One of the scariest things that can happen to you when you are living far from home, in a country that speaks a different language, is have a medical emergency. That can be scary enough when everything else around you is familiar. Change the language, change the alphabet, and it all takes on another level of stress.
Having said that, I’ve just come through an unexpected hospital stay in South Korea and the experience was about as compassionate and stress-free as it could have been under these circumstances.
My problems started innocuously enough. Like just about every foreigner living here, I had recurring problems with gas pains in my digestive tract. But mine became stronger and more persistent so I sought medical treatment.
When I went to the hospital, I was assigned a guide, a non-medical staff member who speaks English. She guided me through the whole experience, making the situation both clearer and less scary. The doctors I dealt with (I saw three different doctors) all spoke some English, usually enough to make themselves understood.
Korea wants to market itself as a medical tourism destination, and there are some good grounds for it. For one, medication in Korea is much more inexpensive than anywhere else I’ve heard of. Before the whole surgery aspect came up, I was on a soup of antibiotics. I was taking four pills three times a day for a week. The total cost of these pills was just over seven dollars. Having said that, the recently signed US-Korea free trade agreement might end that as there are “pro-pharma” clauses that might force prices up.
Korean medical care is about on par with Canadian from what I saw. In many ways it was more efficient. In a three hour span, I was given x-rays, ultrasound and sonogram as well as blood and urine tests. I don’t think that this would have happened as quickly in a Canadian hospital (I wasn’t being admitted as an emergency patient, just as a walk-in). The diagnosis was a colon infection, but with a complication.
I knew something was wrong when the sonogram technician decided that my right flank needed special attention. She kept pressing the sonogram reader into my side and asking “Pain?” My answer was no. She pushed harder and became more insistent, "Pain!" Then she’d reposition me and do it all over again, with the same result. Then she called in another person. She asked this person a question, and the answer was the English word “pain.”
So the second person watched while she repeated the procedure and asked again. Same results. This seemed to cause them both consternation. The technician dismissed me and picked up a phone and called someone.
The complication was that my appendix was extremely swollen. I should have been in severe pain, but I wasn’t. Apparently this can happen.
That was on a Friday, and I was more worried about being late for work than about my appendix. So I went to work with an appointment for first thing in the morning to consult with a surgeon. Before I left, both the surgeon and my guide gave very explicit instruction that if I felt any abdominal pain during the night I was to take a taxi to the hospital emergency room.
Saturday morning and the surgeon is showing me my sonogram. It wasn’t to clear to me, but he could sure see that my appendix was swollen (the colon doctor did a manual inspection and thought he could feel it too). The surgeon’s instructions were explicit. My appendix had to come out that day.
I had two hours to get ready, which meant getting food set for the cat and packing a bag for the hospital. One thing about Korea, the hospitals have free wireless internet. So I showed up with my laptop in tow.
But in that two hour window, I was unable to contact any of my co-workers until I was just about to go under the knife. My manager, not a native English speaker, didn’t understand and thought I was having elective surgery and was apparently mad at me. Later, when she called, I had her talk to one of the nurses in Korean. Once she understood, she was very supportive.
I don’t remember the surgery, of course, but I do remember the recovery room. There was a song going through my head when I started to wake up. I don’t know what song, and I don’t know if I was imagining it or if it was playing in the room. I remember that they kept coming to me and tapping me on the chest and saying, “wake up.” I also remember thinking it was funny that their taps weren’t to the beat of the music.
The scariest part of the whole experience was my first two hours fully awake after the surgery. I woke up in bed in pain. There were two painful spots, a strong but dull pain and right below it a burning, sharp pain that kept getting stronger. It hurt. It really hurt.
I called out for a nurse, but no one came. Finally, a nurse walked into my room, but when I tried to talk to her, she ran out of the room and didn’t come back (I don’t know why, maybe scary foreign guy was yelling at her?). Later, another nurse came, understood that something was wrong and went to get yet another nurse.
Finally, I had five nurses in my room, and they had an English phrase book. They kept telling me “don’t drink water.” I kept telling them “Pain! Hurt!” They understood that we weren’t talking about the same thing, but it wasn’t until I got them to give me my cell phone and I called the interpreter that we finally understood each other. I had a secondary, self-administering, IV for pain management. No one had shown me how to use it.
Once that was settled, I slept.
Despite what I wrote above, the nurses were good. They tried as best they could to explain what was happening, and were patient with me too. One nurse in particular, always left the room blushing and giggling whenever we talked.
After this kind of surgery, you can’t drink water until after you pee, and you can’t have food until after you fart out the excessive anesthesia from the surgery. It was 24 hours before I was on food. once you start back on food, you’re supposed to eat “bland” food, and sure enough, I started with rice soup, which is just really soggy rice. But almost immediately, the food shifted to fried fish, tomato juice, fried egg – foods that I wouldn’t have labeled “bland.”
Now this hospital is well-respected within Busan, and they do also cater to foreigners. So, by Monday, I was getting a “western” diet instead of the traditional Korean food. This would include things like French toast without any toppings, sausage and rice with vegetables in it instead of the plain rice that Koreans got. I think I ate more of the Korean food. But, after each meal, a dietician would come in and ask me what I had eaten and if it was enough. Her English was better than the nurses’.
All told I was in the hospital for three nights and four days. My government-mandated insurance would have covered most of my expenses, including a large part of the cost of surgery, but would have put me in a ward with seven other patients. That would have been awkward, as I’m sure I would have been the only foreigner. So I upgraded to a private room. The total bill, including the private room and all of the drugs, came to w565,000 or about $570.
As it was, I was a bit of a celebrity in the hospital, just for being foreign. For the most part, Koreans in big cities are used to the presence of foreigners and don’t really make a big deal of it, but in the hospital, my presence was definitely a novelty for both the nurses and the patients. I found that I couldn’t prop my bedroom door open without having someone park outside my room and stare at me (usually old men in wheelchairs). When I was doing my walking exercises, invariably some other patient would walk with me and try to talk.
The one and only real oddity of my stay in the hospital was my bathroom. It was fully modern, but it had a motion-sensitive light that would turn off after 10 seconds (I counted, often). When you’re in pain and any movement hurts, the last thing you need is having to wave your arm (the one above your surgery incision) every ten second just to keep the lights on in the crapper! I was finally able to explain this problem to the nurse who changed the setting to 30 seconds.
I had my appendix removed on a Saturday. Wednesday, I was teaching again. It hurt, and I did a lot of it from sitting in my chair but it didn’t hurt excessively. Later in the recovery, I had sharp pains and went back to the doctor. He said that it was because I had gone back to work too soon. It’s been five weeks since the surgery as I’m writing this, and the scar is still a little tender, especially below the surface. Another thing that I did too soon afterwards was try to go swimming. The waves hitting my torso was just too much. I’m sure that also accounted for some of the residual pain. so my summer of living at the beach became my summer of watching the waves and walking the surf’s edge.
The day of my surgery, I was supposed to be going to Seoul for a goodbye party. Three teachers that I had worked with had all finished their contracts and were leaving that weekend. Suffice to say I didn’t get to go. I really don’t know if or when I’ll see those people again. That hurts too, but in a different way.
