First couple hours of the day I contemplated dragging myself to the drugstore a few blocks away for what I knew worked pretty well on sore throats. I finally got the OTC stuff but it didn't seem to help as much as I had remembered, so I started looking up international clinics in the area, or places that at least would participate directly in the HTH insurance I'm receiving from Yale. (Students of IUC are supposed to enroll in the Japanese national health insurance, which would have made this a lot easier. But Yale pays extra for this service. I'll get reimbursed eventually, but there'll be more paperwork) But, all of these places were an hour + trip away, or closed on saturdays, so I was gonna call it quits.
It's hard enough when I'm healthy to call around in Japanese looking for a place, and then take the train and walk there and get lost for half an hour because the Japanese system of street addresses is useless and then navigate a bunch of unfamiliar bureaucratic procedures, so when I'm sick enough that getting out of bed is a challenge I wasn't really up to it. Armed with the knowledge of webmd.com, I knew strep will go away on its own, and the antiobiotics suppress contagiousness and generally not the actual symptoms, so I was content to wait in my bed until it went away.
But my symptoms were getting worse, so I finally pushed through to find a clinic. Interesting things different about the medical system here:
America's big on privacy and always has the waiting area cordoned off from the reception desk where patients discuss symptoms and payments with the nurse; that didn't seem to be a concern here. I'm used to filling out a complete medical questionnaire about anything that has ever happened to anyone in my family when I go to a new clinic for the first time, but the only survey I did was about the current condition.
I had heard that Japanese doctors tend to be brusque and efficient without much concern for bedside manner, and I guess that stereotype was confirmed but not necessarily in a bad way. He looked at my throat and nose and very quickly decided it was "風邪”, a cold, and subscribed me antibiotics. I asked if we should also do a strep test, since American doctors would usually do that as well, but he was confident that he'd prescribe the same things regardless of the test results and didn't feel the need. I felt lucky that my japanese level was advanced to know things like tonsillitis (扁桃炎、literally "flat peach inferno") because he didn't try to explain anything beyond that.
Although I wonder if the usage of kaze is wider in Japanese than it is in English, because I know most colds are actually viral and prescription antibiotics have no effect. And I definitely wouldn't call tonsils as large mine "the sniffles". But, the prescription drugs seem to be helping at least. Maybe the microorganisms responsible in Japan are more likely to be cold bacteria than cold viruses?
Afterwards, trekked into Tokyo for my appointment to sign the contract and pick up the key (yay!) for my new apartment. And then made it home through Tokyo rush hour commuter traffic, in the rain. I am just rocking out at the unreasonably hard being-an-adult challenges this week.
Now just five days until I return to the states for interviews at the Boston Career Forum, partying at the Sigma Chi 25th Reunion, and reminding hahvahd how many dead goats they suck at The Game!
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| Unrelated: best unintentionally hilarious advertisement for a bar, TGIFridays. |
Also unrelated: terrifying but delightful commercial for Dole bananas.
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