Taipei at night and a visit to the doctor
Slippery colors
This has been kind of a down week in terms of activity. This flu thing I had has lingered, and although I am clearly over it, it has held on enough to sap my energy and hit me with an annoying little cough. Worse, Chien-hui has got it now just as I was coming out of it. So, we spend a lot of time laying around our Airbnb drifting in an out of naps, without much of an appetite and only running out to get something to eat once in the evenings. The day naps have really thrown our body clocks off as we keep waking up at one or two in the morning and then staying up until four or five doom scrolling or reading books and then falling back asleep until ten. It’s a bad merry-go-round.
To add to the surreal nature of our existence it has been raining here in Taipei, so we don’t even want to go outside. Taiwan is subtropical and that means the rain drops here are big, fat, and heavy. They make the sound of drum sticks on the bottom of tin pots when they pummel our railing just outside the windows. Add to that the periodic thirty seconds or so of hundreds of firecrackers exploding day and night as the celebration for Lunar New Year continues, and the symphony is percussive.
So, so many people
When we do make it out to find some food, the crowds are intense. We move against the tide of footsteps or with them, depending. Hundreds of faces flashing by me like a twenty-four frames per second film strip. I try to individualize them all, fighting the urge to see them as just that, a giant “them.” The smell of street food changing by the meter, all of it tantalizing and beckoning.
Taipei is far more photographic at night from my perspective, especially in the rain. The colors explode, the reflections amplify, the unreadable (to me) sign become graphic shapes to play with. When I return to the prison cell and look at my take and when I see something special, I feel vindicated. That I did something with my day after all.
Everything is graphic design
Color feast
We went to the doctor yesterday, but not at all because of these flus or colds or whatever it is we had/have. I needed to refill my prescriptions. I have a-fib, and I need to take a bevy of pills to keep my blood flowing viscously and my blood pressure normal, so I don’t stroke out. The last time I refilled my pills was in Mexico City. There, I could just walk into any pharmacy and buy whatever I needed as if I were buying a bottle of Tylenol. Nothing narcotic or anything dangerous like that, but my pills are extremely common and all generic at this point. Here, in Taipei, it’s just like the USA; I need a prescription to get my pills. But the good news is that it’s not hard to get an appointment and get a new prescription, and the prices for drugs are about the same as Mexico. That is to say, and I know somehow, you’ve all heard this before, we are getting seriously scammed in the US for our prescription costs. I won’t go there.
Using the health care system of another country is an experience everyone should get to have. Especially, a nationalized universal system, like Taiwan’s. Everyone has a health care ID card with a chip. It has your entire history on it, and you use it for nearly everything health care related. Go online make an appointment and you get the specific number that you will be seen that morning or afternoon, kind of like ordering a sandwich at the deli. If the doctor sees 16 patients in the morning, and you are number 12, well then you can show up around 10:30 and you won’t have to wait too long. When you get to the clinic or hospital you put your card into the kiosk to check in, it lets the doctor know you’re there and then you’ll see your name on the board, and you know exactly when you’ll be next. Meanwhile you go to the end of the hall and put your card into the blood pressure machine. You sit down and place your arm through the donut thingy. It takes a reading. You put the card into the scale just to the left, and it takes your weight. All of it recorded into your file and on your card.
I am not part of the system. I don’t have this beautiful little card. I have a wife who speaks Mandarin and is forced to be my translator while she tries to navigate a system that has changed so much since she last lived here that she really doesn’t know how any of this works either. I keep asking her questions and she keeps looking at me like, “How the F do I know?!”
But we manage to figure it all out. I get my name on the board. Oh. I am going to be here for a while. Indeed, it was a three hour wait. Before I knew that though, I did my blood pressure reading. My arm didn’t really fit through the donut thingy because I am not a smaller Asian man and that is what the diameter is sized for. I stepped on the scale. Holy cow. That’s the number? I have lost nearly 30 pounds since we left Seattle five months ago. All those stairs!
I finally get into see the doctor who is a young woman who speaks perfect English and was obviously educated in the United States. She asks me a bunch of questions, looks at all the pill bottles I brought with me, and then asks me how much I want. I am paying out of pocket, so she doesn’t need to limit me to a month at a time. I say three month’s worth. Done.
We go downstairs to the cashier and pay for our visit and for the drugs. Then we go over to the pharmacy window to turn in the prescription and wait for what I think will be another three hours, but we are surprised and delighted when they hand us a giant double bag of drugs, ready to go like a Door Dash order. From the time we walked downstairs and paid, they had already filled the prescription. Impressive. The physician fee was $14.62. The registration (like a co-pay) fee was $3.94, and finally the pharmacy service fee was $4.24, for a grand total of $22.80. Remember, I am not a Taiwanese citizen or resident.
The prescriptions were $552.10. This is also what I paid in Mexico City. That is a big number, yes. But remember that if I paid for these in the US without my very, VERY, excellent corporate health care insurance (I love you, Deloitte) the number would be about $5,000. For a three-month supply, even with that insurance, I’d still be looking at about $350. This is what it takes to keep this boy alive. And wine.
Speaking of wine, and you know I never shut up about it, I haven’t drunk any wine in almost ten days. That’s how crappy I have felt. That is easily the longest I have gone in my adult life. I’ll have to rectify that.