My friend Rei came to the hospital, and the nurses took us to the room where my doctors and surgeons were waiting on a lower floor. My surgery was early in the morning, with the initial procedures starting around 8:30 am. From 5 am until 7 or 8 pm, I couldn’t have any liquids, including water. Starting at midnight the night before the surgery, I couldn’t have any more food. I was sure that I would be able to get lots of rest and be well taken care of. I wasn’t really worried about getting surgery “in another country,” because I’d been to the hospital in Japan before and had a really positive experience. We scheduled a date, and a month or so later, I was being checked into the hospital to get surgery. I was so relieved to get the phone call about that, I jumped up and down outside after the call. I went back for more visits, tests, and scans I got claustrophobic on my way into the MRI machine and couldn’t complete the checkup, but a CT scan I took was enough to show the doctors that I had inflammation from the gallstones and needed surgery. My coworker introduced me to a hospital where her friend works, and it was through that connection that I chose Toho University Medical Center, Omori Hospital (東邦大学医療センター大森病院) for the operation. However, the pain didn’t just “go away,” and so this year I finally decided to do something about it. I didn’t want surgery and I didn’t want to keep taking medicine indefinitely, so I ended up stopping the medication when I ran out, and hoped the gallstone problem would just go away after I’d “readjusted” to my life. Long story short, the type of gallstones I had couldn’t be fixed with medication, only eased a little. I went to the local doctor, and he checked me for gallstones and found that I had a lot of them. A month or two later, I had this pain in my gut like food poisoning–or at least I thought it was that, although I’d never had food poisoning before. I was rushed home for a month when that happened, and when everything had settled down I went back to Waki to continue teaching on JET. My gallbladder pain started three years ago, after a car accident took my mom and my grandma in 2014. Rei made a chart that showed where I was in the hospital! The Start of the Gallbladder Problem (Good to know that even post-anesthesia Stephanie can still use her Japanese, even if English felt easier for the first couple of days). Even right after my surgery, it didn’t turn out to be a problem. I thought that if I had any trouble in Japanese or couldn’t communicate what I wanted, she could help, since she’s bilingual. I asked my friend Rei if she could come as my stand-in “family member” throughout the surgery process. Since I can speak Japanese, I didn’t have any trouble communicating with the nurses. More on the costs below–but compared to the US, it wasn’t bad at all. I think there were options that cost a little less, but when my doctor asked what I’d like to do, I asked for his recommendation and he recommended the newer rooms, so I took him up on it. This time, I shared a room with three other ladies, in a newer area of the hospital. The last time I was hospitalized in Japan, I had pneumonia, and I think the reason I had a private room is because that was the only one open. They put me under general anesthetic, and so I was completely out from when I was told, “We’re going to give you the anesthetic now” to the second I woke up. In the keyhole version, they make four small incisions and “inflate” your middle with gas to do the operation. The older kind of operation, an open surgery, involved making a single, longer cut and removing the gallbladder that way here’s a small illustration of the differences between the two. The surgery is called a laparoscopic (keyhole) cholecystectomy (in Japanese: 腹腔鏡下胆嚢摘出術), in which the entire gallbladder is removed. reveal what it cost on Japanese national health insurance.explain when the gallstone problem started. Also like before, I understood Japanese, and so most of the hospital experience was in Japanese unless my friends were visiting, which means that I can’t comment on the English side of things. Just like before, I was very happy with my care, and I’ve been meaning to write about my experience. Last month, I was hospitalized for the second time in Japan, this time for gallbladder surgery.
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