Life This Week in South Korea: June 24-30, 2024

Monday, June 24

The week’s just keep on coming, don’t they?

Sigh.

Tutoring in the morning. Class. Dinner. Rooftop for sunset.

Tuesday, June 25

Trembling and crying have become my personality. I am SO nervous about the whole hospital thing. Korean hospitals very different than US hospitals. I’m supposed to have a caregiver with me – like a friend or family member – who stays with me the whole time in the hospital. I don’t know exactly what the caregiver does or is needed for. I’m pretty independent. Even seven years ago when I had a full hysterectomy, major abdominal surgery, I didn’t have anyone in the room with me all the time. If there just happened to be a nurse in the room when I waas trying to stand up, they’d help…but if I was alone, I got myself up and to the bathroom…or up and for a walk down the hallway by myself. I can’t imagine this could possibly be worse than that. PLUS, since I do not have a caregiver, they have to put me in the nurse’s care ward – I don’t know what that is either, and apparently I get charged extra for that.

I asked if there’d be an interpreter available AT LEAST when I talk to the doctor…and was told that because I’m on the Korean National Health Insurance that by hospital terms I’m no longer considered a “foreigner,” and as a non-foreigner, I’m not really entitled to an interpreter. Could this BE any more stressful? AND, the bill has to be paid in full before discharge. And they can’t give me an estimate of the total cost so I can make sure I even have enough money!

I am just up to HERE with All The Things.

We had a substitute teacher for class today. He was very nice, but talked a LOT faster than my regular teacher and I kept getting a little lost.

I’ll be missing class Wed-Thur-Fri for being in the hospital…and Friday I’m missing another culture class. They’re going to a studio and making…I forget, something out of either mother-of-pearl or silver? Or something like that? I swear the field trips are like jinxes for me 🙁

Come on, Universe. Throw me a bone, already.

Wednesday, June 26

Okay. I’m in the hospital. Came over at 3pm with my friend Jacqueline from my building. It was a little confusing in the beginning but I made it up to my room, had my vitals taken, procured the best size option available of hospital garb (not good, but…they refuse to let me wear my nightgown), had all the rules explained to me via an interpreter, the anaesthesiologist (is that even close to spelled rigfht??) came and took pictures of my teeth and they had to tell me a bunch of scary stuff which I guess they have to do. I’m not looking forward to the possibility of coming out of anaesthesia with a breathing tube still down my throat ;-( Hopefully I’ll breathe well on my own during the procedure and they can’t remove it while I’m still knocked out.

My room is fine. The wifi is wonky. I can’t make my bluetooth earbuds work with a streaming show, though they work with Spotify, so I can’t figure that out. But it means I’ll have to either watch my shows only on my phone for the next three days…or watch just with subtitles and no sound. They’re like YOU MUST LOCK EVERYTHING UP but I have more stuff than they have locker space 🙁

Dinner is soon and then I get IV’d, so I’ll go for now. Hopefully I can sleep through the night. I still don’t know what time the procedure is scheduled for tomorrow. That’s all for now.

Oh, one last thing before I go to sleep. The other ladies in the room are all much older than me. I still have a bit of a lingering from a few weeks ago…and I’m TRYING to hold it in, but…there’s just so long you can do that without going mad, so…eventually I have a little coughing fit. EVERYTIME I cough, the woman in the bed next to me (we all have our curtains drawn so there’s no eye contact or anything), says SOMETHING IN KOREAN REALLY LOUDLY. To my relatively untrained ear I’M understanding it to be STOP MAKING SO MUCH NOISE. I definitely feel that whatever she’s saying is directed at me, cuz…no one else is responding to her and she only does it when I cough.

So that’s fun.

Thursday, June 27

I’m writing this a few days later. The procedure was Thursday morning. I think I went for x-rays beforehand. Just seemed like once things started moving there was a lot going on. The interpreter met me outside of surgery and between her and three other nurses they explained to me what was going to happen…then I went in, they hooked me up to a bunch of things…and just as the doctor was putting the sleeping gas mask on me he asked me a question…I thought he was asking me if I spoke Korean and I said “jokum” (a little) and they all laughed…so I really have no idea WHAT he asked me. And then I was out.

Fortunately I did NOT wake up with the breathing tube still in, but I had a VERY sore throat from it. They brought me back up to my room, I was still a little groggy but I was not allowed to sleep for two hours…nurses kept coming in to check on me and motioning for me to breathe deeply and cough. I wasn’t allowed to drink for another 6 hours after the procedure and THAT was brutal. It felt like my mouth and throat were stuffed with cotton balls. I couldn’t breathe through my nose, my throat was swollen…and all they would give me was some moist gauze pads to like pat my lips with. I was SO comfortable. After a couple HOURS (I was not processing anything very quickly that day), I realized I could suck a drop or two of moisture out of the gauze pads if I sucked REALLY HARD, and what a blessing one or two drops of moisture can be when your mouth is a literal desert! It made a world of difference.

They put in a catheter and a stent during the procedure and they were Really Really Uncomfortable/Painful. I asked for pain killers…I got a shot in the butt (I was surprised that’s still a thing) and expected immediate relief. After 15 minutes with no change I pressed the call bell and asked for more, she said No Can Do. She said it would take 30 minutes to work so just be patient. THIRTY MINUTES??? I just lay there, tense and UNCOMFORTABLE, tightly gripping the bedrails til my fingers cramped…and waited 30 minutes. I pressed the call bell again. “tong kattayo” (the pain is the same). Somehow I’m much more fluent in the hospital than anyhere else I’ve been. But she said she couldn’t give me more painkillers for four hours. So, between the catheter and the dry mouth and the headache,,,it was a long day. And even four hours later when they added some kind of pain killer to the IV, it STILL did nothing. But finally at 5:00 I was able, at long last, to have a few sips of water. THAT was a relief.

I wasn’t allowed to eat that day at all…and I’d only had about 200ml of water by the time I was trying to get to sleep around 10pm. And then I got nauseous…grabbed the trash can off the floor just in time to start vomiting…when all there was was the 200ml of water. And then I was afraid to lay down again, for fear I’d get nauseous again…so I sat on the edge of the bed for almost two hours, leaning on the IV pole…til I finally felt sleepy enough to lay down and get a little sleep.

I was happy when that day was over.

PS – they got the stone out…they put the fragments in a ziplock baggie for me to take home as a souvenir, haha.

PPS – the woman in the bed next to me who kept LOUDLY REPRIMANDING ME last night for coughing…tonight when she heard me start dry heaving and vomiting she yelled out GAHOSANIM! GAHOSANIM! Which is basically “hey, nurse!” So at least she had my back this time 🙂

Friday, June 28

Oh, they’d told me yesterday that I was going to be discharged on Friday, a day early, so that made me very happy. The hospital day starts at 4am, I don’t know why, it just does. They come in the room at 4, turn on all the lights and start doing everyone’s stuff – pills, vitals, dry baths, helping to bathroom, depending on what the patients needed. There were five people in my room. I was the youngest by probably at least 15 years. They all needed much more help than I did. I’m used to being independent and getting myself around on my own, no matter what is happening with my body: kidney stones, cancer, torn knee ligaments…I’m not waiting for anyone’s help. Anyway. They told me I would be discharged at 10 or 11…after another x-ray and The Peeing Olympics.

The Peeing Olympics are when you’re told to drink a lot of water and pee and then call a nurse to come check it. So you do that, but it’s not enough they say. Go again. Pee more. I’m like…it doesn’t work that way! I peed all I could pee. Now you have to wait. But the nurse kept coming in every 15 minutes, instructing me to try again…I’d try again, ekeing out just a few drops…she’d say “it’s not enough, try again.” I’m like, you need to give me at LEAST half an hour between pees if you want MORE. After I’d pee she used a handheld sonogram device to see if my kidneys were totally empty. Until they were totally empty I couldn’t be discharged.

This went on for several hours. Finally I stood my ground and was like I’m not peeing again until *I* feel ready!!! And FINALLY, at like 10:30, I peed/emptied satisfactorily and I was allowed to go downstairs and pay my bill.

New Fear Unlocked. They’d told me the surgery alone would be between 700,000 and 3,000,000 won…which is like $500-$2700…that’s QUITE  a range! And that’s JUST for the procedure, not any medicines or supplies, or the room on the Nursing Care Ward because I didn’t have my own caregiver. I was afraid it was going to use up all the rest of my money…and I was going to have to do a GoFundMe just to get a ticket home cuz I’d be destitute.

Fortunately that was not the case…the entire bill was $902. Not FREE, but also not $5,000.

So I paid, went back up to get my stuff (they hold your stuff hostage til you pay), and then I met my friend in the coffee shop and she helped me get my stuff into an uber and then into my room. Interestingly, they let you walk out on your own. In the US they always push you in a wheelchair til just outside the hospital door.

The Korean hospital experience was interesting. I’m going to write a whole blog post on it. I feel like I say that a lot. I have a lot of unfinished posts in my drafts folder. Someday they’ll all get shared!

Anyway, when I got home, I crashed. Lay down in the air conditioning, ordered delivery food, watched k-dramas, read til I fell asleep.

Saturday, June 29

Feeling much better today. The catheter is no longer even noticeable, the headache is finally gone. My throat is still a little sore and swollen. I tried to eat a bagel…took one bite and could barely get it down, so…had some pudding and the leftover pasta from last night…and just had a quiet day. Did some schoolwork I missed while in hospital.

The rainy season is here so there were some downpours later in the day…and looks like more of the same for the next five days.

Sunday, June 30

Wow, last day of June. THIS was a month! The whole “friend situation” started on June 5…that took the next two weeks to … to what? Not resolve itself…become clear? I started the new class on June 4. I went to the dr on June 3 and that’s when they scheduled the surgery. It was a month of sadness and anxiety. I’m glad it’s over and I can start fresh in July.