Harder than it looks

It's been an interesting week, although not really in a good way. As expected, I passed my doom plague on to Lisa and while it didn't have quite as spectacular an effect on her, it did mean a swift trip out to the hospital (given that there are no GPs here). This turned out to be far less swift than imagined.

As the crow flies, the hospital is very close to our house. We are unfortunately not crows and neither are we mountain climbers, as we discovered quite quickly. We ourselves are on a mountain but there seems to be another mountain precariously balanced on top of this one; the hospital sits on top of that. By the time we had struggled to the top in the volcanic heat, I was convinced it was an ironic joke at the expense of anyone trying to get there in a cast or wheelchair. By all means put an army base or fire station at the top of a mountain to make a point of how tough everyone is, but I think most hospital customers are coming to you because they can't go on a nice hike. Eventually we heaved ourselves to the top, had a brief look at the satellite-like view of Kobe and went inside. It was deserted - we'd have to go to the emergency department at another hospital, apparently. We exchanged glances, imagining pushing our way past car crash victims to have Lisa's tummyache looked at, but decided we'd come too far to trudge home defeated.

We bundled into a taxi and essentially fell off the mountain with a few turns for decoration; within ten minutes we screeched to a halt at the front door and disembarked, grateful not to need the ED for anything else. The guy there spent a while explaining just how much this visit was going to cost before taking us through the half-lit corridors and dropping us off in an empty waiting room. Seeming quite relieved we weren't missing a leg or anything, the doctor patiently nodded through my attempts at finding a word halfway between "poopies" and "shit", gave us a staggering amount of medicine and sent us on our way. Doctors are not shy about prescriptions here - you always seem to walk out with bags and bags of pills, powders, potions and lotions whether you want them or not. This was probably going to be expensive.

"You're sure you don't have a health insurance card?" the guy at the desk asked for the third time, frowning at my response and looking balefully down at the receipt. "It'll be ten thousand yen then."
"Oh. That's not too bad."
"That's just the beginning, you'll have to come back and pay the rest on Monday."
"How much will that be?" I asked, face falling.
"I dunno." He probably wanted to add "bring the deed to your house", but didn't. Lisa went back in trepidation yesterday to sort out the bill and they gave her back 5000 yen. This officially means that a paid-in-full weekend trip to the ED, including medicine, cost about sixty bucks - I don't think my doctor would put on her stethoscope for that. It also means that I do not understand Japan at all.

I'm sorry to say that a doctor appointment was the most exciting thing that happened this week but it was - apart from that it's been working, putting leftover dinners into tupperware containers and watching movies in our jim-jams. I also ate a hot dog and a pizza in the same meal - it's been out of control. There are things to come though! Lisa's birthday is this Friday so we're off to a dinner with some of her workmates, then on Saturday we're off to a rather famous French restaurant for lashings of wine, cream and buttered bread. There will even be cutlery.

God I miss cutlery.