And what a bonus for us it is. So much advice, sharing of experiences, and a healthy amount of warnings. So, to help propagate that knowledge, here are a few links from around the China blogsphere talking about having babies in China that I’ve found particularly insightful.

Giving Birth in Chengdu – Chengdu Living: This excellent four-part series is penned by new father Sascha and offers a lot of advice and information. Though written particularly about giving birth in the capital of Sichuan, Chengdu, the series carries with it sagacity that applies to anywhere in China.

• Part 1: Giving Birth in Chengdu
• Part 2: Giving Birth in Chengdu – Selecting a Hospital
• Part 3: Giving Birth in Chengdu – the Cesarean Conspiracy
• Part 4: Giving Birth in Chengdu – A New Life

The hellish birth of a beautiful angel – Jakob Montrasio: My talented friend Jakob in Shanghai recently endured a rather terrible experience with the birth of his daughter at the hands of the Chinese medical system. He, his wife and his daughter all came out the other side relatively unscathed, but his account serves as an excellent warning for anyone planning to have kids here.

Adventures By Design – The Elbees: My friends Ric and Gin share their experiences (albeit not as often as they should) about having a baby here in China. Lots of cute photos of their adorable baby girl, Aria. These three people deserve much of the credit in preparing Maggie and I for parenthood and we love them for it.

“Foreign Baby in China” Category – ChinaHopeLive.com: Joel and Jessica, a couple in Tianjin, share their experiences and opinions on having and raising a baby in China.

Hao Hao Report “Babies” Tag: As might be expected, I get a lot of direction for China-focused information from stuff submitted to the Hao Hao Report, a Web site I run that is a human aggregator of stories about China.

Update 1

Having a Baby in China: a fantastic resource for parents having a kid in China — complete with a rather comprehensive Chinese-English pregnancy vocab list (complete with pinyin).

If you have any other good reads about having babies in China, please help me out and leave links in the comments!

Nor did the tech print them out much larger than a thumbnail. It’s sort of funny putting our experience up beside friends and family who have gone through all this and come out of it with large images burned to CD, DVDs, 3D ultrasounds, life-like action figures… and we get blurry ultrasound photos. I guess you get what you pay for, and at like $60 for the full ultrasound (and that’s the 2x VIP price) even the fancy foreigner wing is pretty inexpensive. We were told that if we bring in a disc they’ll burn some images for us if we slip the tech a few kuai.

We finally approached the topic of finding out the sex of the baby. As most know, but some might not, revealing the sex of the baby before birth is illegal in China. The law is a reaction to the traditional preference for boys, and resultant aborting of female fetuses (fetii?). For us, and I imagine most city-bred Chinese, it is an inconvenience.

The doctor told us that it depended on who the tech was and whether we could find out or not. At first it seemed like we’d find out, but then we were told that it’s too early and the ultrasound wasn’t clear. We believe that to be Chinese doctor code for, “You should have brought a hong bao“. We may just slip into an ultrasound clinic while we’re in Canada and find out there, saving ourselves the awkwardness of bribing.

A damn cool part of this checkup was that we got to hear the baby’s heartbeat. The doctor cautioned us that if the heartbeat wasn’t loud or immediately distinguishable that we shouldn’t be alarmed, as it’s normal for it to be quiet at this stage. It was a boomin’, so much so that we got a nice loud “tài hǎo le! from the doctor.

Here are the ultrasound pics:

Over the years I’ve been here I’ve avoided the hospital at every turn. I hate hospitals in a sterile “True North” kinda country, but the dirty, muddled mess of a space that passes as medical facilities in China is a sick, sick joke.

Which is why I prefer to roll the dice with the Internet. Either option, Chinese hospital or Google search, is likely to result in mis-diagnosis; but I rarely leave Web sites with viruses I didn’t enter with. Never mind an inflated bill because the doctor has more interest in his pharmaceutical commissions than my health.

Not sure if you should go to a Chinese hospital? Read David’s excellent post at Silk Road International, and contemplate no further.

And so it was that I spent much of the morning tracking down cures (holistic and medicinal) for gout. Yeah, I’ve got gout. I take little, but some, comfort in the fact that it was once referred to as the “Disease of Kings”.

Gout, for anyone that doesn’t know, is a right pain in the … foot. Well, really it can affect any joint, and is caused because uric acid crystals get stuck in your joints/tissues and make them to hurt like hell.

Turns out I’ve had gout for a while, but just didn’t know it. Back in ’05 I was hit with it and was certain it was a soft tissue infection, and then in ’07 I decided to get an expert opinion, and he agreed (as did a doctor the night prior) it was a soft tissue infection, and forced me to endure a week of IVs.

I had it one time since then, but can’t seem to find mention of it in my archives. It would have been around that last time that I mentioned my love of foot infections to a friend, also a suffer of the Royal Pain, and he said, “Hey, sounds like you’ve got gout.”

Not sounding at all like something I wanted to have, I got home and read up on the causes and symptoms: excessive drinking of alcoholic and caffeinated beverages [check], poor diet [check], overweight [check], lack of exercise [check], male [check], excruciating pain in a joint (often your toe or ankle) [check]. Gout seemed like a pretty obvious diagnosis.

In the many months since, I’ve changed my diet, watched what I eat and drink, etc. and I’ve not had a single problem. Until last night. It’s amazing the memory-wiping ability comfort brings. The lack of problems recently left me feeling gout-free — but the five cups of coffee and four beers yesterday was enough to give me a painful lesson in memory retention.

But now, having consumed my body weight in water (and lemon juice) and also ingested some OTC NAIDs (yeah, that’s right… look it up), I’m feeling decent. So what have I learned.

Well, that first diagnosis I made back in ’05, where I tied the pain in my foot to the fact that I had strep throat (instead of the late night at the bar) was wrong. That’s one for the hospitals. But then I went to two different doctors, at two different hospitals, and neither of them labeled it as gout either. Both just suggested antibiotic IVs. That’s two for Google searches.

Sadly, none of this leaves me with any level of comfort. Not having a reliable medical safety net to fall upon is easily one of the toughest and scariest parts of living in China long-term. All I can say is – just as the Silk Road Intl. post linked to above ends – good luck, and don’t get sick.

Anyway, it started looking better on Sunday (after lots of water, and absolutely none of the mead) but it’s sort of leveled out now in an uncomfortable swollen mass. It’s not extremely painful, but not all that great either – and it’s squishy. You know those little fine-sand filled stress balls that you can buy, well that’s my foot… one big anti-stress ball (with an ironic sense of humour).

So, not much else to report. Was off work today, and will be off again tomorrow. Not sure how all this is going down with my school, but the woman that’s my contact at the school is being quite nice about it.

UPDATE: Here’s a photo of my foot. I’ll not gross out any unsuspecting readers by posting the photo – but if you click the link, it’ll bring it up.

As this is all sort of a gross/weird topic – go read the article I wrote for Lost Laowai today – it’s a bit more entertaining.

DisneyMainland: “Disney Is Too Far”