Random thoughts, comments, observations and general fluff from a random bint who left London at the end of September 2004 to embark on a new life and new adventures in Tokyo, land of the cute.... and is leaving mid-June 2010 - and counting!

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

So.. there was a student...

... that I taught last week. A housewife. With lots of fish. In seven tanks. She spends four hours. Every day. Cleaning the tanks out and feeding them. Bloody insane, in my opinion. Surely life is too short to be spending 28 hours a week looking after some daft goldfish.

Er, it's very cold and windy right now.

Er, er, er I'm having hesitation about going back from a week of mainly kindergarten and offices to full-time eikaiwa (language schools). I'm probably just nervous about what schools I'm going to get though. Although I will miss teaching large groups of small kids and the office lessons too. Surprisingly. And the extra money.... Oh what to do, what to do...

Er - nope. I really am struggling to find anything to say that isn't connected to my health. I'm STILL feeling as rough as. My BONES hurt. My muscles STILL feel week. I STILL have a painful stomach and mouth ulcers and fucking candida. And scars. And my last wound keeps periodically bleeding a bit. Well, if I push it, it does. Oh, and I almost passed out in Shinjuku station today. Doing well apart from that.

Am I being a hypercondriac imagining I have something serious? Or am I just caught up in the MRSA and the symptoms I still have and the side effects of the antibiotics I'm STILL on. (I've now been on a variety of types and strengths of antibiotics since the MIDDLE OF DECEMBER).

At least I don't have high blood pressure, diabetes, cervical cancer, HIV, hepatitis, lung problems or.... shit, can't remember the other things I was tested for over the last few weeks.

And yes. I WAS tested for HIV. And no, I wasn't told beforehand. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you can't get an HIV test in England without having counselling first. But that's Japan. Different priorities, I guess. (I think I mentioned they went into reams of panic in the hospital when we thought I might have flu - the tests were inconclusive because I was on so much medication - and wanted to put me in isolation / confine me to my bed - with the curtain drawn / make me wear TWO masks before talking to anyone / not have any more visitors - but MRSA - in a ward with lots of patients weak from a variety of illnesses - no problem to have me running around all over the place. Go figure!)

Enough. I promise to try and stop ranting /whingeing about my health. It's just depressing me quite a lot and it's my blog and I'll rant if I want to... Hell, I don't even want to talk about it to people anymore, it's just so bloody tedious. So my space, my ranting.


P.S. I'm hating this year, so far. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a restart button available?

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

If you've got nothing good to say...

My life:

Study.
Work.
Wonder when I'll be 100% healthy again.

*sigh*

Still, could be worse!

Monday, February 16, 2009

An Alternative Reality

Well, donno about you, buy I've had enough health hassles recently to last a lifetime, and then some.

Last entry I talked about how pissed off I was where I was being treated. My insurance company recommended a British doctor, so I trotted off to her clinic, where she looked at my arms, heard what the Japanese doctors were doing and confirmed that in her opinion they were doing the right thing. She also agreed I should be admitted and that I should continue treatment at the hospital because they were familiar with my case.

Tried rushing back to the hospital to tell them I did want to be admitted, but it was too late for the day, and all the doctors had gone.

Next day - Saturday 31st - I had another appointment for an IV drip and told them I'd changed my mind and did want to be admitted after all. And, although I'd been told there could be a wait of a few days for a bed, I suddenly found one available. Had a chest-xray and EEG or ECG or whatever it was - lots of suckers plonked on my chest and various readings taken. Then had to and fill out various forms, be introduced to the nurses on my ward, etc, before they allowed me to pop home and get some things (Quote: what do you need to get? We have everything you need at Japanese hospitals) - with a tight deadline to return by. Luckily I live less than ten minutes away.

The next 12 nights were spent in the hospital. I didn't get bored - I practically never get bored - but I did get fed up at times. Fed up with being treated like a kid, fed up with the meals, fed up with not getting any information given to you unless you asked direct questions, fed up that I had crap veins and the IV line that should have stayed in my arm the whole time I was there (I was on 6 antibiotic drips a day) had to generally be replaced every 1-2 days as it stopped working. And that sometimes it took six painful attempts (on a few occasions) to actually get one that worked.

I did have a lot of things with me to entertain me and time went by fast with all the treatments, routines, etc. I made some nice friends in there and had lots of visitors. And the nurses were lovely. Plus the downstairs shop sold Haagen-dasz.

Three days before I came out I developed a flu-like virus. I had so many drugs in my system they couldn't actually verify what it was. Luckily that pretty passed. They were threatening to put me in isolation if it didn't, as the hospital has strict rules about things like that...

but not it seems about MRSA - which is the main thing I was being treated for. I did have (probably) cellulitis or, more likely, erysipelas at the beginning, but the MRSA was the biggest problem I had - and multiple subcutaneous abscesses - for anyone who cares about the details!

The worst thing - apart from being treated like a kid - was the floor we were on - and we had six beds in our room and about 8 rooms or so in our area - was that patients were all mixed. There were patients like me and my friends who had to be in hospital but were not suffering life-threatening conditions, mixed with people suffering advanced stages of lung cancer, etc who would shout out in the night, people on chemo, people who were pretty much vegetables and people who had nothing wrong with them but had - for example - potential complications that might come up (serious clotting problems etc) during routine dental treatments, etc and so were there 'in case'.

Can you imagine the mood that put everyone else in? Talk about bad for the morale.

Of course, me and my fellow-inmate pals were trouble makers who broke every rule we could get away with and made far too much noise, kept wandering/wheeling off, continued playing cards out of hours, etc....

But, that's what you do to survive, when you're not in pain. We 'had to' rebel because the general way of being treated / being expected to behave just drove us nuts. And as for the three servings of rice and fish a day...

I came out last Thursday - four days ago - my arm still isn't 100% okay and today I got put on a months course of antibiotic tablets (oh joy) - and I still feel a bit virusy from last week. Plus there is the chance the abscesses will come back - but hopefully they won't. I don't fancy going through all that pain and inconvenience again - to say nothing of loss of earnings.

And, upon coming out, I realised what being institutionalized actually meant. I was in such a daze for about 1.5 days. Suddenly I had to start thinking about buying groceries, paying bills, what to wear, cleaning, working, studying... all the 'real' things I'd not had to deal with in hospital. In fact, if I hadn't wanted to, I wouldn't have had to have made a single decision about anything in the 12 nights I was in as everything was to a pre-determined schedule.