the japanese medical system

For the past couple of days I was feeling under the weather and had a slight fever.

Since the fever wouldn't go down, I asked Satoshi to take me to see the doctor. He had a meeting, but said he would take me to the doctor.

We got to the hospital at 8:30am and checked in. After checking in, we had to wait until 9:00am for the doctor to come. Depending on the day, a different doctor is assigned, so if you want to see a certain one, you have to come on that specific day. At 9:00am, all the nurses stand in front of their areas and bow to everyone and welcome them to the hospital.

From then on, all you see is chaos. Nurses that go in one door, come out from a totally different place. It can get to be quite dizzying. And since a lot of their patients are elderly, the nurses tend to "shout" really loud when calling patient names.

Finally at about 9:30am, we were seen. Satoshi came into the room with me since there is a lot of technical, medical words that they use. After the doctor examined me, she felt all I had was a cold, but she recommended my blood and urine be checked. She also said she could check to see if we were pregnant and the results of all the tests would take about an hour. Satoshi had to get to his meeting, so he left me in the waiting room.

While getting my blood drawn, the nurse spoke REALLY slowly (like I was 5 or deaf or something)...anyway at least she was easy to understand. After getting my blood drawn, I had to give the urine sample....They also have a secret door inside the restroom to give your sample. (whew!!)

After doing all of that, I had to wait the hour. During part of my wait, another nurse came up to me and told me that the pregnancy exam (p.e.) would take 2 to 3 hours to process (where the heck were they having it checked at??), and was I still interested in having it done?...(um, yeah...) then my doctor called me in to go over the blood test results, everything was fine, but of course we were still waiting on the p.e.

Another nurse suggested I wait for the results and the doctor told her, "you're kidding, right?" Anyway, in the end, they decided to give me a call instead of having me wait for the results or come all the way back to hear them.

I was prescribed some medicine, and was amazed that the pharmacy gives you a copy of the each medicine that they prescribe to you on a sheet. This way there is no mistakes in what you are taking.

Also, as for the results, guess we'll have to keep trying... :(