ARGH * scratch scratch *

Yep. I got it. Damn. And this soon... and without even remembering touching any! There must have been some trace of it on a table or something.

What the hell I'm talking about?

Urushi allergy!

Something I might need to mention at this point: Urushi, the lacquer with which the Japanese do these very beautiful things I am here to learn to do, is the sap of a tree by the nice name of 'Toxicodendron vernicifluum', which is as the name says, toxic. Not toxic as in 'dying a painful death', but toxic enough for a 'scratch your skin off rash'.

Pretty much everybody who starts to work with Urushi gets it, some worse, some only a little. One of my teachers for example, Mr. Ogawa, said he had it so badly that both of his hands and arms were completely swollen. For me it started with something that looked just like a small scratch on my lower right arm, but when I went to shower yesterday morning and dried off afterwards it started itching and when I scratched, not realizing what it might be, it became red and over the day started to swell. Now it covers part of the inside of my right, lower arm. It's nothing actually dangerous but it itches a lot and is very annoying. I showed it to my teacher on the first day already but when he saw today that it had grown a little overnight, he said I should better go to a hospital so I could get some proper medicine before going to Kyoto for the 'Golden Week' holiday that will start tomorrow.

Alright, so to the hospital. There the fun started.

I couldn't go myself by bike, because I didn't know where to go and didn't really have enough time on my hands, either since the hospital was supposed to close at 12:00. Strange? Just wait.

Also, the idea of going on my own to a Japanese hospital with my little knowledge of Japanese and the Japanese's little knowledge of English didn't sound like the number one thing on my 'wanting to do' list. But there was a very nice senpai (an older student of the same course) who said she would drive me. So great of her! So we went to the hospital, arriving at 11:30, with time to spare.

Now, the whole idea of a hospital closing in the middle of the day was strange enough to me, but I was told that it's a small, private hospital and that today was the day they did surgeries in the afternoon, so alright, I could understand that. When we were at the hospital though, it was closed. It would also be closed for the whole next week.

We went back to school and then one of my tutors, Chiaki, went off with me again, this time driving to a hospital specialized in skin ailments. We made it just in time for 12:20, because at 12:30 it was scheduled to close for surgeries in the afternoon. Yes, this one too. Because it seems that around here, all smaller, private hospitals close at one and the same day in the week for an afternoon for surgeries. Which means, if you get sick then, you need to wait until they're open again (which in this case would be after Golden Week). Or, if you're really sick, you get yourself into emergency care into a big hospital, somewhere a long way away. Do I really need to be European for that to not make sense to me?

Also somehow it seems there are no doctors operating on their own outside of a hospital, which seems such an impossible thought that I really have to ask about again, maybe I just understood them wrong.

Anyway, we went to a third hospital, which, oh wonder, was opened! Alright, so very enthusiastically we entered and were immediately presented with a form to fill. Name, address, birthday, do you smoke, do you have allergies, do you take medicine and all the other usual blabla. Then we sat down and waited.

Then we tried out the foot massage machines, which were fun.

Then we were called in by a nurse who took my weight, height and blood pressure and somehow was impossibly impressed by my green eyes (really cute, that one). We went back out again and waited a bit more. Then Chiaki took photos of me using the foot massage machine. Then more waiting. Then I was finally called in to the doctor, who agreed with my teachers that this probably was an Urushi allergy and prescribed me a creme and pills. We went to the pharmacy, and gave the prescription to the people who told us to... wait.

By now we were seriously hungry because it was 14:00 already and we had not had any lunch. So we bought something small to eat, waited and filled another form. A form which asked exactly the same questions as the one we had filled in the hospital already. What on earth they want to achieve or control with that I cannot guess. But we got my medicine through it, which was finally something.

So, now I have pills that will make me sleepy but also make the itching go away as well as creme who should stop the rash from spreading any further as well as make it go away eventually.

Aaaaalright.

And on top of the ca. 60€ for hospital and medicine I also paid a whooping 450€ today for materials and tools for my Maki-e course. That doesn't really have to do with the hospital at all, but of course it has to do with the stuff that brought me into this trouble in the first place: urushi!

Cheers!