Well, I intended to write each day until we leave, but I have been stricken with another bout of mastitis (if you don’t know what that is, its a boob infection, and yes, it is totally as fun as it sounds).
So now that the fever has somewhat dissipated, I am back to the original game plan. Which leads me nicely into today’s topic – our adventures in medicine!
The birth story has already been written, and I can’t say enough about the wonderful people at the Toho Women’s Clinic. Plus, they are always very helpful with the boob issues, too. But enough about that. We are lucky enough to have an English speaking Pediatrician just a three-minute walk from our house, and we have made good use of his proximity since Matilda has joined our family. Sometimes for the occasional cough or runny nose, and our regular checkups…sometimes for worries that many new parents experience when they put their child’s clothes in a dresser that was found on the street, and all of the clothes take on a strong scent of mothball. (In our defense, it totally did not start smelling like mothball until 4 days after we’d brought it into the apartment, and we even took it into our handy Japanese shower room and hosed the living daylights out of it before putting Mati’s clothes in there. Despite several of these hosings down, the dresser is still quite useless and smells like my grandma’s attic.) It’s a learning curve sometimes, people. Yeah, so Dr. ? is pretty good. Of course, I can’t remember his name, and his card has his name written in Kanji so you can forget my being able to read it.
We’ve been really fortunate here with the Japanese National Health Care System, and except for the fact that they don’t cover preventative medicinal procedures or CHILDBIRTH, Matilda is covered until she is 6, and we can go visit Dr. ? as much as we want!
Finally perhaps the most frightening experience here so far was when Matilda had her first cold, and I needed to get some saline drops so that I could moisten things up before using that bulby snot sucker thing. The drugstore only had menthol nose drops, so the pharmacist made us go to the Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor, which is just in the building next door (you don’t really seem to need appointments a lot of the time, which is nice). Well, no one really spoke English, so we just kept pointing at Matilda and her stuffy nose, and they sent us into see the doctor. She had me hold Matilda on my lap, and then, quick as lighting, blew a big load of saline up Mati’s nose, and used a super-powered hydraulic snot sucker. Matilda was not pleased if you can imagine. But it did clean her out very well. Then the doctor smiled at me, and charged me 100¥ ($1) for the little bottle of saline solution.
Of course, I am lacking in the lightning fast snot sucking skills, and never did quite achieve the level of success as the ENT doc. And I just have the lame-o rubber bulb. I wonder how much her machine costs?
