Dr. Feelgood

Since I’ve been ill in real life (IE 2009) with a kidney stone, I thought I’d regale you with the time I had to go to a Japanese hospital.

I caught some sort of intestinal infection that had me going to the bathroom far too often than even I had become famous for. Back then (or back there, if you prefer), I considered myself to be constipated if I only went to the bathroom once or twice a day.

I know, there had to have been something wrong with me if I considered five times a day to be pretty normal – and let’s face it, there was nothing pretty about it. I suppose I could narrow it down to my ingesting of 2 liters of Coke a day – my preferred poison of choice. As well, the only foods I knew how to cook were chilli con carne, spaghetti and lasagne. I see the splatter pattern now.

Back in 1990, however, I knew I was sick. I’ll spare you my gory details and will instead attempt to describe how I got to go to the Ohtawara Hospital.

From Monday through Thursday, I was working at a junior high school and suffering. On Friday I visited the Ohtawara Board of Education (OBOE) offices. Not looking my usual chipper self, both Kanemaru-san and Hanazaki-san noticed my complexion to be quite ashen, and came within a few feet of my desk to query me about it.

I explained in English that... well, I had to go to the bathroom a lot. I was trying to be polite. Hanazaki-san didn’t say anything... and he’s the one with the fairly understandable English. So, I pulled out my English/Japanese dictionary. Kanemaru-san pulled out his Japanese/English dictionary and off we went.

Would you believe that my dictionary didn’t have the translation for ‘the squirts’... sorry if I’ve lost you, but it is what it is. Now unable to use words, I resorted to pantomime.

I grabbed my then slender stomach and doubled over and made farty noises. Everyone laughed. Now I appreciate a laugh, but only when I’m trying to be funny. I held up a finger a la ‘just a moment, please’ (chotto matte, kudasai) and ran to the bathroom and came back with a roll of toilet paper.

Believe it or not – they understood I was sick. Of course it may be because I actually used the facilities then and had accidentally left the bathroom door open – but they got my drift.

Hanazaki-san, Kanemaru-san and my bespectacled driver whose name I never learned drove me to the Ohtawara hospital.

Even 19 years ago, it looked 19 years behind what we had in Canada, what with the cramped halls, patients in stretchers in the halls and cracked floors and walls. No biggie. But what struck me as odd was my doctor.

He stepped out of an office into the waiting room where I sat—excluding my posse, all of the other Japanese visitors sat very far away form me, probably not interested in catching whatever international disease I had. I appreciated their concern, as I too did not want to catch something national from them.

Anyhow, the 30-ish doctor in the typical white lab coat and black glasses had a lit cigarette dangling between his lips that jumped rhythmically as he talked to Hanazaki-san. In fact, pretty much everyone who worked at the hospital was smoking—like it was part of the job description. Stranger still is that in my three years there, I never saw or heard a Japanese person with a smoker's cough/hack - I wonder if the amount of green tea ingested had some kind of preventative medicine for cancer?

The doctor stuck his face right in front of mine, pressed a tongue depressor into my mouth, exhaled some smoke at me and asked in the best English-accent I had ever heard outside of Monty Python what was wrong with me.

After Kanemaru-san helped me pick my jaw up off the cracked and dirty marble floor, I quickly explained my issue. The doctor nodded, put two fingers into his white coat pocket and pulled out five wax packages and told me to take one a day, coughed, said sayanora and walked away. Hanazaki-san ran after him.

I kid you not... these wax cachets were about two inches wide by one inch high and thinner than a sugar packet at a gas and gulp diner. Inside the packet was a very fine purple coloured powder. So... do I mix it with my coke (I didn’t drink coffee then), ocha (green tea), heat it up on a spoon and inject the liquid or snort it?

Apparently that’s what Hanazaki-san went to find out for me, telling me I need merely tip the grainy contents into my mouth and swallow it quickly before it dissolved my tongue. That’s what he said. He might have meant “dissolve on your tongue”, but Hanazaki-san was quite insistent I follow his directions.

With nothing to lose but poop, I emptied the contents into my mouth, tasted it and then swallowed. It was a big mistake to have tasted it, because if you can imagine grape flavoured dirt, then you are half-way to the map that will tell you where to find the pit that some now-extinct creature must have barfed atop this medicine. Bleagh! If I ever needed a reason to never get ill again, that magical medicine in the doctor’s pocket that he had handy for me was it. Prescription? Who needs that? Labels on the packaging? That’s for whiners.

After two days, I felt like my regular old self again. On the Thursday of the next week, I was picked up at my school by Hanazaki-san at lunch time and driven back to the hospital for what I figured was a follow-up.

Nope. I had to pay my hospital bill of 1400 yen... which is about $14 US.

Somewhere flush with excitement,
Andrew Joseph
PS – sorry no pictures, but I’m sure you understand.