Trip to a Japanese hospital

Let's start at the beginning. Last week was the big Golden Week vacation. Basically the whole country gets time off from work and travels, and I was no exception. A friend of mine from college (Shea) came to visit and we did some traveling. The first day that we were out my big toe started hurting me. I thought that it was just all of the additional walking and I tried to ignore it. But a couple of days into vacation it was only getting worse. By day 3 it was really hard to walk and this nasty puss filled thing appeared at the base of the nail. I continued to ignore it, but it would even hurt at night, so much so that it would wake me up. The next day after a full day of walking my foot and ankle started to swell up. At this point we decided that I should go to the doctor. Thanks to the providence of God one of my Japanese co-workers was with us and she went with me to the hospital. It was such a blessing to have her because she was able to translate and explain the situation. At this point we were in Kyoto and planned on going to Tokyo the next day. And Kanako my Japanese friend was not going with us to Kyoto. So at 11:00 at night on Saturday we found a hospital that was still open. Apparently they usually close down at night and on weekends.

We went expecting the waiting room to be packed, much to our surprise and relief it was empty. We saw a doctor within 5 minutes. He proceeded to tell me that he was going to remove my toenail in order to drain the thing on my toe. This was not good news to me. So they had me lie down and they numbed my toe and he proceeded to cut away. Dad, if you are reading this don't worry they sterilized everything and he wore gloves and everything was very clean. Shea and Kanako watched almost the whole thing, but I kept my eyes closed with my arm over my face, so that I couldn't see anything. Thanks to the anesthetic I couldn't feel anything either. It turned out that he only had to remove a small portion of my toenail. He bandaged it up and said that I would have to come back to the hospital every day and have them change my bandage. He also said it would be best if I took it easy. Ha, yeah right, like I'm going to sit inside on my vacation. I did not heed his advice.

The next day we went back to the hospital to have them change the bandage. I saw a different doctor this time, and he said it was looking very good and that I could change the bandage myself. This was very good news, considering we were moving cities and I did not want to have to keep hunting down clinics or being forced to pay for this service.

So we continued our vacation and I continued to walk around A LOT. My foot stayed swollen pretty much the rest of the vacation. But now that I am home and not walking around all of the time the swelling is gone and I can walk without limping. It is healing very nicely. I have pictures of my toe at various stages, but they are quite gross, so I don't want to put them on the internet. If you are very curious, please let me know and I can email them to you.

So that was my first and hopefully last experience in a Japanese hospital. It was nice to learn that my insurance is quite good and paid for 70% of the procedures. I only paid about $65 for the surgery, antibiotics and follow-up visit. So all in all not a bad experience.