KID ETHNIC IS WRITTEN BY:
saleem
who is currently moving around East Asia.
kidethnic@gmail.com
ALSO BY KID ETHNIC:
The Whiteboard Videos
Music+Whiteboard Markers+Friends=Good ways to spend weekends
SEAWEED BREAKFAST
A weekly column about Japan that I wrote for Glimpse.org.
The Annual Kid Ethnic Valentine
Because I love you so much.
Twitter
I twitter infrequently. But hope we can stay friends.
100JapaneseThings
A collaborative site to help folks (and each other) find Japanese stuff.
The Alpaca Song
I wrote and recorded this for you. Because you <em>need</em> a song about alpacas, don’t you?
Kid Bronchitis and the Bad Medicine · 13 March 05
Hey kids, guess who has bronchitis? Um, okay, maybe you’re right, but I have no way of knowing if Mandy Moore has bronchitis or not.
I was actually trying to get you to guess “the author”, silly.
(from the cameraphone)
If you squint, you can see that I’m wearing a surgical mask.
Here in Japan, when we get contagiously sick we wear sterile nylon on our faces. It help us keep our bacteria to ourselves.
Altruism. It’s a beautiful thing. And a holy-I-scare-the-crap-out-of-myself-when-I-walk-by-a-mirror thing.
But let’s move beyond appearances, friends. Let’s move on to side-effects. The doctor gave me a strong prescription because, he said, my blood oxygen was low.
(click picture for more details)
Above you see the cargo-pocketful of goods provided to me by my local pharmacist.
The aforementioned mask, a pack of antibiotics, a pack of painkillers, a couple sacks of not-delicious white powder, and a sticker. Yes, a sticker.
(You put the sticker on your chest, and it leaks medicine into your skin that helps your lungs expand more fully.)
When the pharmacist gave me all of the above, he said lots and lots of things. Very fast. In Japanese.
I understood the word “side-effect” (a loan word), but not much of what he said afterward.
I asked him to repeat more slowly.
The second time around, he pointed to his hand and let it shake like a junkie’s in an after-school special. This, I gathered, was one of many side effects.
Of the rest of the side effects he mentioned, the only other ones I understood were stomach aches from the pills and powder and “doki doki” from the sticker.
“Doki doki” is Japanese onomatapeia that can translate as “fear”, “nervousness”, “excitement” or, um, “thumpa-thumpa” (is that what American pounding hearts sound like?).
I’ve dutifully taken almost all the drugs.
Once I had dry heaves. And I’ve lost my balance a couple times. But it’s the sticker that’s scared me most.
Twice I’ve sat up really fast in my sleep and before I know it I’ve ripped the thing off my chest and flung it somewhere.
When I tried to remember what woke me up, it both times it seemed like it was because my heartbeat was so loud that it scared me awake.
Not in the “gosh, my heartbeat is so loud and that doesn’t seem safe”-sense, but in the “dear god, what is that infernal banging”-sense.
Rad, ne?
Positive sidenote:
When you’re wearing a surgical mask you don’t have to worry about trimming your mustache to look sharp for the ladies!
* * *
— DMAC 1966 days ago #
— Onika 1966 days ago #
— ayman 1966 days ago #
— GodTrilla 3000 1964 days ago #
— Mel 1963 days ago #
— caleb 1963 days ago #
— saleem 1963 days ago #
— Mel 1963 days ago #