Bob Sanchez’ BS

My first visit to a Japanese hospital came courtesy of an outing with the bike club. It happened during my first month with the club, on a gray Sunday in October.

We were out with the older folks on a relatively flat course next to a gorgeous river, and since I actually got to spend some time ahead of people (imagine that!), I took the opportunity to practice communicating upcoming hazards by mouth and hand.

KCTC members inform those behind them of cars, potholes, high curbs, and other obstacles by yelling out the name of the object or by sticking a hand behind them and pointing downward on the dangerous side. As simple as it is, I think it’s very cool to communicate this way and feel like a part of the club when we do.

So I was trying to be the responsible one, pointing out all of the hazards on the winding backroad that we were taking that day. At one point about 20 miles from home there was a huge pothole that was difficult to see. I had to swerve to get out of the way, and I pointed at it so that the riders behind me would see it.

Little did I know that I was also showing them a huge patch of gravel on the outside of a very sharp turn around an old house. I had taken my eyes off the road for a split-second to point at the pothole, and before I knew it, I was on my back and the bike and I were sliding through the gritty material and right off the road!

My clothes were ripped up and there were scrapes all down the left side of my body, but the worst one was a gash on my forearm just above my elbow. It was about four inches long, a quarter-inch wide, and at least a half-inch deep. Stones and sand were embedded in the cut and I thought I might get my first look at one of my own bones. I wish I had taken a picture.

I rinsed it out with my water bottle and jumped back on the bike. When we reached the next resting point, Mrs. Bike Shop pulled up and said, “Hey, Mac, I heard you fell down. What happene-OH MY GOSH!!! You’ve got to get that stitched up. Someone gimme a water bottle!”

Luckily, Mrs. Bike Shop used to be a nurse and always carries a first-aid kit tucked away somewhere in her body suit. She was right, it needed to be disinfected and stitched. I broke from the group and rode home to shower and get ready to go to the emergency room.

Mrs. Bike Shop knew of a hospital that is open on Sundays showed me how to get there, and even came in to see the doctor with me.

First, I had to make a member card at the front desk, and then they informed me that any treatment would cost double because it was Sunday. Before I could ask why or prod any further, Mrs. Bike Shop interjected and said that I would be glad to receive treatment, pushing me toward the waiting room.

The waiting room was clean and small, and nobody else was there, so I got called into the treatment area very quickly. There were only three partitions for doctors with collapsible walls and curtains separating them - I was at a “clinic,” not a full-fledged hospital. Interestingly, you go to this same sort of place when you have a cold or the flu.

The doctor came in and we did the “Japanese, OK?” dance and got started. He twisted my arm behind me and began poking and prodding, asking if this or that hurt. So far, so good, emergency care is emergency care, right?

Nouns and adjectives that don’t pop up every day can be tough for me to understand quickly, and the doctor kept talking about taking something out of my arm - jari and doro.

Since the cut was on the back of my elbow, I couldn’t see it while he was looking at it and frantically tried to figure out what the heck jari and doro were. Nerves? Tissue? Some kind of body part? I didn’t think so and certainly hoped not.

The doctor kept saying, “Well, I can’t do anything until we get this jari and doro out of there,” and Mrs. Bike Shop couldn’t define the words for me when I asked.

I think she understood the look on my face, which probably said something like, “this guy doesn’t touch me until I know what he’s taking out of my body!”

The doctor finally pulled out some mirrors and showed me what he was looking at when he pried the cut open - there was a bunch of gravel and mud inside the cut that we hadn’t gotten to at the scene.

In a semi-emergency situation, how would you define gravel and mud in English to someone who didn’t know the meanings of the words? Simple and common nouns, but not everyday words.

I told him how freaked out I was by not understanding jari and doro, and the three of us had a good laugh about that. He went to work and the experience wasn’t much different than that of any American emergency room I’ve been to. Until I went home and the following checkups came.

Japanese doctors get paid by the visit, by and large, and they are not bashful about doing whatever they can to get you to come as often as possible. I walked out of the hospital with two days’ worth of gauze and bandages with instructions to return on Tuesday.

Return I did, and I went twice more after that before realizing that visiting every two or three days really wasn’t helping the wound heal any more; it was doing just fine by itself and I was a chump for paying 5,000 yen for bandages and an OK from the doctor.

I was going to pretend to be interested in the next visit and not show up, but then the doctor played his next card:

“Oh, it looks good, Mac. I think we might be able to take the stitches out between Thursday and next Sunday.”

Talk about a rock and a hard place - I had to decide between paying fifty bucks for more bandages and an “Oh, let’s wait until Sunday” on Thursday or preemptively waiting for Sunday and paying double to get some strings cut.

I cut the stitches myself on Saturday.

Or, I went back on Monday to get them cut.

I honestly can’t remember, because I’ve cut stitches by myself before to avoid ridiculous charges in the States, and I’ve also pulled the Monday trick when I need antibiotics here and the doctor arranges to have my prescription run out on a Saturday. I did one of the two in this situation.

It stinks that the system is set up that way, but everybody knows about it and plays the game, so I do, too. Add to that the automatic, unquestionable respect that the title of Doctor commands here, and you have a guy who hated going to the doctor in his home country . . . well, hating to go to the doctor in a foreign country.

I wouldn’t have gone to the hospital at all if not for Mrs. Bike Shop, and I owe her a lot for standing her ground and commanding me to go. It may have taken a few days and an infection for me to figure it out on my own.

The Bike Shops got a container full of homemade American-style French toast as thanks, but they had that coming to them anyway. I felt like I could trust them and this episode simply proved it.

Now I’ve got a cool scar that I forget about because I can’t see it. My students ask about it sometimes, and I’ll usually make up a story - in a mad dash for home plate, I slid so hard that I ripped up my uniform and my arm and it took the groundskeepers three days to fix the hole.

Something along those lines. Certainly something more exciting and less embarrassing than the truth.