Foreign Body

I went to a Clinic in Tokyo with a Foreign Body...and left without it

I went to the doctor today to get my left thumb looked at. A few weeks back, it started hurting beneath my thumbnail, and a dark area appeared. As usual, I feared cancer at first. I’m at that age where everything feels cancerous. A cough? Lung cancer. A stomachache? Abdominal cancer. A runny nose? Nostril cancer. Constipation? Anal cancer, or whatever they call it. In fact, with very little imagination, I could link any pain anywhere in my body to that dreaded illness. And I’ve been blessed/cursed with more than enough imagination.

It could also be a splinter, though, I tried to convince myself. Probably a splinter. It better be a splinter. It was deep, so I waited for it to get pushed out on its own. And waited. And waited. That hasn’t happened, so I consulted a pro.

Japanese Doctor (English-speaking): Yep, it looks like you’ve got a foreign body.

Me: (Suppressing a laugh) Ya think?

He didn’t get the joke.

JD: Huh?

Me: (Then the words penetrated my sarcastic skull like a drill) Wait! A foreign body? You don’t mean a tumor?

JD: Oh no, no, no. Nothing like that…I don’t think. But, there is definitely something in there. Are you allergic to any local anesthetics?

I didn’t like the sound of that, either.

Me: Errrrr, no. Why? Should I be?

JD: (He laughed) We will have to remove it. It looks like it’s gotten infected.

Me: Ah. Annnnnnnd, how do you propose we do that?

JD: Well, we’ll likely have to cut a portion of the nail off, won’t we?

Me: I see.

JD: Sorry.

Me: (Under my breath) So am I.

He walked away and returned with this tray filled with instruments I associated more with dentistry, or maybe carpentry, than with general practice. And a very unpleasant-looking needle. The scene from Tim Burton’s Batman with that weaselly doctor who operated on Jack Napier’s wounded face and left him with a permanent disfigurement —a chelsea smile—came to mind.

‘You see what I have to work with here.’

It made me shudder.

JD: Now, hold still, OK? (He said this so routinely that I believed the procedure was routine, like taking temperature or blood pressure, so I didn’t flinch as he slid that mosquito-from-hell looking long-ass needle under my thumbnail.)

Me: Er, doc, I can feel that, you know.

JD: Uh-huh, just hold still, please.

Me: I said, I can feel that, doc!

JD: Just a moment more—

Me: Geezus! I FEEL THAT SHIT, MOTHERFUCKER!!

He and his two nurses jumped back in shock at my outburst. I’m sure everyone in the office, including the mob in the waiting area, heard me. I didn’t give a shit. I expected blood to come spouting out of my nail like a geyser any second and was surprised when it didn’t.

JD: (Smiling, but not happy.) You’re such an American. So dramatic. Japanese have patience. Patients must have patience.

He chuckled with pride at his anglicized おやじギャグ (Old Man Joke).

I stared daggers at him.

JD: Come on, Mr. McNeil, please be a patient patient.

He was still amused at his own cleverness. I bet he tells all his comrades at the izakaya (pub) tonight about the screaming gaijin he had in his office today. That all he’d done was skewer me with a few kushi (yakitori sticks), and I was crying like a bitch.

Me: You’re a regular riot, doc.

JD: Sorry. I’m almost done. Let me just—

Me: You’re serious, aren’t you? Mannnn, you are sticking a needle under my fingernail! Have you ever heard of the Geneva Convention?? This procedure is a method of torture in like 195 countries. If I were a captured American spy, I’d be telling you every state secret I know right the fuck now!

He was getting a big kick out of this. And when he translated my words for his assistant and nurses, they, too, got a kick out of torture.

Sadists.

JD: Come on, let’s get this over with. (He glanced at the wall clock as if to say, ‘OK, playtime is over!’)

Me: Sorry if I wasn’t clear, doctor. You. Are. Not. Sticking. That. Needle. Under. My. Nail. EVER. Again.

He read my expression and finally took me seriously.

JD: OK, um, wait here.

He disappeared for a solid 10-15 minutes, leaving me alone with my imagination and his instruments of torture while (I could overhear) he helped one of his fucking patient patients. I tried not to fume.

Instead, I thought of the litany against pain from “Dune” and what the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Mohiam told Paul Atreides when she had the Gom Jabbar at his neck:

“A human can endure any pain. Our test is crisis. This one (Gom Jabbar) kills only animals.”

“I’m not an animal,” I told myself. “If the Japanese can take it without crying out and complaining, so can I! Time to man up, snowflake.”

The doctor returned with his entourage.

JD: So, are we ready now?

He said this as if this was the norm, and I’d just needed a little time to think it through. Which, turned out, was actually exactly what happened. Hmmm. Maybe I have more in common with his patient patients than I realized.

Me: Sure, doc, go ahead, do your thing.

In my head, I chanted: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and--”

Me: Fuck this! Fuck this! FUCK THIS! STOP!!

Damn. Maybe I am an animal.

He put down the needle and picked up an instrument I did not even want to watch him use on me for fear it might trigger night terrors. I looked away. He jammed this thingamajig under my nail, dug around, yanking shit out like he was dealing with a nerveless human being, or perhaps one under total anesthesia. Then suddenly, he freed something.

JD: ほら!(Well, what have we here!)

I turned to look just as he tossed a tiny blood-soaked something or other on a metal tray. The sight of my blood was as alarming as the sound this thing made when it hit the tray. It sounded solid and dense like my extracted wisdom tooth did when my dentist, using similarly sadistic-looking tools, had done the honors on me two weeks earlier.

The older you get, the more you lose shit.

Me: なにそれ?? (What the hell is that??)

I was so shocked I’d gone native. At least it wasn’t cancer. I have never heard of a doctor yanking a malignant tumor out of a thumbnail.

JD: It’s a foreign body!

Me: You don’t say. It looks like part of my foreign body, doc! You sure that’s not a piece of my elbow or shoulder? You sure were deep enough in there!

He chuckled. It seemed he liked my sense of humor even when I was not joking.

JD: No, it’s not a bone. It’s an encapsulated foreign body.

He picked it up and examined it with tweezers. It looked disgusting.

Me: So, we’re done?

JD: I hope so because you’ve scared away half my patients! The nurse will finish up here.

That night, I was kicking it with Miki and told her about what happened at the clinic and why my thumb was gauzed up and would need to remain so for a few days at least. She’d never heard the phrase “foreign body,” so naturally, she didn’t get the double entendre. And there’s no better way to kill a joke than by explaining it.

She thought “foreign body” was an odd way of saying “gaijin patient.” I gave her the side eye at that. Then I told her what my iPhone said, that it also means “any object originating outside the body of an organism.”

In this case, I explained, it was a splinter (or whatever the hell it was that got lodged beneath my thumbnail), but it could be a toy a child shoves in their ear or nose, or if you swallow something indigestible like a rock, something a doctor needs to remove.

Miki: Like that stuff in your nose? (She gestured like someone picking their nose and flicking away the icky contents.)

Me: Yeah, I guess, because it catches dust, pollen, and stuff. And, eww!

Miki: So that thing in your thumbnail was a foreign body, too? Ah! I get it!! (And laughed belatedly). Gaijin in Japan are foreign bodies. And Japan is a thumbnail!!

Me: (Grinning, starting to see where she was going with this. Not sure I dug it, though.) Uh-huh.

Miki: Wait! What if Japan is the nose?

Me: Japan, the nose?

Miki: Yeah, it’s like a, what do you call it? A metaphor, right?

Me: What are you talking about?

Miki: Foreigners come in Japan and make us uncomfortable, right? And Japanese people want to…(she made that booger-picking / flicking gesture again, giggling at her own wit).

Me: Who you calling a booger??

I tried to keep a straight face, but underneath the humor lay the truth: I most certainly did make Japanese people uncomfortable every day. Many! Shit, I could be a real irritant, sometimes. Especially with my articles in their papers.

I imagined the doctor, his retinue of nurses, and his patient patients were definitely irritated by my hollering and gaijin-ing in the clinic. I bet they wished they could flick me away, foreign body and all, and I laughed at my own おやじギャグ (Old Man Joke).

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