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Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
The giant poodle barrels into me head on, smashing my glasses into my face. I’m in pain, I can feel dripping down my face into my eye, and I’m sopping up blood with tissues waiting for the flow to subside. There is a two centimetre cut above my eye where my glasses have stuck into the flesh. I was about to take the dogs for a walk and the carpenter is next door preparing to work on my floor, so I go up to the corner and see him, tell him what has happened, ask if he doesn’t mind walking one of the dogs and I’ll leave the door open for him. The taxi company says it’ll be fifteen minutes, but when I say I’ve had an accident a taxi arrives almost immediately. I’ve dragged the garbage bag outside, even with the sting of my face I’m irritated that I won’t get the garbage out.
The taxi driver calls in to find out where the hospital is. It’s a public holiday and I was not aware of that, and I’m relieved to hear that all the things I had planned to do I couldn’t have done anyway. We drive off to the hospital, it’s really an orthopaedic clinic. The driver is preparing to drive off, but the cleaner at the door says they don’t open until 9, I can sit and wait. I don’t want to sit there until 9. I could just as well sit at home and finish the coffee on the table, smoke a cigarette. So the taxi driver takes me home again. It was an expensive way to find out which hospital I needed to go to, but at least I know now. It’s a hassle to find these things out.
I drive back to the hospital, walk in. But I’m still upset that the emergency list for hospitals has me arriving at one that isn’t open, and I’m unhappy. The gasp when I walk up to the counter in my shoes, having missed the signs, to go back and take them off and return to the counter and be told to go back and get the slippers. And then there’s a questionnaire on a clipboard, and then a fuss about my health care card, it’s expired and I haven’t noticed. You have to pay the full amount in cash they say, and I storm back to the door and put my shoes back on and shout at them that this is not the way to behave when this is an emergency patient! I go home and dig through drawers, find the envelope with the card in it, drive back to the hospital again. They were going by the book, they didn’t expect me to walk out, and they also didn’t expect me to return. This time they’re very efficient, I’m very efficient, they’re sorry and I’m sorry and we’re all apologetic in a professional kind of a way and completely synchronized in our determination to reach a satisfactory conclusion together. I get taped up, bandaged up, and we part on warm terms.
The taxi driver says that everyone calls an ambulance these days. The hospitals don’t pay a lot of attention to people who turn up in taxis. So people call ambulances, even for small things, and the ambulances are over-stretched and not coping. I don’t like the idea of taking an ambulance. I wouldn’t have gone at all except it’s my eye and I wouldn’t like to damage it. I’m bothered to be dragged into the medical system.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
If all goes well Lehan you should receive a couple of Little Golden tokens (not to be confused with little Golden Tokens 🙂 ) of thanks / appreciation for my inclusion in the waterhole painting. There was no opportunity to include a note, hence this one .
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Lehan, in my job I have to establish funding before services can be put in place. It’s a horrible but necessary part of the job
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God, Hung, it’s lucky I didn’t have to drum up some funding for an emergency clinic looking like I’ve just been in a punch up. She doesn’t get along with her poodle, clearly. Why should we enable THAT?
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Oh I see what you mean, Hung One On. Yes, I can see the problem there. And I’m sure that if I were really in a bad way they would care first and talk about payment later. I was unreasonable, I think so too. On the side of the patient though, when you have insurance but have forgotten the card – and the circumstances of forgetting the card (being banged on the head) are pretty understandable – it’s aggravating. In normal circumstances I would be apologetic from the beginning. I was thinking I might go back there with a list of english phrases for them for their next foreign patient, as atonement.
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Yes that is the problem. People that need help can’t get it due to no funding
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There are people (personnel) failures, and there are system failures, at one particular level or another.
The real problem that I could see is that someone entering the system should not be sent to a hospital that was unprepared. I could have had a serious concussion, I have a history of at least two previous serious concussions and one was in the same place on my head. So I am thinking immediately that it should not be treated lightly, and even though I just want to stick a bandaid on it and forget about it, I do the procedure. And I find that the procedure doesn’t work.
There is a risk to send someone to a place that will be closed for another hour. And that has no skill in judging concussions and head injuries. That is not the problem of the staff at that hospital. Of course that could be a problem of taxi-diagnosis…..but it seems to me that the emergency system is flawed. The problem is that “emergency” should receive a quick and clear response, and it doesn’t.
Faced with such an abruptly angry patient, the staff should look immediately at how hard I was hit and consider sending me to a bigger hospital. Not advising, sending. Then their financial worry will be ended anyway. They didn’t do that at all, they just tended a cut and told me to go to a plastic surgeon. They need to be better trained. So do the taxi staff, if they are a part of the system. Rage can be a sign of trauma.
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It just took me two days to find the words that I needed to say to the hospital when I got there. I have had brain injuries and two episodes of amnesia, please check that. So there was some kind of problem there, maybe just light, but apparent to me now. That’s why they need to be better trained. People are not necessarily going to be able to tell you the things they need to tell you. If they had asked, I would have remembered.
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Maybe our brains can’t think about themselves in such moments.
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Three days. And longer to pay attention to the fact that it is not cute puppy behaviour in the dog but aggressive behaviour. Today he dragged me down a muddy slope, all the cats are getting injuries. I think we will have a quiet time today.
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Thanks for writing these follow ups Lehan. What you said about taxi diagnosis seems perceptive; it sounds as if you are en route to instituting a blanket policy of calling the ambulance in case of all and any head injuries. On the basis that your ability to make good judgements could be impaired. The ambos usually prefer people to be safe rather than sorry.
Before I exit mother hen mode, I’m happy for a more dog experienced person to put me straight, but strict training might help the dog a lot more than a quiet day. They are not deep thinkers and it’s kinder to them to make it quite clear what is expected and be very consistent about enforcing it.
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The dog trainer said it’s time to give alpha dog status to the poodle. He thinks he’ll stop a lot of this stuff if he is put at the top of the hierarchy and gets the first round of everything, including attention. Then he needs consistent training.
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Such a tale of woe; but it might have been worse. You might have run into this poodle.
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Hard not to see that one coming, Waz 🙂
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Hard not to hear that one coming, emm, and at a distance. I think Lehan’s plight might have been more clueless given the timing and circumstances of the impact with her glasses of the great big Poodle Pup of Hakodate.
Nice one, Warrigal. Putting your golden poodle up. I laughed at the line about sniffing arses looking for a new leader. 🙂
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The sniffing line was MJ’s. An instant classic!
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Thanks for the kind attribution, Waz. I’d completely forgotten the line.
Without you, I’d have no working memory left ! Like Mother, like son, I guess.
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A Golden Classic, Warrigal?
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Nonsense Emmjay. After The Op you’ll be as good as gold.
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I CAN see how getting a poodle into someone’s house would count as an act of sabotage. I didn’t know what kind of dog it was when I first saw it, and so became besotted without hearing the word POODLE. I didn’t put the word to the dog until he opened his mouth and howled. Impressive.
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Love the photo too. You obviously have a “flare” for self portraiture.
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It looks as if I have a speech bubble coming out of my head. You’ll never guess what it says….
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Ouch! (?)
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nooooooo.
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Things are a little fuzzy, but I believe it began with JESUS FUCKING LORD and then went a little downhill.
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I get a little pious.
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I’ve heard that the pious has been a real winner for Toyota. Good choice !
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I believe it was a Toyota in which I learned some of the more colourful words, yes.
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What a thing to collide over, Lehan! A sock! Whose was it, yours or the poo’s?
Sir Newton’s third law of motion comes to mind, here, Lehan, to wit:
“The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear. This means that whenever a first body exerts a force F on a second body, the second body exerts a force −F on the first body. F and −F are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. This law is sometimes referred to as the action-reaction law, with F called the “action” and −F the “reaction”. The action and the reaction are simultaneous.
Which, in effect means, from the negative event caused by the accidental poo collision, came the positive event of learning something (about the ways and tropes of the Japanese hospitals).
PS. Whether learning is always a positive thing, is discussed by Plato in one of his Socratic dialogues, called “Protagoras.”
“I don’t care about a scar…” Now that’s something I rarely hear! Very brave of you Lehan. Very Stoical. Words that one would expect to be heard from an ancient Greek or Roman soldier, in the blaze of bloody battle!
Hope you get well very soon, mate!
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Whose sock?Depends on who you ask, atomou – the poodle or the sock.
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…but after I hammered my finger black this morning I could at least see where it was all coming from. Pre-production disasters are upon me, fairly mild by usual standards…
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there is no one as alluring to Chaos as someone desiring to be organized.
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entropy
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That was a rather weird accident, Lehan, glad to see you all nicely bandaged…
My Milo will never cause any accidents, I just KNOW it. Bowral seems to be a paradise for dogs, being mainly Anglo most folk here are very kind to canines. When in a antique shop the other day, the owner came to tell us that don’t leave your little dog outside…
Another time we came out of a hardware store (not Bunnings, Big M) and could not find Milo, a nice shop assistant had taken him inside….too warm in the sun !
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Thanks Helvi. The poodle is very fond of standing on his back legs and throwing his arms around people. He does it whenever I’m slightly off guard. I’m expecting that he’ll punch the lights out on a few people before we’re done with his training.
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This sounds like a kangaroo. I wonder if you could offer us a lead on what sort of music this belligerent head banger is soothed by should any one of us venture by this location lost in the dark.
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Funny Lehan (below) and I were both posting simultaneous references albeit in different places in this document, Lehan describing the poodle and me in the throes of trying to imagine it. 🙂
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They bounce, Sandshoe. Against any surface available. They don’t need music, nor a reason.
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I had a similar situation with our West Highland Terrier this week. Head-butted the screen door, as the sliding door opened, damaging the little plastic wheels. Very ashamed of himself, and hid for 20 minutes. Another trip to the dreaded Bunnings, sans sausage sizzle!
Glad you survived, Lehan, with vision, both biological and spiritual, intact.
You’ll have to forgive us hospital folk for our questions. Humans are prone to all manner of complications when one starts to give them drugs, etc.
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Yes it is sensible M. I think I could have prepared them a bit better to begin with, left a little collage of blood down my face, or gone in clutching those tissues.
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It’s funny isn’t it how system failures can happen. The system overrides our common sense. I find the sound of an ambulance to be a totally sorrowful one, I’m sure a lot of people do, and nobody likes to hear one stop close by in the neighbourhood. But they become more common, picking up people who’ve been hit by flying poodles…and then on the roads when one is rushing by people don’t move their cars to the side of the road as quickly because it’s more frequent, because it no longer means life or death…and then the power of the ambulance is lost.
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Well done getting that sorted Lehan!
You have dogs! That sounds very settled. And kittens!
I think you are not living in a big city? I’m not suggesting that you want to hang out with ex-pats all the time, but those groups can be very good sources of important information. I dare say that even a Tokyo group would have some general info that could be relevant across most of Japan, if you could get in touch with them. It would take some of the hassle out of the survival things, leaving over plenty of day-to-day things for bumbling comfortably through I’m sure.
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Hi Voice,
This is a port town of 300 000 people, kind of isolated. I used to hang out with other foreigners when I lived in Kyoto, but I don’t come into contact with them here. I don’t mind trying to get the information in Japanese, but there are times (like when you’ve got a dog in one hand and a bunch of tissues in the other) when it’s a bit of a struggle to be patient.
I have a house, I have a financial problem and I have no job. And there are no jobs, for me anyway, so I’m a little bit stuck here and a little bit glad to be stuck here.
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(It’s not a day-to-day financial problem, it’s a loan default, so it isn’t something I can do much about, so I don’t mean I’m destitute, I’m just stuck.)
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(Maybe I will get thrown out of my house. Then, I will be destitute. But not so stuck.)
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Yes I totally get the thing about certain types of time when knowing the ropes is not just a question of patience, but of safety and potential long-term consequences. Injury is one, although usually if there are other people around they’ll help, and it really helps if you can manage not to injure yourself outside of business hours! Night time alone at home is a really good time to already have your medical ducks in a row. Sometimes there are organised groups, not just a loose group of fellow foreigners (which can also be handy for that sort of thing), with well-organised written information on those certain types of time. And about other less immediate but important things.
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You’re right Voice.
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The Tokyo groups are good, the Kyoto groups are good, the local groups of foreigners put their organizational skills into quite different outcomes, outcomes I find myself oddly outside of.
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Lehan I looked your city up on Google Earth and realised its location has an appearance something like where I live in Adelaide. When I was in Melbourne recently in the Backpackers I told some Japanese youth I have a friend who lives there and they lit up and said “It’s beautiful”. I don’t know about that, but … it did make me feel special to say I have a friend who lives there.
🙂
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I don’t have too good a rapport with local groups myself Lehan. Au contraire. It revolves around systematic angst I harbour, I reckon maybe. I don’t dig the politics.
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By that I don’t mean individuals. I mean the overall drift of organisations into the eradication of principles of humanity in favour of meeting goals racked up off a pie chart and I guess that is causing a lot of alienation.
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I understand what you mean about that shoe. As soon as the group gets out of simple practical action I start doodling and edging for the door.
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I was reflecting on the near misses and the almost misses and the could-have-been-the-opposite-way-around situations (you with shoes on when you oughtn’t and me without them).
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While the photograph is beautiful of you Lehan the bandage creates an appearance no doubt that section of your face is especially special. That is a hard won bandage. This becomes clear from the text. This is so familiar.
“And then there’s a questionnaire on a clipboard… ” Those I really do not like!
And I had to throw away a pair of shoes in a roadside bin in Melbourne and was in trouble from a woman in the street who would not have a bar of it I had no choice but to be barefoot! I almost started into an argument with her.
🙂
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Ditto on those clipboard questionnaires, sandshoe!
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What might Lehan write? What might any of us?
Help.
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I have a scar Lehan that I said about it didn’t matter. It matters a little bit. Other things definitely matter more. I wonder that your injury is probably causing you pain.
I suppose now you likely have to avoid The (famous for its medicinal properties!) Pigs Arms pink drink if you have been given medicinal compounds at the hospital?
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This ought be down in reply to Lehan!
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I have a scar underneath that eye Sandshoe, and one above would balance it quite nicely. I’ve never actually been punched in the face but three or four times I’ve had injuries that LOOK like I’ve been punched in the face, and I always go into the hospital feeling a little abashed. Yes, REALLY it was a poodle, I’m thinking.
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They were worried at the hospital that I would have a scar, and they made me promise to go to the big hospital tomorrow. I don’t care about a scar, but they told me many things about armies of infections thundering into my eye and damaging my eyesight, and so I have to go. Tomorrow they will do the same thing, same sized bandage, and then probably make me promise to go the next day….we get our medical experiences in frequent small doses here….I don’t know what the questionaire said, probably stuff about allergies and side effects again, they didn’t even bring it out when I went back…..
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One of the Emmlets went to Japan with the high school band. Got a severe case of vomiting and diarrhoea and the school to which they were visiting insisted that the Emmlet and another sick student should go to a small suburban hospital. Emmlet was there 2 days (on a drip for the first day). She recovered well and said that the doctors and staff were great but had little English and required a translator from the school. Hospital refused to charge for the stay and Emmlet thought that they and the school were embarrassed that visiting foreigners would get sick there.
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When you’re a foreigner they want to do things really properly. Double the protocol, double the regulations. But also double the care….
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I compromised, I found the internal medicine hospital the old people go to, it was almost empty, the doctor dabbed on a bit of mecurachrome and stuck a bandage over more of my face. No infection will dare to stick around, but there will probably be a scar. And I can rack up another identifying mark on my person, just in case there should ever be doubt.
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Old people’s hospitals, so practical. They shrug. They say they don’t have any of that really strong tape, only the ordinary tape. Maybe I should go up the road to the busy hospital? Where they’ve got a plastic surgeon guy? I know I’m in the right place. I shake my head. Here they’re gonna take my blood pressure. On the questionnaire they’re gonna ask how many coffees I have, how many cigarettes I smoke, if I drink or not, am I gonna be driving much. In this hospital they understand how we understand medicine.
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That’s a pretty sad story but modern life is just so much form and abiding by regulation. How’s your poodle, feeling guilty? Hope your eye is allright but the photo shows determination and survival pitched at a premium.
It seems strange to be hit by a poodle. Was he charging at you in some kind of mad frenzy to be taken for a walk?
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Yes, he was very excited about the walk and I was taking my time. We collided over a sock.
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He’s a big dog, long legs and long body and these last few weeks he’s stopped growing and is picking up body weight. So he’s suddenly more powerful, an adult body with a dumb puppy brain. Quite uncontrollable right now, all the character traits of a small poodle have been pulled together properly. It’s lucky that just-adult human animals don’t have as great a tendency to drag each other under the table and wrestle the daylights out of each other. As it is you don’t want to get in the path of one.
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Although I guess young people do do a fair bit of wrestling under tables.
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Could be that he saw that sock as a bit of an opportunity for a tournament.
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