Luxury Of Illness, Dr. Speedy Gonzalez
So I suddenly got ill Tuesday midnight 2 weeks ago. I’m not sure to this day what exactly it was. I suddenly felt really weak and left a gathering to go to bed. That whole night I had a high fever and started to develop symptoms I later found out perfectly match the flu. Now, with all this swine flu hype going on at the moment, my first reaction was obviously: “Oh no.” The next day I was sent to a clinic to get checked. It was a tiny clinic close to the university; maybe 5 minutes walk away. After signing up for clinic membership (yay in English!) and waiting a short while, my temperature was taken. 6 times. The first couple of times it displayed 39°C so the nurse thought that can’t be right, as I was clearly looking half-well and not dead. With a different thermometer it showed 35°C. Hrm. Two more times later it displayed I think 38°C so she thought that was appropriate enough for her liking. After this adventure, I got taken to the doctor, who checked my heart beat at about 15 different points at a rate of 0.5 seconds per place. After that he said something Japanese I didn’t understand which according to the the nurse translates into “not flu, cold”. 2500 yen later I was free to go home and rest.
I informed the Foreign Affairs Office here at TUFS of what happened and they said to rest until I feel better, and that because it’s not swine flu, I’m not excused, so every day of rest is marked as absent. Great. Let’s see my attendance requirement to complete my Japanese language class is 80%, so 4 out of 5 days, I’ve been here almost 8 weeks, so I get to miss 8 days…… right, OK that’ll work out. Just can’t afford the luxury of being ill again.
In total I missed 5 days of class, so it wasn’t too bad. My tutor helped me during this time to think of ways to get those 5 days attendance loss back, including going to a different clinic, but that would have involved more time, effort, money and nerves lost. Sigh.
10.12.2009 04:13 
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