Medical misadventures

Last week we caught the cold that has been going around Greg's school. Greg was lucky and just got sniffles (may have been helped by still being on a medicine regiment) whereas I got my butt kicked by another bug. The school nurse thinks I have bronchitis again, or possibly relapsed due to the cold. So that brings me up to a certain twice diagnosed and treated with medicine, twice not (officially - as in by someone with a MD) diagnosed or treated this year. So my question is this: is there really any point to going back to the doctor to get the same medicine?

I'm really not feeling like this guy can do anything for me, and honestly I don't know what would be done for me in the states either. Every time he gives me antibiotics, which I feel uncomfortable with, but I wonder if I should be taking them due to the risk factors associated with having bronchitis 2(4) times.

Aside from finding another job, is there anything I can do? There is no hot water or anti-bacterial soap here, and the kids cough and sneeze all over everything. Should I be asking for something in particular (anti-biotic, other med, tests....), or just resting and letting it pass because I shouldn't be popping anti-biotics like candy?

This weekend was too short.

Friday afternoon, I was sitting around a table in the staff room with a couple other teachers. We were all sitting over cups of tea and enjoying some buttered and salted sweet potatos that we'd picked a few hours earlier with the kids. We were also exhausted. Everyone's been pitching in a little extra since Tokushige sensei had his car accident (he still isn't back, although there's a substitute covering his classes), and there's been some bug going around my school which has managed to get everyone. Our Thursday afternoon staff meeting was a sad chorus of sniffles, sneezes and coughs. So all the teachers were talking about how beat they were, and how they were just going to go home and rest all weekend.

Lucky bastards.

Sam and I had a union meeting in Tokyo in the evening (more on that later), which required me to speed, weave through traffic, and run more than one red (in America, yellow means four more cars - in Japan, red means the same thing) to get us to Narita station in time for a 5:30 train, getting us into Tokyo by 7. The meeting lasted until 9, when we finally got to eat dinner and go home.

Saturday morning I woke up at 8, briefly celebrated Fitzmas, then ran to the store to get things for pumpkin pie. Luckily it's not something that takes too long to bake. At noon, Sam and I left for a Halloween party organized by Ms. Suzuki, the nice lady who helps us get help when things like our stove break. We played with little kids for a few hours (Sam and I helped them bob for apples - mainly holding back little girls hair), then cleaned up and went back to Ms. Suzuki's house for a little dinner party with the other area english teachers who had been helping out at the party. We had a nice time, but again, got home really late.

Today, our friend Ben woke me up with a phone call at... 1:30pm. Usually if I'm still in bed at that hour, I'm mostly awake, and just too lazy to actually move. This time, I was actually woken out of a dream by the phone ringing. We spent the afternoon running last-minute errands to get things for our Halloween parties tomorrow, and then I spent the evening making dinner and another pumpkin pie (this one is for the staff at my school). Now it's 11:30 and it feels like neither of us had any free time all weekend. Damn.

At least this week should be comparatively easy. After the Halloween parties tomorrow (they were fun as a kid - I promise you they're stressful for the teachers organizing them), we get Tuesday off (I think it's the town's birthday or something), then Thursday is a holiday, and there are no classes at my school Friday afternoon because of some large meeting. Yay.

Well, we're going to have visitors.

Damn, I wake up in the morning and read about cheap airfares and before I've had time to eat breakfast 7 people buy tickets to come see us. Here's the schedule for visitors so far:

Susan, Suzanne, and Jonathan: December 27th - January 5th

Irving: December 28th - January 19th

Kate: March 2nd - March 13th

Mommy and Daddy: March 23rd - April 4th

Wow. And here I was thinking Sam and I were going to be lonely this year.

Whoa.

I just booked Irving a ticket from PDX to Narita for $438 roundtrip. Over the new year, no less.

I get cheap flights do still exist.

Ikea!!

I had imagined that in a few years when we come home I would have to bug Maureen and Jim to let me borrow the Subaru so I could drive to Ikea in Seattle to replace the furniture we sold before coming here. No longer, Ikea Portland is slated to open Spring 2007 near PDX. Now I'll only have to borrow the Subaru to go across town.

My car can't take anymore drives with 3 bookcases strapped to the roof.

Earthquake!

Typhoon #20 decided to disintigrate about 12 hours before it was supposed to make landfall, so we had a normal day of work today. It was fairly calm, after three days of torrential rain.

But just about an hour ago we had a 6.2 magnitude quake just offshore of Ibaraki, the next prefecture up. The house swayed, the computer shook, and the street kind of rippled, but we're fine. Reports say they felt this one all the way up in Hokkaido though.

Typhoon!

I've been back at work for two days, and this afternoon a notice came through from the city school board that typhoon #20 might cause school to be cancelled tomorrow. They told us to expect a 6am phone call if school is cancelled, and report to work otherwise. I'm not normally up at 6am, so that's going to suck. For once though, I actually hope school isn't cancelled. Not only am I sick of sitting around the house, but my 3rd and 4th graders have to masks (that they'll wear to the Halloween party on the 31st) out of construction paper tomorrow.

A side note: cool graphics about western Pacific typhoons can be found here.

A little better

I went to the doctor on Saturday and he took another chest x-ray (they really like their x-rays here), which was apparently much better than the last one. So I can go back to work on Monday. That's good, because if I'd had to miss any more school it could have jeapordized preparations for our Halloween party. Remember, I teach elementary school. Halloween parties are a big deal. I'll take pictures of it if I can.

Still still sick

Greg's off from work until Monday. His X-ray says he got worse this weekend (even though he feels better). It's too bad he has to be stuck taking meds three times a day, but I'm cranky because he doesn't have sick days so this whole adventure will end up costing about $1000. It's not his fault, of course. The doctor ordered him out of school for that long.

It's not the end of the world, but that $1000 was the extra payment on his credit card that would pay it off. If we work hard we can be out of debt (including student loans) by August 2008, and I really don't like setbacks.

I was back at school today, which stunk because I forgot to bring my meds. I guess it was just a preview of tomorrow because I run out at lunch and have to suffer from then on. The principal sent me home at 4:00, when the students left. No such luck tomorrow, the kids only cut out 20 minutes before I do (4:30). I get a funny taste in my mouth when I cough, to make matters worse.

Greg went to the convenience store today and got our tickets for my birthday trip to Ghibli. That was one happy moment when I got home from work.

The other was #1 best banana pancakes.

still sick

Well, sorta. I actually feel better than Sam at this point, even though I have pneumonia and she "only" has bronchitis. But she has to go back to work tomorrow, and I have to stay home another two days. Doctor's orders.

What I'm worried about right now is that the company has decided to send a substitute teacher to my school for the days I'll be gone this week. That's all fine and good, except that I know the teacher that they'll be sending, and I actually don't think too highly of her. She's a nice lady, but she's kind of a head case. Not the kind of person I'd pick to go teach the first grade tomorrow. The silver lining: at least the kids won't be disappointed when I come back.

Voodoo

This is the best kitchen thing I have ever seen.
http://www.csbcommodities.com

Birthday

Last year for my birthday we went to Puro Land, the Hello Kitty theme park. We went with almost no planning (as in we bought tickets off of some chick as she was walking away from the park), ate expensive lunch there, and left mid-afternoon due to election stress.

This year I have chosen something different. Greg will have to go buy tickets from Loppi tomorrow around 10 am to get us there. We will leave early on the train, eat expensive lunch, and buy things at the gift shop. We're going to the GHIBLI MUSEUM!!!

Pneumonia buddies

Well, Greg's had a fever for the past two days so he went to the doctor. It turns out he has pneumonia, so the doctor gave him medicine by IV and some to take home too. His urine is +1 for blood and protein, but it's been very concentrated since he became sick and the doctor is informed of the situation so they are keeping an eye on it.

I've been feeling crummy but without a fever for a few days. Today I got a small fever and was rushed off to the doctor too. I've had bronchitis (again) and had just started to develope pneumonia. Since I was an early catch I don't get an IV and I'll go back to work on tuesday. Greg is out until at least next Thursday.

Well, shit.

There's a word in Japanese, karoshi (過労死). It means "death from overwork". There have been two guys in Japan that I've been worried are headed down that road: the dude who teaches 3rd and 4th grade at my school, and the guy who does most of the union organizing for the foreign workers of Nambu (our union).

The guy who teaches 3rd and 4th grade (a combined class of ten - call your congressman and tell him that small classes rock) is in his first year, which means he's busy as hell. He's alway leaving halfway through the day to go to meetings around the prefecture, sometimes I look at his schedule and see that he's not scheduled to be done with the daily routine of teaching, grading, advising, and attending meetings until well after 8 or 9 pm. It's just the way it is here, these people are insane. Tokushige sensei (the teacher) gets like 3-4 hours of sleep most nights, is the first one at school in the morning and the last one out every day (unless he had to leave early to go to some conference). On top of that, since he's the only male teacher he organizes things like the sports festival, which take lots of extra work.

Anyway, today he had a meeting at 1:20 somewhere about an hour away, so he took lunch early and headed off. It was raining all day, and I ran into him in the office, we joked about me trying to read his schedule (meeting descriptions tend to be long strings of kanji - hard shit), and I told him to be safe out on the roads.

After I was done teaching his class sixth period, the staff told me he'd been in a wreck on his way to his afternoon meeting. Wrecked his car (he loved that car), the entire front end is gone, I think due to a fight with a truck. Tokushige's leg is broken, and he's in serious condition in a hospital at Narita. So I'm going to help cover his classes (can't do much about teaching them Japanese, but I can at least supervise while they're doing drills and stuff), and I'll try to go see him this weekend, give him some chocolates or something.

But what keeps bugging me is that when they told me about his accident, the first thing I thought was literally, "I'm surprised it took this long." Nobody should run themselves into the ground like that.

Greg should learn to make this lunch for me.

Mmm!

We have graham crackers! And Trabi likes them.