Asian Adventures in Pain Relief
Two days before we left for China, I woke up with a pain in my neck -- I just assumed I had slept funny on the futon, but day by day the pain got more and more intense, until I couldn't move my head, I had agonizing headaches 24 hours a day, I couldn't sleep, and I was so nauseous I could barely eat. So after six days in Beijing, I finally went to the hospital, which was the dirtiest place I have ever seen in my life -- it was so dim and dusty that it looked like a long-abandoned factory, but there were people everywhere, bleeding and oozing and moaning and howling. Finally, someone pointed us to the Foreigner Clinic, which had no lights on and was deserted except for an old nurse sleeping in the waiting room with a Q-tip sticking out of her ear. First, she told us there was no English doctor and we should come back in 3 days (of course, she said nothing that articulate), but James insisted, so we waited for hours until they found a doctor who spoke about 10 words of English. He poked at me and asked some questions I couldn't understand, then in the greatest mime competition of all times, I explained to him what was wrong, he acted out some more questions, looked in a dictionary, and wrote down: "Cervical Spondylitis?? Maybe." He indicated that I should have an X-ray when I got back to Japan, since I was leaving Beijing for Xi'an the next day, and one day certainly wasn't enough time to have an X-ray.
In the meantime, he prescribed me 5 different medications (in true Asian fashion - they always give you something for each one of your symptoms, to avoid dealing with what the cause might be). The nurse at the dispensary mimed, drew pictures of clocks, and pointed at a calendar I couldn't read to explain my various dosages, then charged me a whopping $8 or so for the whole ordeal. The medication didn't help a lot, but it controlled the headache to the extent that I could at least enjoy sightseeing and sleep a few hours each night.
When I got home to Japan, I went to an international clinic run by a Japanese doctor who likes foreigners so much that if you let him, he will tell you the life history of every foreign patient he's ever seen. He had no clue what was wrong with me, but after my X-ray said: "Hey! Do you know you have scoliosis? Of course, it has nothing to do with your current problem..." He decided that I should see an orthopedic specialist. The one in the area is Korean ("You don't happen to speak Korean, do you?") but speaks excellent Japanese, so he wrote out all my symptoms in Japanese in a little letter for me to take with me. But then, he couldn't quite give me directions to the Orthopedic clinic, so he ran and got his car and drove me there!
At the Ortho clinic, nobody spoke a word of English, and while my Japanese is conversational, I don't have a lot of vocab like "agony" or "throbbing pain" yet. So the receptionist gave me a little person-diagram to draw my pain on, then sent me with my picture and letter into the examining room. In a mime contest rivaling the one in China, I once again tried to explain my condition, then answered wordless questions, received wordless instruction on where to stand for the X-rays, etc, etc. THEN he sent me to the rehab clinic upstairs, where another giggly miming nurse stuck little suction-electrode thingies to my neck, set the timer for 20 minutes and abandoned me in a little curtained cubicle. The device sent fluctuating currents into my neck muscles, beginning at 3-11 Hz (? volts? amps? I don't know!!) and slowly increasing to 100. Each different number (Hertzage? Voltage?) was accompanied by a corresponding soothing tone, which sounded like organ music. As the tingling in my muscles became more and more unpleasant, the pitch of the music rose higher and higher, like some cheesy B-movie. By about the 17th minute, I was cringing from the pain, drooling slightly, and waiting for a nurse with a hatchet to come crashing through the curtain at the crescendo of the music.
When the timer finally went "ding", the smiling nurse peeled the well-adhered thingies from my neck, leaving violent purple, 1/2-inch circular hickeys all over my neck, then shoo'd me back downstairs where the doctor asked me if everything was okay now. I explained to him (in Japanese) that my neck felt the same, but now looked very bad. I asked him what he thought was wrong, to which he replied in perfect English "I have no idea." So, in true Asian fashion, off I went to the dispensary (my wallet about $100 lighter), where not one, but three giggling dispensary-girls mimed the dosages and effects of my SIX medications while I tried very hard to come up with some vocabulary that might match the actions. After much culling of my limited medical knowledge for what might be a cure for neck pain, I received a standing, jumping-up-and-down, cheering ovation for correctly naming pain-killers, anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants, something-for-my-stomach-no-upset, and plasters (huge analgesic-jelly-filled bandages with Krazy-glue-like adhesive). The sixth treatment, sadly, remains un-named to this day. The brand name didn't even come up on my CD-ROM medical encyclopedia.
So, home I went, took my medications chose not to avail myself of the proffered services of the rehab clinic, and in about 5 weeks, the pain went away.