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With April and May came sand storms. Humans had finally exhausted Earth's resources and colonised Mars. That's what it looked like. A harsh experiment in human living. It wasn't red, but two or three tones of orange. Visibility shrunk to metres.

The storms were conjured in the in desertified West, and unleashed on Beijing by strong nor-easterlies. The already dusty city was asthmatic with pollution. In the weeks before the May holiday, Beijing experienced its worst pollution levels in 6 years. State media reported that the city was well short of its blue sky target. By April, the city had just 56 clear days, 16 less than the same period last year.

The storms didn't only affect China. They reached the Korean Peninsula. And, worse, Japan, stirring up further complications in an already tricky diplomatic relationship. In the aftermath of the winds, which picked up other, more sinister chemical dust on their way from the Gobi, buildings and streets turned browny-yellow. Windows everywhere received a tint. I accidentally left my window open during a stormy night, and everything in my bedroom was covered. Not sand, like big Bondi grains. This was a matte film over my laundry, my computer, my bed, and the inside of my lungs. I developed a chronic chest infection. My lungs filled with gunky lumps of Beijing air and mucous. I barked a wet cough and nursed, with dedication, my growing paranoia about some fatal, airborne illness.

One day, aroused with fever, I pressed a taxi driver wearing a face mask to take me to the nearest hospital. He opened all the windows and stared wide-eyed at me in the rear-view mirror. He sped through the deserted streets. These days marked the frenzied heights of bird flu coverage. There were now daily reports of poultry culling, in provinces close to Beijing. It was not unreasonable to suspect the racing pigeons roosting next door were flying time bombs.

The driver dropped me off and made me put the money on the front seat. His wheels made a cartoonish squeal and he was gone. This was my first hospital-visit in China. Inside, delirium magnified the suffering. It looked like Beijing train station. Or the temporary housing for refugees. People pushed and yelled. Packs scrummed at a confusing series of windows for forms and receipts. Others looked like they'd been there for days and had given up. The lobby was a hospice of patients propped up against walls. There was nothing in Roman characters anywhere and I could only recognise a handful of characters. I almost left, but at that moment hacked up one of my lungs involuntarily onto the floor and fortified myself for the worst.

Without warning, I was picked out of the crowd by several fussy plain-clothed attendants and conveyed through the terminal-like entrance, past the pushing hordes, to the foot of a gently inclined ramp that led to a pretty alcove with the characters for "Foreigners' Area". Inside this separate area, air-conditioning gently wafted through vents in the ceiling accompanied by inoffensive musak. Smiling faces attached to the bodies of young nurses wearing crisp white uniforms helped me with the perfunctory forms, after which a pleasant-faced doctor with stunning English and soft hands examined me. He did blood tests and I left with an armoury of Western and Traditional Chinese medicines from the well-stocked, inexpensive pharmacy on the same floor. I was a wimp, but a relieved wimp. I had found the medical oasis in the middle of Mars.

I was just one set of lungs that contributed to a 40 per cent surge in hospital patients during a particularly bad 5 days in April when 300,000 tonnes of sand was dumped on Beijing. That's the weight of 3 million adult male pandas raining down on the capital. That's the image I had, anyway, a city swarming with giant pandas made of sand pitching battles against gangs of workers with brooms and hoses. Blame the antibiotics.