Deciding to go was the easy part. What came next was months of doing the hardest research of my life, mostly alone, while a quiet voice kept asking: what if you're making a terrible mistake?
I had no experience with China. I didn't know what its hospitals were like, what the hospitality was like, how the medical system worked, or even how to pay for a coffee once I landed. I found a facilitator — a company based in China that arranges these trips — and on paper, that was supposed to be the part that made everything easier.
It didn't, entirely. The facilitator often felt elusive and confusing. I was in Canada trying to decide whether I was truly ready to board a plane and have surgery on the other side of the planet, and the support I was getting back was thin and vague at exactly the moments I needed it to be solid. Every unanswered question became a new place for fear to live.
The double-checking that never stopped
Because no one was reassuring me, I reassured myself the only way I knew how: I checked everything, twice. I researched the surgeon's credentials months in advance. When a name on a document didn't match what I expected, I chased it down until I understood it. I got my imaging done. I weighed my options again and again. I was, by any measure, more thorough about this decision than most people are about any decision — and still, the nervousness came.
I learned that lesson the hard way. I'd feel calm and settled, and then a single confusing email would arrive and my stomach would drop all over again. Nothing about the medicine had changed — the surgeon, the hospital, the procedure were all the same as when I'd felt sure. But uncertainty has a way of reopening a decision you thought you'd closed. What I wish I'd understood sooner is that the antidote to that particular fear isn't more worrying. It's a single, direct answer from someone who actually knows.
The hospital that changed on me
Here's the moment that still bothers me most. My entire plan had been built around one hospital. Then, late in the process, the address I was sent pointed to a different hospital, in a different city than the one I'd spent months preparing for. I couldn't get a straight answer about why. I was about to fly internationally for surgery, and the single most basic fact — where am I going? — had quietly shifted under my feet, with no one willing to just explain it plainly.
Think about what that does to a person who is already frightened. It's not that any one hospital was wrong. It's that I was handed vagueness at the exact moment I needed certainty, and I had no one on my side whose only job was to tell me the truth. I had to become my own investigator, in a language I didn't read, twelve time zones from home.
The money fear
Then there was the payment. I was asked to bring a large amount of cash and hand it to the facilitator rather than pay the hospital directly. That set off every alarm I had. Was this even legal? Who would protect me if something went wrong? I spent anxious hours trying to understand customs declaration rules, whether paying cash for surgery abroad was legitimate, and why the money wasn't simply going to the hospital with a proper invoice.
What I eventually learned is worth passing on: paying for medical care abroad is perfectly legal, and declaring cash at the border is a routine form, not a red flag. But a legitimate hospital wants the paper trail — the official invoice — not an untraceable handoff to a middleman. The lesson wasn't "cash is bad." It was that I should never have been left to figure out something that important alone, under pressure, the week before surgery.
Packing my fears, and my family
In the end I did what frightened, determined people do: I prepared obsessively. I set up a VPN before leaving, because the tools I relied on are blocked in China and you can't install them once you're there. I downloaded translator apps. I researched hotels for hours — with an added complication, because a vestibular condition of mine meant high floors and fast elevators were genuinely problematic, so every booking had to be checked against that. I read about visas and entry rules. And I brought my family across the world with me, because I couldn't imagine doing it without them.
I got on the plane having done everything right — and still carrying the weight of having done all of it half-blind. What happened when I landed is Part 3. It's the part that changed my mind about everything.