Sick As An Inu

As I write this, I am sitting in a classroom with windows that overlook the Ginza, and a woman in a gold kimono is waiting to cross the street in front of Matsumoto Kiyoshi, the drugstore that is next to the Dior building. I’m drinking a cup of some kind of hot lemon drink (from a package mix) that Aki brought for all of us who have the flu.

This is how spoiled I am:

On Saturday, I had a fever and chills and a cough and I felt like I might have to have a lung removed to make room for the truck that someone was trying to park in my chest. It was snowing and I wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed, crank up the heat, and stay under the covers until I felt better or until the cherry trees were in bloom--whichever came first.

I only got out of bed--grumbling and coughing and sniffling the whole time--because I had an appointment along with two friends for a facial at Shisedo in Omotesando. Yes, that’s how spoiled I am. I only got out of bed because I was meeting friends for a facial--and I won’t even mention the pasta and pastry and champagne that came later.

The next day it was cold enough that the snow had stuck and where the sun had melted it, the water had pooled and turned to ice. I was running a fever and the truck in my chest had a bad muffler, so that every time I tried to breath, I sounded like I was trying to hack up chunks of wet, ground glass. I got out of bed, grumbling and coughing, to make it an hour late to a party in Nakayama--on the other side of Yokohama.

Monday I felt horrible and snarled at the manager when he stopped me (after my quitting time) to ask me to do an interview with a prospective student. I was tired, feverish, didn’t want to be there, was in nicotine withdrawal from not having smoked (since my lungs hurt too much to light up). And I snarled and apologized and did the interview and went home.

Yesterday, I arrived and work and said, “Enough.” I told everyone I was sick. It was like someone had set off an alarm that awakened all the inner Jewish mothers in the room. Aki jumped up and put one of those masks on me, the white Michael Jackson surgical masks that all the Japanese wear when they have allergies or colds or the flu. The head teacher and manager arranged all my morning classes so that the head teacher and I could go off to the doctor’s clinic in Ginza.

The Ginza clinic is about a ten minute walk
(the head teacher asked if I wanted a cab, and I said no, though she is a woman after my own heart and we have taken cab rides where the meter didn’t move. Honestly, just to get in the cab costs 650 yen, and that covers the first kilometer, and we once got in a cab, were taken to our destination, and when we got out, the meter still said 650 yen.)

Anyway, the clinic was a womb like dump. It was like some bad high school play of a doctor’s clinic. The waiting room had an enormous, worn-out pastel avocado green leatherette couch. The walls were wallpapered in some green and gold curlique’d paper and hung with heavy-handed oil paintings framed with even heavier gold baroque frames. The carpet was also nightmarishly green, and was so old that it had started to curl up at the corners, and the glass coffee tables, of course, were smoked glass. Everything was moodily lit and the plain-looking but nonetheless snooty nurses wore navy blue uniforms and white cardigans and they all shush-shushed around on white sandals that they, to a one, wore with white socks.

I gave a small bit of thanks for the overheated waiting room and while the head teacher handled all the front-desk details, I sunk down into one of the couches, pulled out my copy of Love In The Time of Cholera and began to read. She joined me a bit later, filled out my form in kanji, gave my number (4), and then sat down next to me. She opened her Coach handbag, pulled out her nail polish, and began to do her nails. We chatted for a bit, then I went back to reading, and when I looked up a couple of minutes later, she had fallen asleep, her hands held out to her sides like a little baby bird so that she might not ruin her wet nails.

It turns out that we had arrived just as the staff was heading off for lunch, a fact that wasn’t expressed to us, but I was glad because it means that I had an extra hour of quiet time with my novel.

As the lunch hour ended, the clinic began to come to life again. More people arrived and the number calling began. One of the first to be called was a young man who went in to the doctor’s office fully dressed in a suit, but who came out with his jacket and tie over his arm, his dress shirt untucked and unbuttoned. He sat for a time in the waiting room this way, with his clothes slung across his lap, then he was called in to speak to another doctor, then came out and finished dressing in the waiting room.

The woman I was with was called in. As with the other patients before her, the door remained open the whole time, but a curtain was drawn around the doctor, who sat at her desk, and the patient, who sat on a green swiveling stool in front of the doctor.
After a few minutes,I was called in. I left my coat and bag in a bin outside the curtain and joined the teacher already in the office. (She was to translate for me if necessary.)

The doctor was businesslike but kind, a woman perhaps in her mid-50’s to mid-60’s (it’s hard for me to tell ages still). Her thick black hair was cut in a pageboy and she wore a white lab coat and a pair of reading glasses. She asked my symptoms, felt my lymph nodes, asked me (through the teacher) to lift my shirt so she could listen to my heart and lungs. The exam took about three minutes. She spoke a few words in English--mostly body parts--but I noticed that her notes were both in English and Japanese. When she was finished with the exam, she pulled her prescription pad toward her and quickly wrote out a prescription. “Is this an antibiotic?” I asked the doctor through my translator, the head teacher. The doctor replied and the head teacher translated her reply as, “There’s a little antibiotic in it. Do you want--need--an antibiotic?” Um, no. I was just curious about what I was going to be taking.

At a nearby pharmacy, I exchanged the prescription for four days worth of pills and a handful of plastic packets with some white powder in them that I was instructed to take with water. The powder’s name is unknown to me, but I’m sure that whatever it is, the name translates into “happy zombie powder” in English, because I sure see life through happy zombie lenses when I take the stuff. (And of course I’ve been taking it, and--of course--just as in the States, I’m sure that I’ve been getting better just as quickly as if I were taking nothing at all.) As far as identification goes, I fare better with the pill’s name which is in katakana on the package. It’s called “Resupuren” (my translation). Looking it up online (on a Japanese website), I find that it’s eprazinone HCL. The page, babelfished from Japanese into English, lists the main side effects as “poisonous, inappetence, evil intention and vomiting.” I love the idea of “evil intention” being a side effect. There’s a murder defense right there--and if my head starts to spin all the way around, call a priest. (Though this isn’t a Christian country, so it’d probably be a Shinto priest.)

Update

Well, I have finished the drugs and finished milking my cold for all it’s worth. Today I’m sitting at work (it’s break time), and it’s a dark, cold, rainy, wintery day here in Tokyo. If I look out the window, I can see across to the Hermes building and the Sony Building.