Its still sore.... :(

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Friday 18th Jan 08
Well this morning my knee was hurting pretty bad, so I decided to get it seen by a doctor. Can you believe that a; the resort doesn’t have a doctor or nurse, and b; they don’t even have a shuttle bus to go into town? Anyway, a $40 taxi ride later and I was at the hospital. My Japanese isn’t very good at all, so the resort was nice enough to send an interpreter with me which came in handy.
As we went into the hospital there were little, and I mean little, slippers that you had to wear. So not only am I limping around with a sore knee, but I'm wearing plastic slippers that are about an inch and a half to small for me and wont stay on my feet. It was comical. I got to see the doctor who has diagnosed it as a sprain, and told me to keep off it for two weeks however he also said that after a few days it might be good enough just to do some very easy green runs and I should see how it goes. He prescribed some pain killers and an ice pack. It’s a funny kind of system over here, it was about $50 to see the Dr, but it was another $50 to get him to write a medical certificate in English so that I could send it to the travel insurance people, so I handed over more money and got my certificate and prescription. At first I couldn’t figure out why I needed a prescription for an ice pack and all that Mie, my translator, could say was “Japanese ice pack very good” so I handed over some more money and got the ice pack. Well they aren’t kidding, its not really an ice pack but its pretty good. It’s a piece of moist felt about 15cm by 20cm that has some sort of herbal compound in it and you peel the plastic sheet of, like a band aid, then stick it to your knee. It feels very cold, but good as well. Apparently it has a similar effect to Voltarin Gel. So we will se how quickly it heals up.
Donna had a great lesson this morning and really got her confidence up, and this continued in her afternoon lesson. She is going into a lesson 2 tomorrow so that should be heaps of fun and she will get to see more of the mountain.

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