"But doctor, her arm hurts. "
    "You have to go to the surgical department for that. It's just opposite. I'll take you there. "
    I really like the man. But all the same I had to run all the way down to the ground floor to register again for the surgical department. And for all that much trouble the doctor spent less than five minutes examining Granny and sai: "She'll need an X-ray." He wrote out a chit and that was that.

    The X-ray department was on the ground floor and I had to help her all the way down. The complications and rigmarole involved in getting the X-ray done were too complicated and irritating to describe. The long and short of it was, after we got the X-ray picture, I had to take Granny all the way up again to the third floor. After taking a look at it , the doctor said :"No bones broken. I'll prescribe some pain-killer and antibiotics. "

    So it was all the way down again. The complications in paying the bill and getting the medicine were too silly for words. I had to queue from window to window-to~get the medicine priced and added up , to pay the bill ; to get the medicine. . . And if you didn't know the right order and sequence, which I didn't, it often meant standing in the wrong queue only to be told to come back again after queuing up at another window.

    By the time we got home it was almost one o'clock. We had spent almost four hours at the hospital, and I made a calculation: Five minutes with the doctor in the emergency room, half an hour with the dentist, ten minutes with the surgeon-three
quarters of an hour all told. The rest of the time was spent waiting, queuing,rushing from place to place. If Granny had had to do all that by herself, she wouldn't have left the hospital alive, I'm sure.

        Taxt B

    Dr Ding Ping, a bone specialist in No. 2 People's Hospital of Anqing in Anhui Province, won a bronze medal at the 37th International Eureka Fair in Brussels iast year for his invention, a new bone-setting device. Not only the doctor himself vvas happy and honoured . his hospital , indeed the whole city felt honoured and happy too. But who would have thought that his invention not only brought the doctor a bronze medal , but also plunged him into a heavy debt.

    It all started in 1986 when for the whole ycar Dr Ding spent his every spare minute on his new invention. After another year's clinical trial use, the device proved to be effective. So in June last year Dr Ding was informed by the Science Commission of Anhui Province that this invention had been selected to compete
in the 37th Eureka International Fair.

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