Just when you think everything’s okay…
I’ve just been informed that our daughter has been admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. She’ll be there for a week, which means she’ll miss Mommy and Kei’s homecoming by several days.
This really upsets me because it should never have happened. This is almost entirely the fault of Japan’s socialized medical system (and its pernicious belief in the infallibility of doctors, but I’ll follow up on that later).
Our daughter went to see a doctor last week for a slight cold, but the girl behind her in the waiting room was to be treated for pneumonia. Why Japanese hospitals don’t have an appointment system is quite beyond me, but putting a bunch of sick kids in the same room and having them wait their turn to see the doctor (a wait that often lasts for hours, as it did in this particular case) is just begging for them to share germs. At the very least, I don’t see why the patient with pneumonia’s case couldn’t be placed at the very top of the pile, so that she could be dealt with before spreading her illness to others. But no, that’s not how Japanese hospitals work.
So what should have been a simple visit to get some medicine for a cold has evolved into a one-week hospitalization for full-blown pneumonia.
At least we can be thankful that this was diagnosed before the baby came home, I guess.
