2014.06.16

Latest news from Michiyoshi *Originally posted in Japanese on June 16th , 2014

The cough I reported on before was identified as whooping cough on June 13th
extremely furious, saying “We are in a hospital, and your patient was complaining of a
violent cough. I couldn’t sleep at night for a week. Why, for three weeks, you didn’t suspect
I had whooping cough, a disease spread among adults actually!” Again, my words of protest sounded in vain... A nurse in charge of me started coughing, too.
Then I asked the opinion of my old elementary school classmate Nobuhiko Okabe, now the director of the Infectious Disease Surveillance Center of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases – he sometimes appears on TV. According to him, “Doctors specialized in infectious disease would immediately think about whooping cough, but for other doctors, it wouldn’t be a high priority in their mind.” I started to accept his explanation and my anger settled. But...
With this matter, I fully realized that in this world, there are so many people who don’t know at all about whatever lies outside their expertise. In fields such as music, theater, painting and movie-making for example, everyone is focused on their own little world. People also rely too heavily on their smartphones for their general knowledge. People are losing their ability to imagine possibilities outside their domain. Those who are not at all interested in a diversity of things are dangerous. They most likely don’t even have friends in other fields to whom they can easily ask an opinion... Is this vicious situation caused by the Japanese virtue called “modesty”...?
I myself made a gross error. I was feeling as if I were aboard a perfectly run great ship, after going to the “big and distinguished hospital highly specialized in cancers”. But in fact I was like the students on that sinking Korean ship. Is this the way people who own guns for self-defense feel in the supposedly great US? This might seem like an illogical leap in what I write... probably because I am in such a long difficult situation.
I finally reached midway point day of my whole treatment.
It's becoming more and more difficult for me to swallow. I hear that within the last four years feeding tube techniques have been becoming more common. Before using feeding tubes became more common, almost half of all throat cancer patients were discouraged halfway through radiation therapy and thus they couldn’t get ideal treatment. I can totally understand it. This extreme suffering is about five times worse than I imagined.
Give up smoking, everyone! My case is not caused by smoking, but hey.... I got
Originally posted in Japanese on June 16th, 2014