Death in Shanghai

By the time I get up to my room, fall into bed, into fitful sleep, there's something very wrong, and there doesn't seem to be anything to do about it.
My head is throbbing, my legs are throbbing. Everything hurts; my hair hurts, my skin hurts.
Time passes.
I'm sweating into the pillows and sheets, a tangled, sweaty mess of fever. My throat has closed up long ago. It hurts to get out of bed, so I don't.
More time passes, and it occurs to me, sometime Wednesday that I could die here in this Shanghai hotel, with the neon lights and buildings outside, with the lights off, with no one calling. I imagine that maybe I have some brain-eating virus -- something has to be eating my brain, or I wouldn't be hurting, aching, throbbing like this.
I feel so helpless; I would never allow myself to access this level of pain in my normal life. On the second day of any fever, or once my throat closed, I would be in a doctor's office like that. I can't imagine trying to call down to the front desk and make my way through the language barrier to get a doctor; I can't imagine trying to navigage my way through a Chinese hospital. I'm a little bit afraid, but the pain is actually too overwhelming to feel much fear.
During the very bad parts, I moan little prayers to a god I don't believe in.
We fly back to San Francisco; I stumble out of the airport, sit on my luggage, smoke morosely. Lisa drives up, feels my forehead, says, "Oh my god, I'm taking you to the hospital."
We go to UCSF and because of my "recent travels" I get a private room and the nurses, techs and doctors all come in with masks on. I worry they will stick me in a scary quarantine room but they don't.
Six hours, one EKG, a chest X-ray and multiple blood tests later, they give me the happy diagnosis of a non-brain eating virus and dehydration. I get 2 liters of saline pumped through my veins, a prescription for codeine and we go home, to Lisa's home.
I stay in her bed for three more days.
I am so happy to be alive.