Hey Mr. Ambulance Driver

This country continues to perplex me.

Last Tuesday, I went to the Death Hospital across the road from apartment to sort out a lump that’s developed on the sole of my foot. I’ve never been into the hospital before, although I have cursed it many a time when an ambulance comes blaring down the street at 3am. The ambulances here don’t just do the siren thing, but a few blocks from the hospital, in a blatant residential area, they will get on the loud (LOUD!) speaker and yell things over and over again in a shrill voice. I have no idea what this achieves.

For one, the siren is piercing enough scatter the cars to the side of the road, and at 3am (actually anytime after 8pm), there ARE no cars on the road. When I first arrived in my town, I was convinced that the loud speakers were an urgent way to alert the doctors that they were arriving with some sort of Grey’s Anatomy-worthy freak case of a guy swallowing an umbrella. But as the nights went one and the loud speakers stayed constant, I began to realize that the patients must fit more into the dull domestic sphere of accidents; broken hips and the like. Surely there is some kind of ambulance intercom or a cellphone they could use instead of waking three apartment blocks of sleeping citizens??

To be fair, with my limited knowledge of Japanese and speaker distortion, I have no idea what they are actually yelling so frantically about for five minutes. I often wonder if it a detailed description of what’s happened to the patient, complete with a passive aggressive warning about cutting down on red meat or not running with scissors.

Either way, this almost nightly ritual has become a nightmare in itself, with my apartment about ten meters from the hospital’s coveted ambulance entrance. One night there was an ambulance influx, with five arriving within a four hour dead-of-night time frame. After the third one, I got up at downed two shots of tequila which knocked me out, until the next one came groaning along at 4 am.

Anyway, the visit inside this building was somewhat of an anticlimax. I expected to see teams of ethnic surgeons rushing around performing miracle surgeries and having hot affairs. Not so. Everyone who is sick (or doesn’t wish to get sick) in Japan must wear a paper surgeon’s mask to prevent germs, and so the hospital waiting rooms looks like a SARs evacuation area. (These masks are also work by teachers at school, which often makes it rather tricky to catch the words at the back of the class. They do have other purposes as well; one of my students pulled down her mask to show me the three lip piercings she’d got secretly over the weekend.)

However, it was the bathrooms that really got me. Of the three that I went into on different floors (the first for emptying my bladder and the following two to make sure I wasn’t imagining things), not one had any kind of hand drying device. Paper towels? Nah. Some kind of hot air? I wish. And so, all these people with colds and flu’s are going around with damp hands, spreading more germs than if they didn’t wash them in the first place. Either way, it’s rather a disconcerting prospect. Perhaps this explains the plethora of ambulances; the masks obviously just aren’t cutting it.

My faith in the Japanese health system been shaky at the best of times. A fellow ALT went to the doctor to get her cold sorted and was given a pap smear. Another was told that his sore throat was a result of tonsillitis, despite the fact that his tonsils were removed several years earlier. After a week on antibiotics, the lump on my foot is still painfully in residence. Clearly ANOTHER visit to the hospital is in order in the next few days; I’ll keep my readers updated. I must admit, the whole thing is very bizarre and makes for a good blogging. But I still can’t walk.

My other discovery of the week was that the inside shoes/outside shoes rule is applicable even to those who can’t walk. The boy with cerebral palsy now uses a wheelchair (perhaps a result of being made to run a ten kilometre race through the hills last year so that he wouldn’t fail P.E.) and when he leaves school, he has to change from his inside wheelchair (which is blue) to his outside wheelchair (which is red). This was in addition to him changing his shoes as well. A few days later at another school, I waited around the entrance to witness the same wheelchair changeover with the paraplegic student, shoes and all.

I don’t really get it. You’d think that if someone can’t walk you could cut them a bit of slack on the shoes front. And how much do wheelchairs cost? But then I guess with all the snow on the ground, it makes some sort of sense. I can no longer fathom the wearing of outdoor shoes inside, especially in the depths of a drizzly winter. That’s the thing about Japan; it gets under your skin. I swear that there’s logic to it all, somewhere.