Pressure Cooker

Some people get ulcers over their high-powered executive jobs, like Wall Street Analysts, or whatever. They got nothin' on me. People are saying they check my blog daily, and while that is flattering, they have no idea what kind of pressure it puts on one.

What to write . . . what to write . . . and now I've played my "Four" wild card, and have no backup material.

My stomach hurts.

Which reminds me . . . there was this one time, when I was a student in Japan, and I got a bad tummyache. Then it got worse. Like, a LOT worse. So my "mom" called an ambulance, and I got to take a very bumpy ride to the hospital, with a wailing siren causing my eardrums to hurt almost as much as my stomach. Turns out there are public and private hospitals in Japan. Public hospitals are closed on Sunday (the day I was taking my little joy ride), so they drove me what felt like about a hundred miles over dirt roads to the closest private hospital, where there were no doctors in the house, and where I was diagnosed with food poisoning by an intern who gave me a cursory examination.

I went home with my food poisoning medicine, being a nasty powder in a paper envelope that I had to pour into my mouth every few hours and wash down with water. The "food poisoning" didn't go away after four days, and by Thursday, when I was in so much pain I couldn't see (literally) or walk, some guy came and carried me downstairs and put me in the back of his car. Why they took me to the same hospital I don't know, but they did. This time there were doctors there, who diagnosed me with appendicitis. I believe this was a misdiagnosis, since by that time I didn't have an appendix anymore as it had exploded all over my insides, but they decided to operate anyway. Here's where it gets fun.

I'm laying on the operating table, which means I was strapped to something that looked a lot like a cross, with my arms out to my sides, and after I communicated to the nurse that I needed to throw up, and she gave me a little bowl to hurl in. Then I started to feel better. In fact, from the chest down I started to feel nothing at all. This was good. Then the nurses put up a little tiny curtain over my chest, so that I couldn't see anything but the doctor's head looking down at my stomach. Then I heard a little snipping sound. I wondered what it was. Then I realized that they were cutting open my stomach.

Too bad my language skills (especially the medical vocabulary) were limited. I may have shouted for an anaesthesiologist. It wouldn't have done any good. There was no such person. They performed the entire operation under local anaesthetic! Fortunately for me, I was tuckered out from my long stomachache, and fell asleep partway into the procedure. When I woke up, the doctor was leaning over me asking if I wanted to see my appendix. Why not? So he showed it to me. It was very ugly.

One more wrinkle in the story: the private hospital was apparently not very popular. They had few patients, most of whom were old guys, who all lived together in one room. So I think they thought they had hit something like the motherlode with an American patient. They kept me there for three weeks, even after they removed the tube that was draining green slime out of my body cavity for about fourteen days. I got pretty bored. There was no TV, and I read a lot of books. The hospital was too far from home for many people to visit, so I spent some time washing the gray walls around my bed with a box of diaper wipes. Turns out they were really off-white.

Oh! And after I was released, and people gave me all kinds of money and gifts, which was cool, and after the incision site had all healed over, more or less, I found out that in Japan they still use cotton sutures. This is a practice left over from WWII times, and has been abandoned in most civilized nations for the hipper practice of using dissolving sutures. I found out about it when my sutures got a little infected, and then they started working themselves out of my skin like little worms, which was a little painful, actually.

So I went to the doctor, who took a look and called in a nurse. She came in and calmly held me down on the table. The doctor then (with no anaesthesia) took a tiny little spoon, and started carving suture bits out of my scar. Sadistic. I think he was probably a WWII veteran looking for any opportunity to avenge himself on the Americans.

And that's my story about Japanese medicine. Sadly, it's not the last. If you're lucky, next time I'll tell you about the visit to the Japanese gynecologist.