MY SKIN, HIS TOOTH

The very first spot appeared on my chest. It was like a zit, but round and perfectly white. I would have ignored it completely, but I was feeling a little ill and I tend to be a bit of a hypochondriac. ‘What do you reckon this is?’ I asked my boyfriend. He shrugged. It was hard for him to sympathize: he had an impacted wisdom tooth that had been giving him hell for days.

We both went to work and did our best to forget our respective problems.  But six hours later I was feeling rotten and Peter’s tooth was killing him. I went with him to the dentist’s office, as he didn’t speak Japanese.

The dentist tried, but failed, to knock out Peter’s tooth, using a variety of tools that looked disturbingly pre-historic. For some reason, he didn’t anesthetize Peter before doing this.  I felt especially bad because I had recommended this dentist; he had always seemed perfectly kind and competent to me, but then all I’d had done was minor things. As we left the office, Peter was clutching his jaw and he was close to tears. His clothes were soaked with sweat. On our way to the station he said in a whisper I’ve never been in so much agony in all my *%&$-ing  life.

In a few hours time, I had a pounding headache and Peter’s jaw had swollen up to chipmunk size. I took him to the Tokyo Medical and Dental Hospital in Shinochanomizu, not far from where we both worked. The oral surgeon who saw Peter said that he could not do anything for him until the soft tissue swelling had gone down and the wound had healed, and that would take about a week. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Who did this to him?’  I told him and he shook his head. ‘That isn’t a job for a dentist, that’s a job for an oral surgeon. No one should have attempted to extract the tooth that way. It’ll have to be cut out and there’s no way I wouldn’t use a general anesthetic.’ He prescribed strong painkillers and something to reduce the swelling.

At the hospital, I saw my reflection in the bathroom mirror and I was horrified. I had broken out in spots for the first time in at least a decade. And they itched. On the train home, I began to feel terribly uncomfortable. Not only did my face itch, but my stomach and chest felt as though they were covered with mosquito bites. And my head hurt even more, and I felt hot and miserable even though it was late February and there was snow on the ground.

When I woke up the next morning after only four hours of bad sleep, I felt as though I was on fire. Doctors don’t make house calls in Tokyo, so I dragged myself up and pulled on my clothes. Which is when I suddenly noticed that there were spots all over my body, especially on my chest and back. When I got to the hospital, the young doctor examined me, then excused himself abruptly. From the next room, I could hear him flipping through the pages of a book. He came back in a few minutes later with a diagnosis:  You’ve got chickenpox!  I looked at him in astonishment. ‘Jeez. Really?’  ‘Absolutely. Textbook case.’ He sent me home with the advice to take aspirin and put baking soda in my bath.

By the time I was home fifty minutes later, I was exhausted. I could barely walk the half kilometre from the station to my apartment. My headache was of the all-encompassing variety, and the pain radiated down my spine into my sacrum. The spots seemed to be proliferating at an astonishing rate all over my chest, back, and face and down my legs and arms.

I hardly ever take medicine because I hardly ever need it. When I do, one aspirin will usually sort me out, but I took two on this occasion and they did nothing whatsoever.  I slept fitfully for a few hours, then got up and looked at myself in the mirror. My face was almost unrecognizable. My eyes were virtually swollen shut and the spots were in my nose and mouth. When I tried to drink, I realized that they were down my throat too. I had waist-length hair back then, and when I began to brush it, I screamed. There were open blisters all over my scalp and every one of them felt like a cold sore.

I panicked. First I called work and told them I could not come in, leaving a message for Peter to call me when he arrived. Then I called the hospital. It took the receptionist ages to page the doctor I had seen the day before, and when I told him what had happened, he sounded provokingly blasé. ‘That’s perfectly normal,’ he said in the kind of voice someone uses when he’s glancing at his wristwatch and longing to yawn. ‘But I itch all over!’ ‘Well, that’s perfectly normal too. Chickenpox, after all. Ha ha!’  I hung up.

It got worse. The spots were really blisters and they were horrid things, each one like a mosquito bite, but wet and oozing. I have never seen anything like it in my life. My face, chest and back looked appalling, like so much raw hamburger. My joints ached, and my head and spine were on fire. Clearly, I could not leave my apartment.

That evening Peter came to visit me. He and I had only been together for five months, and I dreaded having him see me the way I looked. I had tried to prepare him for it, but I was still ashamed. When he arrived, I had a wet tea-towel wrapped around my head and my body was covered from my chin to my feet in a robe. ‘Let’s see,’ he said gently. ‘Take it off and show me.’  ‘I can’t.’ ‘Come on, of course you can. Just take it off.’ I unwrapped the towel first, and saw his face register the shock. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he lied. Then I opened the robe and showed him the rest. ‘Jesus, you poor thing!’  He brought me more aspirin and we took our pills together. Peter’s jaw was far less swollen and his painkillers let him get eight hours of solid sleep. Which was a good thing, because the next morning he had to go to work.  ‘Are you sure you don’t need me?’ ‘No, no – I’ll be fine. I’ll just sleep all day.’

But I couldn’t sleep. The itching was as bad as pain, then it was worse. No sooner would I drift off into a fitful sleep than I would wake up, desperate to scratch myself. I had been warned not to scratch – to keep my hands off myself to the extent possible – but this proved hellishly difficult. Japanese futons are placed directly on the floor, so I took to rolling about, tossing and turning. This did not stop the itching, but it distracted me from it somewhat.

Peter came to visit me in the evening again, and by this time I was beginning to hallucinate from the lack of sleep. ‘You’ve got to get them to hospitalize you,’ he said. So in the morning I called the hospital again. My doctor was not there.  ‘I think I might need to be hospitalized,’ I told the nurse. ‘Oh? What is wrong with you?’ ‘I’ve got chickenpox, and I’m covered with spots. I can’t sleep and my head and back really hurt.’ The nurse told me that they had no beds available, and in any case, chickenpox wasn’t a serious disease. I hung up the phone in tears.

I spent much of that day in hell. I’d had so little sleep that I was hysterical. Pouring myself a glass of water I managed to break the glass and that sent me into a rage. I could not brush my hair properly, nor was there any way I could bring myself to wash my face or body. I had long since run out of baking soda, and the paste I made to spread over my torso had flaked and dried on my skin and was all over the place. I lay down and tried to sleep but no sooner had I dropped off than I was jerked awake by the fiendish itching. Or I would begin to dream that I was scratching myself until I bled; the blood would begin to trickle down, and as it did it itched and I had to scratch myself all over again.  A few times when I did manage to drift off to sleep, I woke up with a start and realized that I had been scratching myself.

The way that I got admitted to the hospital was serendipitous. Weeks earlier, my landlady had given me a telephone number for a doctor who wanted help correcting a manuscript he was planning to present at a medical conference. I’d had no intention of calling this doctor as I was far too busy at work, but for some reason, I had kept his number. I called the number more to be doing something than anything else, and got the doctor’s wife, who told me that her husband was a hifuka, or dermatologist. Hearing this, I began to laugh hysterically. I am amazed that she didn’t hang up on me straight away. ‘What is so funny?’ she wanted to know, and it all came spilling out:  the nasty, festering lesions, my pounding head and aching spine, my fever, my sleeplessness. By this time I also had a cough, and at one point I was laughing, crying and coughing all at the same time. The woman hung up the phone and called her husband, who called me back immediately. I gave him the number for the British Council, where my husband and I worked, and he called them for corroboration that I was as bad off as I claimed to be. Less than an hour after my phone call to the doctor’s wife, an ambulance was on its way to pick me up. 

When they came to get me, I insisted on walking to the ambulance, and I draped a shawl over my head and pulled it up over my nose. I would have been grateful for a burqa. The ambulance attendants, deprived of a chance to utilize their stretcher skills, insisted on using their siren, though I asked them not to:  Tokyo traffic is bad enough as it is. All the neighbors came out for the show. My landlady, who had no idea what a good turn she had done me by giving me the doctor’s number, came out of her dry cleaning shop to watch them load me in. ‘Maa! What in the world has happened to you?’ ‘Chickenpox,’ I wailed, just as they shut the door and the ambulance took off with a dramatic WAAIIEEE of sirens.

At the hospital, the first thing they did was put me on an I.V. I hadn’t been able to eat or drink much at all because of the sores down my throat, and I was dehydrated.  I had a question that had been bothering me for two days. ‘Will this go away? Completely?’ At the time, I couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to look that way forever, and it wasn’t a nice thing to think about. ‘Yes. As long as you don’t scratch it.’ Great.

Next, a young doctor was set the task of pasting me with ointment. ‘Put it on the lesions,’ the senior doctor said to him. The young doctor looked perplexed. ‘But – there’s no space in between them. She’s wall-to-wall pustules.’ ‘Well, just spread it everywhere, then.’ The young doctor used one jar of ointment on my shoulders, then another one on my back and another one on my face and chest. ‘I’ve never seen a case this bad,’ both doctors said, obviously impressed. ‘May we take some photographs, please?’ This used to happen a lot to me in Japan, especially back when foreigners were still comparatively rare. Strangers I didn’t know would sidle up to me and say ‘Can I pose with you, please?’ or ‘May I take your photograph?’ In fact, this happens to all foreigners in Japan; you don’t have to be especially beautiful or exotic to have someone ask you to pose for a photograph.  Frankly, I always found this business of having your photograph taken so indiscriminately profoundly annoying. But now, as a medical celebrity, I didn't mind being asked at all. I was special.

After I’d been smeared with ointment, the nurses gave me something to knock me out. That night my temperature reached 104 degrees. A nurse came to give me an injection and put in another I.V. Another one brought me an ice pillow and some lime jello, and placed her cool hand on my bumpy forehead. I loathe jello, but I will never forget how delicious it tasted that night, or how cool that nurse’s hand felt on my face. And when she eased the ice pillow under my head, I could have wept from relief and gratitude.

Four days later I knew all the nurses’ first and last names, what prefectures they were from, how long they had lived in Tokyo, what foreign countries they had visited, and their food preferences. I knew which ones could put in my I.V. without bruising me, which one was allergic to chocolate and which one was terrified of cockroaches, who was married and who was single. They, in turn, had learned that foreigners resident in Japan had to pay income tax and could not vote, that in America women – not men –  received chocolates, cards and flowers for Valentine’s Day. They were also thrilled to hear that that there was a growing trend in western countries for men to wash dishes.  They brought me Japanese magazines and got excited for me when Peter came to visit. ‘He’s cute! You are so lucky!’

Several friends from work visited me and were suitably impressed by how awful I looked. ‘You ought to take a picture of yourself like this. Just to remind yourself what you looked like.’ No chance. I didn’t want to be reminded, and besides, the doctors had already snapped me anterior, posterior, and lateral, even my face with the requisite black strip placed over my eyes to protect my identify. Somewhere in Japan, doctors may even still be gazing with awe upon my naked form.

When I was discharged on my fifth day, the swelling had gone down but I was still covered with sores. I was sick and tired of I.V.s and bland hospital food – tofu and potatoes in broth, soup, and cooked-to-death rice and vegetables. Every organ in my body had been x-rayed – adult-onset chickenpox can affect internal organs in rare cases – and I had gone through a dozen jars of ointment. I paid my whopping great hospital bill and took a taxi back to my apartment. Once there, I promptly lay down and slept for nine hours straight. Then I washed my hair for the first time in ten days.

One week after my discharge, I went with Peter to the Tokyo Medical and Dental Hospital where he was admitted to have his wisdom tooth excised. After helping him explain his medical history and get registered, I asked the doctor if I needed to stay. ‘No, no, there’s no need for you to be here. Just come back in four hours.’ 

Four hours later, I’d barely gotten out of the elevator when one of the nurses came running up to me all excited. ‘Where have you been?!  You weren’t at home or at work! We’ve been calling you for hours!’ ‘But – the doctor said I didn’t have to stay!’ Another nurse joined us and she was also agitated. ‘Okusan!’ she admonished me, addressing me as ‘wife’ even though I had told her Peter and I were not married, ‘you never should have left your husband like that! A wife has to stick by her husband, you should know  that!’ The doctor joined us now, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

‘Is Peter alright?’ I asked, suddenly fearful. The doctor shook his head. ‘Your husband is okay now, but I must tell you that we have all had a very difficult time.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘We calculated the anesthetic based on your husband’s height and weight. We did not make a mistake. But the root of the tooth was badly twisted, very crooked, and the surgery took much longer than we expected, and I am afraid that your husband came to while we were still trying to extract the tooth.’ ‘Oh my God.’ ‘Yes. We gave him more anesthetic, but that soon wore off, and after the surgery we gave him painkillers, but they don’t seem to have made any difference at all. So we gave him a higher dose, but I cannot ethically prescribe any more, it could poison him, damage his liver. Do you understand?’ ‘Yes – of course.’ ‘Well, I am afraid that your husband does not. Will you come and talk to him?’

Peter was lying in a hospital bed, looking dreadful. I approached him with caution. ‘Are you okay? I’ve just heard about what – ’ His voice was a mere whisper. ‘Get me more painkillers.’ ‘Peter, I’ve just talked to the doctor and he –’ ‘Get. Me. MORE.’ ‘Look, I know you’re in pain, but the doc – ’ ‘Get me more fucking pain pills! NOW!’

In the corridor the doctor and nurses were still hovering nervously. ‘He wants more pain pills.’ The doctor raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘I am sorry. I cannot prescribe them.’ ‘Please. He’s obviously in agony.’ The doctor scribbled something onto a pad. ‘Look, this is a placebo. You must go to the pharmacy and get these. Give them to your husband and tell him that they will take away his pain.’

At the pharmacy, I had to wait in line for over twenty minutes. Japanese hospitals are a lot like Tokyo trains:  hundreds of people, many of them sick, all crammed into a comparatively small space. ‘What is wrong with you, if you don’t mind me asking?' enquired the elderly woman just behind me in line. Normally, I would have found this very rude, but the way I looked, I could well understand her curiosity. ‘Chickenpox.’ ‘Oooh. You’re not contagious, are you?’ ‘Let’s hope not.’

When I got back to Peter with the medicine, he was fast asleep and snoring to beat the band. In the next bed over was a young Japanese man, tossing and turning, trying in vain to get to sleep through the racket. Hospitals are noisy places to begin with, and having Peter as a roommate was an unlucky break. The young man sat up in bed and cast a despairing eye in Peter's direction. ‘Nurse, do you have any earplugs?’ The nurse grinned and shook her head. ‘Why, I'll bet you snore too!’ she laughed. ‘Get used to it!’  And the poor boy went back to tossing and turning.

I sat next to Peter’s bed and waited for him to wake up, placebo pills at the ready. The nurses had placed his shoes at the foot of his bed and I stared at them. They looked strangely new and shiny, and several sizes too big to be Peter’s. Moreover, they had poncy little Union Jacks inside them, hardly the kind of thing Peter would be likely to buy. Surreptitiously, I looked over at the Japanese lad’s feet. They were huge. I crept over to the foot of his bed and stared down at the shoes there. Peter’s old, scuffed up work shoes!  Moving quietly, I exchanged the two pairs. The Japanese boy stirred in his fitful rest and stared at me glumly. He must have thought that it was bad enough to be suffering with a swollen jaw, to have to lie next to a fellow who was braying like a donkey. Now a woman was stealing his shoes.

An hour later, Peter was ready to be discharged. He was still in pain, but he had been given another prescription for pain pills.  ‘And here’s the tooth,’ the doctor said, producing a stoppered test tube. Inside there was something that looked like a piece of mangled flesh and bone.’ Peter looked at it and blanched. ‘Get that thing away from me.’  I put the tooth in my coat pocket and promptly forgot about it until the next day when I needed some money to buy flowers. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a few notes – and out came that test tube with its gory contents. It went skittering across the florist’s shop. The man who retrieved it for me watched me closely until I left the shop with my bouquet of roses.

The flowers were for the nurses who had been so good to me at the hospital. I had a box of chocolate chip cookies I had baked for them the night before, and a card. I went straight to the ward and saw my favorite nurse there, making notes in a chart. ‘Hello, Saito-san!’ She looked at me blankly. ‘May I help you?’ she asked rather coolly. I smiled at her and held out the roses and the box of cookies. ‘These are for all of you.’ She stared back at me, perplexed. ‘What room do you want me to deliver them to?’ ‘No, no – they’re for you! And for Nakayama-san and Morita-san, and the others.’ Another nurse joined us and stared at me. I smiled at her. ‘Hello, Morita-san!’ She stared back at me. ‘Oh – you speak Japanese?’ ‘Of course I do – we had conversations together! Don’t you remember me?’ Suddenly Nakayama-san gasped and clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘It’s Mary!’  Morita-san peered into my face and gasped too. ‘It is, it is!’  They both stood back, gaping. ‘You’re pretty! We had no idea you were pretty!’  Neither of them had recognized me. On the way out, I passed the young doctor. He didn’t recognize me either.

At the station, I discarded Peter’s tooth. I still had scabs all over my face, back, chest, neck, upper arms and thighs, and I was exhausted, but I felt remarkably good. Peter had his troublesome tooth out now and the nurses hadn’t recognized me. I was well on the road to recovery.