20th post: you goitre be kidding

So, if you know me, you know I'm pretty sickly.  I have chronic fatigue and asthma and when I was getting x-rayed for my Japan visa, they found a giant goitre behind my breastbone that has wrapped around my windpipe.  Goitre – most glamorous sickness ever.  The doctor's at home said it shouldn't grow too fast and I'd be okay to come to Japan, so we delayed the operation to have it removed until after I get back.

I guess it was always going to be a bit of a struggle, the course load here is heavier than at home, and whereas at home you can just faff off a day or two if you're feeling crap, they don't really like that here.

Anyway, so after Aomori, I started feeling pretty crap and couldn't go to school for a couple of weeks, except for a day here and there.  I didn't really want to go to the doctor because I figured there's not really anything they can do, I have the best possible treatment plan for the CFS as my specialist is one of the best in the world, and my goitre just needs pulling out, which can wait til I get home.  In the end though, I couldn't avoid it any longer.

My uni has a doctor's clinic, so one day after class I went in.  It's a little bit different than at home.  Firstly, I only had to wait about 5 minutes before the nurse called me in.  My teachers had said that the staff there spoke English, but they didn't really.  Luckily, the speech I'd written for the Japanese speech contest was about how I had learned to live with having a chronic illness through the power of Arashi, so I knew how to say my symptoms and stuff in Japanese, but some bits were confusing and we both had to use our electronic dictionaries and at one point I drew an awesome picture of my goitre strangling me.  The nurse took my temperature and heart rate and all that kind of stuff before I went to see the doctor - my heart rate was really fast, which I've actually noticed of a night when trying to sleep it's been banging like a taisho drum.  Anyway, the nurse was really lovely.

She took me into the doctor then.  The doctor was quite nice too but she didn't speak any English, and the nurse kind of tried to translate a bit but she had to keep going off and doing nursey stuff, and the doctor was just firing all these medical terms at me in really fast Japanese, so I didn't really have much idea what was going on.  I got that she wasn't sure if I was sick from my goitre or my CFS, so she decided I should go to the hospital where they could do tests and also spoke English.  She wrote me a referral letter and the nice nurse printed out maps and things of how to get there.

I could only go between 8-11am, so that Friday I set out.  I met up with Liam at Tsukiji because he'd offered to come with me, and it's lucky he did because the map the nurse had given me didn't really match up with the map at the station and I'd have gotten totally lost!

The administration system at the hospital was very impressive.  You go to the “first time visit” desk and give them your referral letter and fill out a form, which comes in loads of different languages.  Then you take a number and the girl calls you up and gives you a little slip with what desk to go to and an ATM card thing, which I didn’t understand the purpose of at that point.  All of the different sections of the hospital have numbered counters so they’re easy to find. 

I had to go to section 10, which was emergency and general medical.  The girl there spoke very good English and was lovely.  I had to take my temperature and blood pressure with this weird blood pressure machine that looked as if it was going to cut off my arm.  It gives you a handy little print out to give back to the girl.  Then you sit and wait for a doctor to call you into a little cubicle.

From the get-go, my doctor was a bit of a douche.  He asked me what was wrong and I told him, then he said “which one of these symptoms would you like me to treat?”.  Does that even make sense?  No, no it doesn’t.  Please treat the cause and not the symptoms, doctor-san!  Shouldn’t that be one of the first things you learn at doctor school?  So I told him I wanted to know if it was the CFS or the goitre that was making me sick and what he thought I should do, considering I’m here on exchange and hadn’t been able to go to school.  He looked a little bemused, I was hoping it was just a language barrier thing, but in hindsight I realise it’s because he was an idiot.

Anyway, he wrote out this bit of paper with a bunch of numbers and hard kanjis, which was the different sections I had to go to and the tests I had to have there, then I had to go back to him an hour after I’d finished the tests.

So I went to the first section for the blood and wee test.  The system for this is really nifty, you put your ATM card thing into a machine and it prints you out this slip of paper,  which not only says your number in the queue but also tells the nurses what you need done.  It was incredibly simple.  When my number came up, I went into this little room, where there were all these little desks of nurses taking blood.  The nurse was so good, I didn’t even feel the needle at all!  It was amazing!  Then she gives you the wee jar and you go into the loo next door – I was a bit worried I’d have to walk around the hospital with it, but they have a little window next to the sinks in the toilet where you pass it through.  Handy!

Then I had to have an ECG, which I’d never had done before.  It was the same process with the ATM card thing, and then you have to go into this room and get your kit off.  It was a bit weird.  The nurse was really nice but she puts these weird clamp things around your wrists and ankles and these little suckers on your chest, and you can feel these tiny little electric shocks from them.  I didn’t much fancy it.

After that was the chest x-ray.  That was a bit confusing because he kept telling me to do all these different poses in Japanese, which I couldn’t understand so he had to arrange my limbs into weird spots for me.  Also, I got when I had to suck in my breath but he kept not telling me when I was allowed to breathe out again.

Anyway, after the tests, Liam and I went to the hospital cafeteria for lunch.  I was starving because I hadn’t eaten on account of not knowing what tests I’d have to do and if it would be okay to eat first.  I had an oyakodon which had some NQR chicken in it but was otherwise okay.  Poor Liam, he had to just sit around waiting all day, can’t have been much fun.

Then it was time to go back to Dr Douchey.  He had the chest x-ray up on the screen and it looked kind of like this:

(not my actual chest x-ray, but one I got off the internets and photoshopped how my goitre looked over the top)

Goitre-chan has grown a lot since I saw it last!  Before it was just a tiny little bump that you could hardly see and they had to do all these other weird sort of scans and things on me to tell what it was!

So the doctor, he asked me something in Japanese about cancer, which I assumed was “do you have it” but am not sure, because honestly as the doctor why was he asking me?  But I said no, because the thyroid specialist said there was only a teeny tiny chance that it was and they can’t tell until it’s removed anyway.  Then the doctor said “well in that case, there’s nothing wrong with you”.  He said it in English, so there wasn’t even a chance I misunderstood, he actually said that.  I asked him if he was kidding and he said he wasn’t.  I pointed to the x-ray and asked him if he really thought that was nothing.  He said my blood tests were all normal, except that my white blood cells were down, so I should just put up with it and go back to school.  I told him that there was this massive foreign mass in my chest cavity that is pushing on all my internal organs and restricted my breathing, how was that nothing?  He said “there is nothing wrong, it’s all in your imagination”.

By that point, I was pretty angry.  I told him to give me my test results so that I could take them to a competent doctor, then I thanked him for wasting my entire day and walked out.  Apparently this kind of thing is quite common with male Japanese doctors, I’ve read a lot of blogs where people have had serious illnesses and the doctors have just told them it’s stress or whatever and done nothing for them, so I shouldn’t be surprised but I was just so incredibly angry at him.  Like, what if I was some shy Japanese girl who just took him at his word, until my goitre strangled me to death?  And he’s basically saying that the five or six doctors I’m seeing in Melbourne are making stuff up?  I wish I’d have had my umbrella with me so I could’ve clocked him over the head with it!

Anyway, so then we had to wait an hour so they could burn a CD with my x-ray on it.  I don’t know why it took an hour and it was kind of pointless because you need some sort of weird Japanese medical software to view it.

At the end, you have to put your ATM card into this machine and it tells you how much you have to pay.  I had to pay 7000 yen.  This didn’t seem right, so I asked the girl, because I have medical insurance.  She said it was from the tests and the x-ray CD and from seeing the douchebag doctor, you get 70% of it off from the insurance but still have to pay the rest, so it would’ve been a fortune if not for the insurance.  I have Rikkyo medical insurance too, so I have to take in all this stuff to uni to get my 7000 yen back.

I emailed my doctor in Melbourne with the test results and whatnot and in the end decided the best thing to do is to go home early and have the operation ASAP.  It’s kind of sad because it’s not that long until the end of semester and I’d studied so hard until I got sick.  My teachers at Rikkyo have all been lovely, I got an email from my Japanese culture teacher the other day saying how she also has a chronic illness so she understands, and because I’ve been doing my best up until now, she knows that from here on I can keep on doing my best as well.  The lady from the international office looked as if she was going to cry and hug me when I went in to sign the form to say I was withdrawing, and she said how it was so sad because my teachers are always saying how hard I study and stuff.  I thought that was really sweet.  Everyone has been so nice, which helps seeing as how I feel like a massive failure at life.

So now I need to sort out all my crap and pack and whatnot, and in a week I’m heading home.  The up-side of this is that in 8 days I will be with my dog, and really that’s the main thing.

Oh, and I had to pull out of the Japanese speech comp and I totes bet I would’ve won!