said to Wei Ziqi. “I flunked nursery school.”
“I figured you must have flunked a year,” he said with a grin. He told me that he’d failed as well—he’d repeated fifth grade, mostly because he was also undersized.
By the time I was an adolescent, my health was good, but I never shook a lingering fear of hospitals. Taking Wei Jia into Beijing had been a kind of torture—it reminded me how I’d often felt as a child. The morning after his blood test, I left the village and returned home to downtown Beijing, where I finally had a chance to look up xuexiaoban in a dictionary. The term means “platelet,” and I went online, searching for childhood diseases with bruising and low platelet counts. Over and over, the same thing kept coming up: leukemia. In a panic, I sent e-mails to three doctor friends in the United States, copying the printouts from Wei Jia’s blood tests. The messages went out late at night, my time; by early morning all the doctors had already responded: one from San Francisco, one from Missouri, one from New Jersey. Each believed that leukemia seemed unlikely, although they recommended a biopsy. Independently, they all guessed that it was a condition known as ITP—immune thrombocytopenic purpura. ITP is a disease with unknown causes, and it often strikes children. Usually, if the patient rests and eats well, the situation resolves itself within two months. Rarely is it chronic, but Wei Jia’s platelet count was so dangerously low that his blood might not clot; in particular, there was a risk of bleeding in the brain. “I’d give him steroids or immune globulin,” one doctor wrote. My friend Eileen Kavanagh, who was finishing medical school in New Jersey, responded, “The thing that bothers me the most is that they didn’t put him in the hospital to figure all of this out.”
I telephoned Sancha and Cao Chunmei answered. “He’s fine,” she said. “He just had a nosebleed, but it wasn’t serious.”
“You can’t let him do anything rough,” I said. “Don’t let him play or run around. Just keep him in bed while we figure out what to do. This is serious—make sure he stays quiet.”
I called Mimi and we considered the options. There was no transport in the village, apart from motorcycles. Mimi had her family car, but we had no idea where to take him; I wasn’t going to return to the Children’s Hospital. While we were talking, my cell