The Barefoot Doctor
...written on 2001-02-24, @ 20:04:30
Tales of Kim's Life in Japan
Thu February 22, 2001
I rolled to the edge of my futon to silence the ringing noise. Oh, it was my cellphone, not my alarm.
"Hello?" I mumbled.
"Kim? Are you ok?" asked Yasuyo
"I need more medicine." I said.
"Ok, I am coming. I will take you to a different hospital." said Yasuyo.
I hung up the phone. Everything after that I did in slow motion as I felt super wobbly.
Yasuyo took me to a clinic near her house. She said her sister used to play with the doctor's daughter. We sat outside the curtained office of the doctor where he sat with a woman patient before us. We could hear everything being discussed.
It was our turn and after the initial shock of seeing a foreigner (I guess all the other gaijins are either very healthy or go to Nagoya for medical care.), we got down to the interview process. Since I had done this last night, I wasn't so much interested in this part of the event as I was at observing the doctor's feet.
As I said in my first visit to a clinic here in Japan (see Doctor is there nothing I can take?), usually at the door, you take off your shoes and put on slippers to walk around in the clinic or hospital. This doctor had brought his own sandals from home and wasn't wearing any socks. I looked at his crusty feet and thick toenails for a long while.
Then Yasuyo asked me a question on behalf of the doctor. I explained the answer in the simplest English I could using many hand gestures. Yasuyo then turned to the doctor and apologized for not understanding English very well and told him what she thought I said.
We all stared at my chest x-ray. Well, me and the doctor stared at it, Yasuyo was staring at the doctor, who didn't say anything for several minutes. Finally he started to squirm a little and Yasuyo reached for her pink "Hello Kitty" English-Japanese dictionary. I then made a big mistake, I said two words in Japanese.
They could have been any two words in the Japanese language, like "nice day" or "left shoe" or "traffic light", it didn't matter. The doctor shifted in his chair and said "Oh, well, she speaks Japanese.", and then he started speaking in very simple stilted English, couldn't go further and ended in Japanese with "x-ray is ok." The doctor told me I had bronchitis and that I would be hacking and spitting for the next two weeks. :::Groan::: They took some blood from me to do some nutrition tests and such and gave me 5 different kinds of medicine to take after each meal.
My last little task was to pee in a cup. I went to the bathroom. The floor was flooded. I put my little cup in front of the delivery window and noticed that in the wastebasket at my feet there lay discarded another cup seemingly empty with the post-it bearing the patient's name upon it. I washed my hands at the sink, but declined to dry my hands on the cloth towel hanging from the towel rack for that purpose and instead pulled a tissue from my purse.
As I stepped out of the clinic slippers, off the ledge, and into my shoes, I vowed to recover and stay healthy for the remainder of my time in Japan.