Hi, I’m not sure whether I want advice or just want to vent here, but here’s the story. (Excuse my English, it’s my 2nd language)
I and my family live in a rural town in Hokkaido. It’s a town of 17k people, has a big hospital too as it also caters patients from neighboring towns.
Last summer, there was an influenza outbreak in town. My kids and my husband got sick (cough and fever). My kids’ doctor, just told me it’s “daijoubu, flu jannai” without the tests. They were okay a few days later.
But as for my husband, it’s a different story.
When my husband came to Japan, he had lost a lot of weight. His eating habits were the same, actually better than when we were in our home country, but he got an extremely physically exhausting job here taking care of a barn so we figured it’s because of that. But he didn’t feel well with occasional fever, insomnia, cough, so we went to have a general medical checkup. Blood tests, xray, urine tests went back normal.
More than a year later, he got sick during this summer influenza outbreak. We went for a checkup at the town’s hospital. The doctor almost concluded it’s just because of the flu that’s been going around when I told him my husband’s always sick and he lost 10kgs since he came to Japan last year. That’s when the doctor ordered a CT Scan, Xray, and blood test, turned out his lungs were cloudy and doctor said it’s probably bacterial or viral infection. He prescribed antibiotics and cough and fever medicines. He also referred us to the university hospital in the city about 2 hours away from our town.
In that city hospital, they did ct scan, xray, blood and sputum tests. Sputum was negative. He had to do it 3 times, and all negative. They also stopped the antibiotics after 2 days of taking because my husband was allergic (we didn’t know this).
They did the x-ray, ct scan and blood test two more times. This was every week. The doctor couldn’t provide an exact diagnosis and so there was no medicine prescribed. So yeah, my husband had to endure days and sleepless nights of coughing.
I turned to the internet to find meds, and bought some herbal capsules which I think helped because the xray and ct scans improved and a month after his lungs cleared.
And now, another flu outbreak. My kids got sick again, but doctor said daijoubu, so okay. After 2 weeks, kids got better but my husband started to get sick again with fever, cough, shivers.
He went for checkup a week later. The doctor just gave him fever medicine, didn’t check his lungs, nothing. He requested for blood tests and xray, the doctor told him to just come back a week later.
I think the herbal capsule magic didn’t work this time. My husband’s getting worse. Nonstop coughing, high fever, shivers, dizziness.
So yeah, that’s our story. I don’t know if the doctor’s treatment is like this because we’re foreigners and “foreign bodies work differently” or this is really Japan’s medical practice.
We actually don’t know what to do this time. We’re considering just him going back to our country but he’s too sick to do that. We also can’t do an online checkup with a doctor from our country since the hospital don’t give us copies of his xray and ct scan results. We tried asking before but they can’t.
by Entire_Speed5068