Hospitales

Ouch. This person obviously chose the wrong career – I’m thinking Corrections Officer would have been more appropriate.
My second year in Japan, I got in a fairly serious accident while riding to work on my motor scooter. A small car ran a stop sign right in front of me. I crashed into its side and flew over the hood into a drained rice field, gasping for breath as the wind had been knocked out of me. I passed out and woke up during the ambulance ride to Tenri Hospital.
All in all, I felt relatively uninjured. They looked me over in the ER, checked especially for head trauma, and everything seemed fine until the doctor brought out the helmet I had been wearing and said I needed additional tests in broken English (I still couldn’t speak very much Japanese at the time). Looking at the helmet, I agreed: It had probably saved my life. The doctor took the dented, deformed hunk of plastic out of the room, and told me to follow him. When I asked where we were going, he looked back at me, dead serious, and said a single word: “Lobotomy.”
To this day, I have no idea if that fucker was joking or not (maybe – just maybe – he meant something else?), but at the time the shit wasn’t very funny.

3 thoughts on “Hospitales

  1. I am SO VERY GLAD that I’ve never been to a hospital in Japan. What freaks me out (beside your Lobotomy story), is everyone’s reaction to getting a cold. Everyone goes to the hospital for an anti-biotic IV drip. WTF?!
    A little medicine is preferable to doing nothing, but even a minor sniffle gets an IV drip. What the heck is wrong with Japanese people? [ that was a rhtorical outburst, not a serious question ]
    I thought they were tougher than needing antibiotics all the time, maybe it’s just the folks I meet – maybe they are the weak ones….

  2. Don’t knock the IV drips dude. I felt the same way as you for a number of years, but lately I’m starting to see the power of the drip. It kicks your cold’s ass real quick.

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