October 28th

So after my mom flew 14 hours on a plane to get here, what’s the first thing (after some sleep) that we do?  How about go to the hospital?  That sounds fun!

It wasn’t an emergency situation, no one was dying.  But I had been constantly sick since I’ve come to Japan and my asthma has been worse than it’s been in a long time.  Part of that is due to the vast amount of smokers in Japan.  It’s really prominent here, and very gross.  Another part of it is the new environment, Japan has all kinds of allergens that are different enough from home that they are driving my system nuts.  I take Zyrtec everyday and Benadryl at night, but even with those meds, it’s still difficult.

We went to the Red Cross Hospital in Toyama, which is about a 10 minute walk from my apartment (you can see it from my balcony).  We went in and up to the information/registration desk.  I handed them my insurance card and asked if they understood English.  No such luck.  Fortunately, one of the things my mom had brought from home was my new medical alert bracelet.  On on side it reads “ASTHMA” and on the other it has “ZENSOKU” the Japanese word for asthma.  I showed the desk clerk my bracelet and she nodded and had me fill out a form as best I could.

After the form was filled out she led me and my mom over to the waiting area for the general medicine doctors.  I was given a number (rather like the next in line stuff at the deli back home) and asked to sit and wait.  We sat down and waited for a bit.  A nurse came over and handed me a bigger form and asked if I could fill it out.  I shook my head, since I can’t read all (or any) of the kanji on it.  She nodded and left.

We waited for awhile longer, and then they brought out an assistant (not a nurse) who could speak English.  She was really helpful and her English was very good.  I explained that my asthma was bothering me a lot more than usual, and that whenever I got a cold it would stay for a long time.  She understood and asked me a bunch of questions and we filled out the forms together.

Then she took the forms back and we waited some more.  Maybe half an hour later the assistant came back and asked if I had the information for the doctors I had seen before coming to the hospital.  I gave her my cards for the two clinics and she let me know that the doctor was going to call the clinics and talk to them about my condition.

More waiting.

Then she came back and asked us to follow her.  She led us to a patient room, and again I was amazed at how cramped together everything is.  The room had a very small antechamber, with a chair and a basket.  The chair was to sit and change shoes into the slippers and the basket was for your bag, jacket and shirt.  They gave me a towel to wrap around my shoulders and asked me to sit on a stool next to the doctor’s desk.

The little space where the doctor sat had a desk with a computer on it, a bed, a bunch of medical instruments and was open to a central area in the back.  There was a curtain drawn across the opening so that it was private, but I think that it’s open to allow the doctors and nurses to move easily from one room to another without those pesky doors.

The doctor checked my lungs and with the help from the English speaking assistant and my mom, we explained the issues.  Having my mom there was really helpful.  Japanese people have a lot of respect for parents, so since she was there they were very attentive to the things she said.

After a bit of discussion and looking at my inhaler, they asked me to go back out into the waiting area.

More waiting.  By now we had spent nearly 4 hours in the hospital.

The assistant came back out and asked me to follow her to the medicine area.  It’s not the pharmacy, but the place where they actually give you the medicine right there.  Shots and other kinds of treatment that have to be administered by a nurse.  They sat me down in front a machine and poured a liquid into a small reservoir.  As soon as they flipped the machine on I recognized it.  A nebulizer.  When I first developed asthma back in high school I had needed to use a nebulizer at home.  From wiki – “Jet nebulizers are connected by tubing to a compressed air source that causes air or oxygen to blast at high velocity through a liquid medicine to turn it into an aerosol, which is then inhaled by the patient.”

So basically they turn liquid into mist so you can breathe the medicine in.  It really dries out your mouth though.  I sat and breathed in the medicine and when that was finished we were taken back out to the main hospital area, where we would wait for the bill and more medicine.

The medicine they prescribed was Advair, which was a relief to me because it was the same exact stuff that I was on in high school.  It really helped me to control my asthma when it was really bad.  Yay for American medicine!

In total we spent about 4 and half hours in the hospital, but the mission was accomplished.  The total cost for the visit plus the medicine was around $35 US.  Hurray for asthma medicine.