Watashi no Migi no Mimi Desu!

Can you say "doctor" in Japanese? No? Neither can I, but that didn't stop me from going today!

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I came down with yet another cold, which explains but doesn't justify the lack of phone calls. Sorry! Happy Thanksgiving! Anyway, yesterday I finally realized that I have an ear infection. Although it feels almost better today, I decided I should go to a clinic for antibiotics like I normally do at home, just to nip it in the bud. Enami Sensei was so cool; she called her favorite clinic and told them I was coming and explained my condition, in order to make the language barrier a little less of a problem. There are English speaking doctors my friends recommended, but where's the fun in that?

Now I was just happy I found the place. Looking at a rough map and for a particular sign when you can't read is always an adventure. But the fun doesn't stop there! I walked in and handed the secretary my photo ID and my medical insurance card. Fortunately I do understand "denwa bango" (telephone number!), but "zero kyuu zero san roku ni san ichi ichi go hachi" is a bit of a mouthful when you realize you have no idea what you've gotten yourself into; so, unable to speak, I wrote it down for her. And then it was another jumble of mixed signals until I finally figured out that she was just asking me to take a seat and wait for my name to be called.

So I waited for about ten minutes, and then a lady came out with several files in hand and called out a few names, one of which was mine. We fortunate few, you guessed it, moved into another waiting room (which I had been staring into from the first one). In the second room, there were still some other people waiting, and we sat on a bench along one wall and faced a curtain that divided the room in half lengthwise. On the other side of the curtain were four dentist-type chairs and several nurses flittering back and forth between patients. One wonders why there was even a curtain in the first place, since the patients had no privacy from each other, let alone those waiting to be helped. But, you know, whatever.

So I waited for another twenty minutes, which isn't bad at all. I've heard nightmare stories about waiting all day for help since you have to bribe secretaries for appointments (not my words). I took a seat and waited a few more minutes for the ancient Dr. Fujimori to make his way over to me, and I sat in horror as I watched the other patients get their nasal cavities pillaged with obscenely long instruments.

Then Dr. Fujimori looked in my ears and apparently recommended a hearing test, so I followed the nurse to another room. I didn't understand one word she said to me the entire ten minutes we spent alone (a phenomenon I've become surprisingly comfortable with), but apparently I passed the test! I haven't done a hearing test since the fourth grade at Mt. Carmel, so I don't know what the kids do these days, but the one I took was way cool! They try to distract you by playing distracting noises in one ear while they test the other. And then the nurse took me upstairs and left me with another nurse who sat me in front of a tympanograph. It was like a tire gauge for my ears, and it even printed out a little graph of their respective pressures (all systems go)!

So I went back to the inner waiting room and waited to be seated again. And then Dr. Fujimori poked at my brain with the same nefarious apparata I had seen weilded on so many defenseless others. It sucked, and now I am more acutely aware of my ear ache, but at least I have meds! I also got to breathe through a nebulizer that reminded me of Harold & Maude's Odorifics, but it wasn't quite the olfactory banquet I had hoped for.

Still, it was a rather exciting day, and worth the two hours of paid time off I took to skip work after lunch!

PS: The title of this blog is "It's My Right Ear!" I can't be clever in Japanese yet, sorry.