Hips and Makers

Well after a sleepless night last night I had to go to the doctor today to get my back/unmovable leg seen to. The pain was unbearable and I couldn't get to sleep with it despite taking copious amounts of painkillers. In I went to see Dr. Wada, a friendly ol' fella who knows the boss very well...a story he tells to all the foreign staff who visit him. His reputation as a doctor has always been mocked and ridiculed by the foreign staff who go to him and after today, although i won't be joining the ranks of those how mock and ridicule him, I wonder about his medical prowess....but I do think he's a grand gentle fella with good enough english to get by. He called me Mark-san, thinking that that was my family name but when I said it was Carmody he was mortified and apologised profusely. Such a strange thing this Japanese formality. I'm known as Mark-san at work mainly because they can't pronounce my surname.

Anyway, I digress. His office/"medical centre" is small and situated on the 21st floor of a nearby building in OBP. I told him what was wrong (for those who don't know you haven't been reading my blog but here's a run down anyway (all those who know, skip the next 20 pages): pain across my middle back at night, pain coming from my lower back down my right leg and around the groin on my right-hand side, unable to either walk properly or run a step and an inability to raise my right leg at times. When in bed, trying to sleep, I can't use my right leg to move my body and have to struggle to get up on all fours to enable to turn over...Guero, if you read this tell me what it is!!). He took some x-rays of my lower back and hips. Less than 5 minutes later, I was called back into his office where he had the x-rays in hand. He asked me did I play alot of sport when I was younger as my spine was in great shape, very strong and the "architecture" looked superb...I think the translation of "architecture" from Japanese to English may be something entirely different. Anyway, I lay down on the table and he checked the movement of my legs and hips and then slapped my thigh and exclaimed, in his best Osakan accent, "I have it!!"....Hip Gout....now I have Hip Gout. How is it, particularly in someone as young as me, and particularly in the hip(!) do I get gout? He first thought it might have been a bone disease but because of the x-rays and by the lack of leg mobility, he knows it's a nerve disease (they use disease to mean ailment or condition), so gout it is. BUT GOUT IS NOT A NERVE DISEASE!!!!!!! Jeeeeeezzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!! It's a deposition of sodium urate crystals in the joints...it's a form of arthritis for !#@% sake!!! Oh, the frustration...oh the desire for some perscribed painkillers!!!!! I just wanted to scream....

Instead, I just nodded and said thank you. He told me to give up the booze (not a bad thing I guess), coffee (not good) and eat more veggies and fruit which I can do. He gave me anti-inflammatories ("from Ciba-Geigy, the very best, no side effects") and vitamin B1 ("very good brand, no side effects") tablets. If the pain doesn't go away in 10 days I am to go back to him and he'll organize a CT or MRI scan. I think I'll go back for the scans. Not being able to lift my right leg is not only comical to see but it's damn painful. An ol' painkilling injection I thought would have been nice. What was once diagnosed as a sciatic problem has now mutated to a bout of gout...

However, the one thing which I want to point out, apart from the bad medical analysis, is the speed of the service. All that took less than 30 minutes!! And all it cost me was 12yoyos for the drugs...at least my 100yoyo monthly health insurance is paying for something!!

There you go....*sigh*