But that was the start of a week's journey of daily trips there. I don't want to go into all the gory (spelling?) details, but it was intensely painful for them to touch her ear. It's vital that she doesn't move, so she had to basically get pinned down by 4 little Japanese nurses, plus me holding her firmly on my lap and a dr with those magnifying glasses and a long pokey thing with a camera going down her ear canal. She hit the roof, to put it mildly. So, she had/has a bad infection. She's on antibiotics, but needs it to be cleaned out every day as there's a lot of discharge. Poor thing! She is so brave in coming, even though she knows what's coming her way. She comes. Once he starts his procedure, she goes balistic. After he's done she is short of cursing the poor guy. It's hard for her to understand that he's helping her as it just causes her so much pain. I have to say, I've had crocodile tears in my own eyes each time. It's horrible to see her in pain. But I know it's helping. Btw, I do give her paracetamol 30min before going in to help. But let's say, it doesn't seem to really help her. Well, today, the dr said it's starting to get a bit better, but she needs to go in every day for treatment this week.
Now, the way it works at the dr here is quite good: you arrive any time it suits you in their opening hours and you get a number. Basically you're queuing, but there's a big screen up to say which number they're on. You can leave for a few minutes if your number is further down. But that doctor is pretty fast. He is churning out a patient every 5 minutes or so. But he's really good, I must say. Not a word of English, but his little camera shows it all. There's a big screen up so you can watch what he's doing inside the ear. My dad would like that! I thought the pictures were quite shocking. I didn't realise all that goes on inside an infected ear. Gross!
Now finally, while one waits in the waiting room - which is fairly similar to what we're used to - of course, we grab ourselves a book. Here, there are children's books too. Japanese ones. They read from back to front. And some of the illustrations leave me a little confused. You know, normally one can "make up" a story from the pictures and figure out what's going on from the pictures. Not here. At least not me. I thought: "I must take a sneak pic of this to show you"....this is from one of the children's books...
it's upside down here (sorry!)
Pretty gross child, I know -sorry. But spot the hairs coming out of Pappa's nostrils. Wow.
