Vince had vowed never to go to a doctor in Japan. He had a healthy distrust of the medical profession in any country and resented the hours he had spent in waiting rooms. It seemed that professionalism for doctors and specialists was measured in the amount of time they kept you sitting in spiritless rooms with out-of-date magazines.
Of course, if you are going to vow not to go to a doctor, you should first vow not to get to sick, and this is not the sort of promise you should ever make to yourself in Tokyo. Half the city suffers from a perpetual influenza. Just travelling to and from work will cure one's low blood pressure. And if you think that walking up and down thousands of stairs in a day is good exercise, you soon discover that it also gives you arthritis in the knees and ankles. In spring time, the cedar pollen has everyone with swollen eyes, sneezing and wearing white masks. One of the most prevalent problems, especially in summer, is the range of skin ailments that afflict the average resident of the larger Tokyo area. It was one of these that smote Vince. He had become infected with a tinea fungus while working in a tin mine as a student, but had always kept it under control via a whole host of home remedies. After two years in Japan, none of these remedies seemed to work any more and it was in the summer of 1992 that he developed a heat rash that turned into some sort of eczema. He, of course, ignored it for as long as possible, but his ankles became swollen and that also happened to be the week in which he carried the omikoshi and they got stomped by fifty other pairs of tabi. It also turned out to be stand on or kick Vince's feet week and he had decided that not all of this pedal injury was accidental.
After three days, Connie felt that Nozomi who was after all a trained nurse could help. She came over and tut-tutted over the feet washing them with disinfectant. This stung like hell, but Vince's own father had always advocated detol washing for any external injury and so he was prepared to bend to such a treatment if only out of habit. Vince's feet had other ideas. They had suffered 34 years of antiseptics and enough was enough. They rebelled. Within a day, they had swollen to such proportions that the skin had broken into little rivulets that wept blood. On the day Vince finally agreed to go to the doctor, he couldn't stand up without assistance. For the first time since he got to Japan, he would have preferred to have been sleeping in a western style bed instead of a futon, just because it would have been easier to get out of one. He could scarcely walk although he certainly tried to walk as much as possible. Anticipating his first visit to a Japanese doctor, amputation wasn't out of the question.
When Vince visited Dr. Otake's waiting room, above the local Makudonaruda at 7:45 a.m., he witnessed a professionalism of a new order. Not only were there no seats left, but there appeared to be no standing room either. The room was chocked fuller than the Yamanote train during the morning peak hour and Vince would not have been at all surprised to see nurse's arrive with white gloves to push everyone in. As there was no such nurse, prospective patients ebbed out into the hallway and down the stairs, up the street and around the block. There were even people waiting in the elevator. Vince suspected that half the customers at Makudonaruda were actually waiting to see Dr. Otake as well, even though the surgery wasn't due to open for another hour and a quarter.
Certainly, the man must have had some reputation, Vince decided. Nozomi had told him that Dr. Otake was always calm and cheerful and gave no nonsense medical treatments. Vince was not at all sure whether the throngs of people in the waiting room and outside were testimony to Dr. Otake's skill or to the number of Japanese people with skin problems.
Connie found a spot somewhere near the ceiling to prop up Vince and went over to place a card with his name on it on top of a pile of hundreds of others. Vince had read his way through Anna Karenina and Gone with the Wind by the time his name was finally called late that afternoon. He was led past vast trays of gauzes, cotton buds, tweezers, white plastic jars full of multi-coloured pills and multi-coloured plastic jars of white pills into Cubicle No. 8.
The nurse pulled a plastic screen across the doorway and Vince found himself in a monk-like cell with a cot bed and a machine that resembled an aircraft flight recorder box and was clearly labelled in English, Laser Knife. Vince had suspected as much from the start. He only hoped that laser amputation was less painful than the regular sort.
If Vince had thought the waiting was through, he was wrong. There were eight such cubicles and Dr. Otake didn't arrive for another half hour. Vince was surprised to discover that the specialist was a woman. He would never have made such an assumption in Australia, but here in Japan, it had seemed possible that all doctors were men and all nurses were women.
Dr. Otake took one glance at his feet as if they were the 50,000th. pair she had seen that day and made a quick sketch of them. Vince caught a glimpse of it and it looked more like one of Picasso's etched nudes. She then burbled something to the nurse and left within thirty seconds.
Before Vince knew it, a hyperdermic needle jabbed into his shoulder and 20 ccs of clear fluid emptied into his veins. Vince's brain told him that these were drugs. He was ushered back to the waiting room where they spent another hour watching another nurse doling out pill and creams, explaining: "You take the green ones in the morning between breakfast and lunch. You take six of these red ones a day, one with every meal. You have two blue ones just before bed and if the pain gets so agonising that it's unbearable take one of the apricot ones with the purple spots.
Finally, Vince's own medication arrived and he was relieved to discover that there were enough pills to share with his junkie friends at work. Admittedly, there were no green ones, but there were white, pink, yellow, red, blue, russet, cobalt, canary yellow, tan and beige ones: seventeen kinds. Plus seven plastic jars of cream. "You take this one in the morning with breakfast ..." "What's it for?" Vince demanded groggily. akf The nurse looked at him bewildered, as if it was the first time that she had ever heard the question.
"You take this one in the morning with breakfast," she repeated dumbly.
"What's it for?" "It's for breakfast." "I know you have it with breakfast," Vince said testily. "But what is it called? What does it cure?" "I don't know," the nurse blushed. "I only work here." Aghast at the sheer quackery of Dr. Otake's surgery, all the reports he'd heard about the malpractice of the Japanese medical profession were confirmed.
"She hardly glanced at my feet," he told Connie. "Then, she gave me an injection, without even checking my blood pressure, without even asking me if I were allergic to anything. And I'm half tempted not to take any of this pharmaceutical factory full of pills that they gave me." Connie looked at him patiently, "Maybe, you should at least try them, Vince. There were an awful lot of people in that waiting room. You'd hardly think that there'd be so many if she didn't have some success with her patients." "I don't know." "Now, what would you tell me if you saw a crowded restaurant." "I'd say the tucker was good and it was cheap." "So, we already know that Dr. Otake charges reasonable rates and maybe her medicines work, too." Mumbling something about the dissimilarities between restaurants and clinics, Vince reluctantly started taking the pills and was more than a little chagrined to discover that they did work. The swelling went down almost immediately and when he returned to Dr. Otake's waiting room, the following Monday, his feet were beginning to feel normal. Connie had managed to convince him that it could not possibly be as crowded on a Monday as it had been on a Saturday. But she was wrong. The only difference was that he was ushered into Cubicle 6 instead of Cubicle 8. It might have looked exactly the same had it not been for the absence of the laser knife. In its place were two containers of dry ice. No fewer than three nurses bowed and apologised their way into the cubicle to get a beakerful of the solid carbon dioxide and soon Cubicle No. 6 was looking like the perfect stage setting for Macbeth and Banquo's meeting with the witches on the heath.
Over the weeks as Vince's feet repaired themselves, he moved up the line of cubicles. Cubicle 5 had the radio knife. Cubicle 4 had the electrolysis lamp. Cubicle 3 had the oxygen equipment. Cubicle 2 had a collection of medical comic books with the most up-to-date techniques. And Cubicle 1 had the infra red analysis camera.
Once he'd reached Cubicle 1, Dr. Otake came in and pronounced him cured. She congratulated him on his fast recovery. He had after all repeated only one part of the treatment. He'd spent two sessions in Cubicle 5 with the radio knife. She neglected to mention that he'd never been in Cubicle 7 and when she asked him if he had any questions, he thought for a moment and asked: "Yeah, what's in Cubicle 7?" "What?" "Well, the laser knife is in Cubicle 8," he counted them off on his fingers. "The radio knife is in Cubicle 5, the dry ice is in Cubicle 6, the medical manga are in Cubicle 2, the electrolysis lamp is in Cubicle 4, the infra red camera is here, and what's in Cubicle 3?" "The oxygen equipment," Connie replied. " "That's right, the oxygen equipment. So, what's in Cubicle 7?" Dr. Otake smiled sublimely and closed the curtain without a word.
"I'll go look for myself," Vince muttered.
But he didn't. He simply kept on wondering. Was it a professional secret or was the question just too unprofessional to be answered? Vince wondered what you had to do to get into Cubicle 7, what foul diseases of the skin were treated in there. But some things are better left as mysteries and Vince was happy enough with his old feet, that hadn't been amputated after all. Happy enough anyway, never to want to go back to Dr. Otake.