About a week after my 24 hour stint with the portable EKG device, Mina went in to talk to the cardiologist, to see what the verdict was. I could have gone in; but since she's been a long time friendly acquaintance of the doctor in charge (and is there five days a week) it was decided that I needn't be present. While all physicians in this country need to have at least a basic command of the English language, most of them won't speak it - or will go out of their way to avoid needing to. Fair enough. She could simply stop in and have a chat with him at their mutual convenience, and find out what was going on... without my 'gaijin-ness' getting in the way. In any case, Mina insists on accompanying me to all of my medical appointments, so that there is no space for mis-communication or misunderstanding. She's seen enough in her three decade-plus year career to know that things are best not left to chance. This is her territory; it's always a better idea to defer to the judgement of the resident senior nurse.
"Nurse's orders. We can't refuse."
Indeed.
We were both more than a little relieved to hear that, while there were some minor irregularities in my pulse recorded over the day that I was being remotely monitored, the head cardiologist's assessment was that he didn't think it represented anything to be overly concerned about - at least at this point.
Mina had been checking my heart rate every day, and said that things appeared to have largely returned to normal shortly after the funeral business wrapped. I felt fine. I was back to hauling my arse the nearly 10 km up the canal and back four or five mornings a week, and using Mina's magnetic spin bike on the days that it decided to piss down with rain. She figures that the fluctuations have something to do with accumulated stress. With the pandemic's ebbs and flows, and abundant uncertainty in almost everything...who hasn't been feeling the crunch these days?
The cardiologist told her that he thought she worried too much.
That served to ease my mind a little, at least. In any case, while there would be no need for medication or follow-up tests right now, said 'irregularities' would be duly noted - and added to my slowly growing list of shadowy medical issues and 'blips' that would need to be watched and checked on periodically, as I advance in years. I wasn't particularly health conscious in my younger days. I did what I liked, and had a fucking good time. Mostly, anyways.
Alas, the joys of aging.
About a week later, I was back in to have my full physical...the annual 'ningen dock' (human dry dock) medical examination that I have to contend with early every autumn. Owing to the COVID situation, appointments had been staggered to keep the number of people queueing up to be examined at any given time to a minimum. The crowd in there was indeed sparser than usual.
I told Mina that I wanted to forgo the ill-fitting Japanese pyjamas and under-sized slippers that we're usually required to wear at these going overs (the reason being that I didn't want to have to use the narrow and poorly ventilated locker room with lord knows who else and their potential virus), so she phoned ahead and explained 'our' concerns. They told her that it would be fine if I just wore light shorts, a t-shirt and flip flops from home this time around. I imagined that I mustn't have been the only one with these concerns - they'd apparently had a bit of a worrying incident with some infected people over there a couple of months before, and were now taking extra precautions to try to prevent a recurrence.
Still...it seemed that everyone else there that morning had thrown caution to the wind, braved the tiny, stuffy changing rooms, and dutifully suited up in the health check area's obligatory hospital issue pyjamas and slippers. On a positive note, the waiting examinees were all masked up, but the odd nose was hanging out. Of course, no one - staff or patients - bothered to say anything to anyone about it. There didn't seem to be any extraordinary air of concern or caution in the place. Just business as usual. Nobody wants to rock the boat.
The natives are masters of compliance - halfhearted and careless as that may be.
Of course, I'd have to point the exposed nose crew out to Mina, and she'd have to shush me, and give me stink eye.
She'd admonish me in hushed tones."Shhh! Some people can understand what you're saying! They might hear you!"
"Good. That's the point. This is supposed to be a fucking hospital. How many times do people need to be told? Assholes."
"You're not the mask-police! Don't cause trouble!", etc., etc.
It looked like I was the only one 'being difficult'. As usual.
Everything went off without a hitch, except for a minor conflict that erupted in the hearing test area over a poor explanation of when I needed to press the button in the 'ping testing' booth. It seems the hospital has started enlisting part-timers from an employment agency to fill some of the more sundry positions in the health check area. These temp staff are easily identifiable, as they are done up in clerical/office-lady style grey skirt and vest ensembles - as opposed to standard hospital uniforms. Most of them manage to do the tasks they are assigned at least adequately, with a minimum of enthusiasm... or acumen.
To make a long story short, I misunderstood (or couldn't remember) whether I needed to hit the 'ping timer' button as I heard the sound in the headset, or after it had finished, so I just guessed - and clearly botched it up. When I came out of the soundproof testing booth, the attendant part timer - by all appearances, a gaijin - possibly a Filipina in her late twenties or early thirties - got excited and told me (in Japanese) that I had, 'failed the test', and implied something to the effect that I was either clinically deaf, stupid - or both. Needless to say, I didn't appreciate her tone. I was pissed off that the 'ping' button business hadn't been explained to me more clearly before I started (though I really should have known - I had done it every year for over a decade).
Anyways, I felt stupid, and couldn't resist saying something nasty and dismissive. Maybe I called her an idiot, and told her to stay away from me. I can't remember. Nothing too horrible...but seemingly bad enough. She was unfazed, and just gave me a look...essentially waving me off. These women are tough as nails, and have no shits to give. Mina suggested a do over, and I said that I wanted 'the temp' swapped out for someone else. She seemed more than happy to comply. I'm sure she hated me as much as I hated her. This actually happens between gaijin over here more than you'd think. Everyone thinks they have more of a right to be here than everyone else. When another gaijin shows up, they suddenly feel a little less 'exceptional'. Or threatened? In any case, another attendant took her place, I did it again, and everything went down as it probably should have the first time.
I'm pretty sure I was in the doghouse with Mina for at least a couple of hours after that. I have a penchant for flaring up and over-reacting. Something hits me the wrong way, and 'boom!'
Expletives and middle fingers. Lots of attitude. Then I feel kinda bad... but it's too late.
Probably not my finest hour.
Again.
We got the results back in the mail just over a week later...though Mina was able to preview most of them (particularly my blood and urinalysis results) via the hospital's computer network within a day or two. Aside from the minor heart blip thing, there was essentially no bad news...which translates as good news. I was glad to be done with it all for another year. Fingers crossed that the fates would continue to favour us, and keep us out of there - at least as patients - for the foreseeable future.
Now, if I could just get something for my hair trigger assholiness. It doesn't look like weed will be legalized over here any time this century, though. I'd try meditation...but I don't have the patience. I think I'd need to down a bunch of pot gummies before attempting anything like that. The running works to some extent...but that seems to taper stress more than reduce my a-hole tendencies. The end result is, I'm a less tightly wound asshole, with better cardiovascular health.
By the end of September, the last of the year's heat and humidity had finally given way to some 'pleasant' early autumn weather. While the evenings and mornings were getting darker and just a bit cooler, the afternoons were still warm and pleasant.
Under normal circumstances, this would be the time of year to open the windows and all of the sliders in the morning to air the place out. After having everything closed, and the A/C on all summer, a season's worth of stale air needed to go. In a month it would be getting a bit too chilly to really consider it.
There was nothing normal about any of the circumstances of this year, though. While we could open the front, south-facing sliders, we dare not open anything on the north-side - or attempt to turn off the noisy kitchen range top fan - unless we fancied at least half of our place smelling like Fidel Castro's arsehole within ten minutes. The used up old slag next door was into her third month of residence, and obviously going for some kind of record. I'd never experienced anything like this in my life. I mean, I've been a smoker. Lived with smokers. It had never got to me like this before. This was next level. It was like she was trying to break some kind of record for consecutive filterless old man cigarettes smoked per day.
I'm up at five am most mornings. It seemed like our kitchen would start smelling like an ashtray at around six-thirty, so that's when I'd have to turn on the range top 'white noise machine'. The extra room in the back - my 'classroom' - would start smelling like Castro's tailpipe shortly before seven. This was going on all day, every day. The rotary fans we had set up just weren't doing the trick, either. They'd agitate and push the cruddy air around; but it would still be there. Out of desperation, I'd tried hitting the room with a febreze deodorant mist; but those things aggravate my asthma, and just replace one foul odour with another.
Mina and I had a gentleman's wager on how long the human cigarette filter would last over there. Would she drop dead of smoke inhalation... or move first? I figured that she'd be there a year, tops...and be gone by July or August '21. No one ever stayed in that apartment for more than eight or ten months. Mina was less optimistic. She figured that (with our luck) she could be the one to actually stick it out for the long haul. We had even tossed around the idea of moving...but there was no guarantee that the next place would be any different. We could end up with kitchen and balcony smokers on either side...in addition to taking it up the arse to the tune of thousands of dollars in moving expenses and deposits just for the privilege.
Low on optimism, and with our eyes on the long game, we finally decided that we were going to need to be a bit more pro-active - so we gave in and went down to Yamada-Denki, (the local electronic appliance 'super-store' we patronize for all of our 'tech' needs), looking to invest in some technology to alleviate our misery.
Air cleaners, ionizers and plasma-cluster units are all the rage over here - so there were plenty of options to navigate through - most of them running between four and seven hundred bucks a shot.
Ouch.
Mina managed to corner a salesman (quite a feat on a weekday afternoon), and explained our quandary. It seems that of all the unpleasant smells that plague Japanese households - pets, cooking and food related odours, senior citizens (no kidding - the 'smell of old people' is a thing over here, and is mentioned prominently in all the sales brochures) - cigarette and tobacco related stink is just about the hardest one to conquer.
After looking at half a dozen potential options, we finally settled on a small, table-top 'Triple Deodorant' plasma-ionizer unit called a Plazion, made by Fujitsu.
According to the literature, this would be our ticket - though the salesman went to lengths to tailor our expectations by emphasizing the particularly stubborn nature of cigarette stink, and that while this little device would indeed go some way toward cleaning the air, it might not completely eradicate the odour. To pull that off, he suggested that we also buy a plasma-cluster air cleaner, and use the two machines in tandem. An expensive proposition, to be sure...but more likely to be effective. A little rich for our blood. I had my eye on a new 4K panel and 7.1 sound system within the next couple of years. I didn't wanna be squandering our home theatre fund on un-fun things like air cleaners.
As anything seemed better than what we were currently contending with, we decided to take our chances with the one smaller unit, laid out two hundred and twenty bucks, and packed our new acquisition home.
To shorten another potentially long story, while it may indeed 'clean the air' (who can really tell, anyways?), and eliminate the 'musty old blanket aroma' of any nearby senior citizens, it didn't really eliminate the smell of Madame Fidel's nicotine bum-bum in my classroom...at least not to any really noticeable degree. I could still tell precisely when she was in her kitchen blowing plumes of smoke up her range top - which was essentially from dawn to midnight, every day.
Perhaps, if you imagine hard enough that something is working, maybe it finally 'kind of' does?
I tried hard to believe that it was at least removing toxins. My doctor student mused over it when he first saw it, too. It looks nice sitting on top of our printer, in front of the window. It's shiny and white, and has five settings, and a timer. It makes a bit of a blowing noise on its highest setting, which can be slightly distracting if I'm teaching. He was as curious about it as I had been earlier in the week. I clicked it on at the beginning of his class, and waited for his verdict. He cracked a half smile and said that he couldn't tell if there was any cigarette smell or not. That could be the result I was looking for.
I insisted that I could still smell something. I turned it off for a couple of minutes...then turned it on again.
He shrugged. "Maybe it's working. Or maybe your nose is ultra-sensitive".
Notwithstanding the blowing noise, he seemed genuinely unruffled. Knowing that we'd just shelled out two hundred and twenty bucks for what could arguably be an ineffective table top noise maker, I doubt he would have mentioned it he thought it was. A true gentleman.
Finally, it was better than nothing. At least that's what I had to keep telling myself.
He had his lap top set up and ready to go within seconds of his arrival. It's nice to see someone so focussed and organized. For the last month of Saturday mornings, we had been neck deep in work on the English language text for a relatively short paper on a new leukemia treatment that he was preparing to submit to a low impact Japanese medical journal. With the deadline fast approaching, there were bigger fish to be fried in our 90 minute session than whether there was any lingering cigarette odour near the window, or if my new toy was effective, or a complete waste of time and money .
Later that week, Mina was on the phone with Mayumi, and casually mentioned that we'd been struggling to resolve the issue of our neighbour's second hand smoke stink...and that we'd even gone so far as to buy an ion deodorizer, only to find that it had little practical effect. Mayumi told her that she had a spare Sharp plasma-cluster air cleaner at her place, and that we were welcome to it if we liked. It was set up in her late husband's room; but had been largely unused for whatever reason. It seemed that he had considered it a waste of electricity, or something to that effect. She said she'd even bring it over if we wanted. Mina has a thing about accepting used stuff; but after discussing it, we decided to take her up on what I considered to be a generous offer. When we were at Yamada, we'd priced out a newer model in the same series at almost five hundred bucks.
She dropped it off the next day, and Mina gave it a thorough going over. It was in good shape, and looked almost 'new' - though when we researched the model number online, we found that it was actually nearly ten years old. This is considered the end-of-the-line for most major appliances here in J-land. When we turned it on, Mina leaned over it and said that she could smell her sister's 'eau de toilette' spraying out when she activated the unit's plasma-cluster blower. She made me stand over it and check. I could smell something of a 'feminine nature' there - though not particularly strong. It bugged Mina enough that she decided to open everything up, and inspect all of the filters. To eliminate the offensive 'elder sister odour', we'd need to replace two of them (there are three), which would cost us close to a hundred bucks. Better than five hundred bucks, anyways. Hopefully the unit still had a few years left in it.
With the new filters in, whatever trace perfume smell that had been there was essentially gone, and everything seemed to be in good working order.
When all was said and done; though a bit noisy, both machines running in tandem actually did seem to make a dent in the stench coming through our closed north windows. That didn't solve the issue of the stink seeping into our kitchen through the range top when the fan was shut off, though. As the autumn moved towards winter, keeping that fan on all day would effectively suck all the warm air out of our kitchen and living room. It was also a white noise machine. We'd have to get used to a constant din coming out of the kitchen.
Getting most of the stink out of the classroom was something of a victory, nonetheless.
"I feel like I wanna send that used up old slag the bill for all this stuff..." I mused.
Mina laughed. "Yeah. Good luck."
"Just watch...now that we've spent all this time and money to solve her stink problem...she'll move."
Strangely prophetic words.
Less than three months later; as suddenly as she had come...she was gone.
TO BE CONTINUED....
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