Monday, June 2

I don’t know. I like you guys. I kinda feel like I should protect you from MY WRATH at this RIDICULOUS DAY.

I think I need to calm down so you don’t have to read 27 paragraphs of &*%^#%#!!!!

Long story short (actual long story here complete with 27 paragraphs of of &*%^#%#!!!!)…went to hospital, went home from hospital, went to hospital, went home from hospital.

Tuesday, June 3

Okay. I had a good night’s sleep in my own bed…had a leisurely-ish (as leisurely as one can be when headed to the hospital later in the day) morning, and went back to the hospital for 4pm check-in. Well, not really check-in – I can bypass the kiosks and windows and go straight to the nurse’s station on my floor (Pop Quiz: What floor is my room on?) and resignedly submit to their instructions to put on the hospital clothes and lay on the bed with the side rails up. They’re pretty hard core about these things. There are signs above the bed that say (in picture form) DON’T FALL OUT OF THE BED! As if this is something I had planned to do before reading the sign.

Anyway, I hate the guard rails cuz I have a hard time putting them down when I need to get out of bed. And I hate ever buzzing the nurses for anything ever. Unless I have pain. For pain I will buzz.

I re-packed and left (again) for the hospital around 4pm, and as they said, everything was shut down (for Election Day). Even the entrance. When I got off the bus I had to walk three-quarters of the way around the outside of the building to find a way in. I made my way in and up…and thennnnn the clothing battle started.

WHY are they so insistent you wear their stupid clothes?? They never fit me, and they always have to search the hospital for something that WILL fit me, and cuz apparently I’m The Largest Person In The World, I’m the only who EVER wears these giant pants and shirts, which means they are still new, stiff material. In the end I was like, I’ll wear the pants, but until I absolutely have to, I am not putting that shirt on.

There was really nowhere that was amenable to working on the laptop, so I only managed to eke out one hour of remote work…I’d hoped to work all evening to “pre-catch-up” on work I knew I’d be missing after the surgery.

I slept on and off through the night. It was quieter than most hospital stays I’ve had. No one was screaming or moaning in pain, no monitors beeping…just one ahjumma who slept (and lightly snored) through my entire time in the room, and a little girl whose father called her about once an hour (her mother and then her grandmother were there in the hospital with her) and her little voice was So Sweet. 아빠! 보고 싶어요! Ah-PA! Bo-go ship-oy-yo! Daddy! I miss you!

Her sweetness gave me something to smile about while sandpaper cardboard pants were riding up my butt :-\

Wednesday, June 4

Blood pressure monitoring started at 5am. Sigh. They didn’t come get me for surgery til almost 11am, so it was a morning of eye drops, IV insertion, “put your hair in pigtails in these hair torturing rubber bands,” and Put On That Shirt Now.

I stayed pretty calm. I can actually see a BIG difference between last June (wow, almost exactly a year ago) when I had the kidney procedure and was SO anxious about being in the hospital and not speaking/understanding the language well enough to advocate for myself…and now, when I was just like eh, whatever, we’ll figure it out. Not that I understand the language so much better, but I’m more comfortable with not understanding it. We’ll muddle through somehow.

When they finally wheeled me into the surgery room it took them FOR. EVER. to get everything ready. Like my suddenly showing up was a surprise to them. Usually you go in, get on the table, they hook you up to stuff pretty quickly then give you the “count backwards from 1o” mask and off you go to dreamland.

It was easily 10 minutes of room prep while I just lay there staring at the ceiling. Then when they finally got to me, put the blood pressure cuff on my left arm and the thing on your finger (pulse?) and some rubber thing sort of separating my thumb from my index finger (?) and then they were like ‘lay your arms at your side on the table.” Well, the table was narrow and I am wide. There was no room for my arms! So I’m trying to just like hold them up, level with my body, but not supported by anything…while one of the nurses kept doing what felt like pressing the hook side of velcro into my forehead along my hair line. Hard. My arms were trembling. I finally put one arm across my chest, but the nurse immediately took it back off. I got the “count backwards from 10” mask…10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1…ok now what? Again, she said.

Six Times. I counted backwards from ten SIX TIMES. Was it really supposed to knock me out in the first ten? Why don’t they just say “count backwards from 100,” then you wouldn’t feel like a failure every time you got to One and you were still not unconscious.

And people think I’m being dramatic when I say I have a high tolerance to things.

The next thing I knew I was in recovery with a knife jammed in my eye. They kept saying, “beh-TEE pain?” YES. YES, PAIN! Okay, we’re giving you more painkiller. Nothing. A little while later…pain? yes pain…more painkiller, still nothing. I’m telling you some kind of receptors or something in my body or brain is just OFF. Finally they were like we can’t give you anymore painkillers. I’m like Have You Given Me ANY Painkillers??

When they wheeled me back to my room it was 3pm…I was still heavily anaesthetized…almost fell getting off the one bed and onto another (I thought that was the whole point of rolly beds, so the patient didn’t HAVE to switch beds). I plopped myself, face down, onto my bed and tried to just breathe through eye pain.

Around 5pm the surgeon came to see me, she said a bunch of words that mostly sounded like bad news and I thought I’m still foggy, I’ll ask her to tell me when I see her again. And she said I could go home.

This is how fuzzy I still was. I stayed there another two hours after she said I could go home! I honestly almost asked if I could stay overnight, that’s how out of it (but still in pain) I was.

But the lure of my own bed and my own nightgown won…and I eventually slowly struggled up and into my clothes, got all my stuff together…and I was walking out and one of the nurses was like no, wait, leave your stuff here while you go pay. I know this from my other times in the hospital. They’re like afraid you’re gonna surgery’n’scoot and not pay your bill, so they hold something, your clothes, your snacks, hostage til you go pay then came back up for your belongings. I was like NO.

No. I do not have the energy to go downstairs, handle adult matters, then come BACK UP for my things. Nope. I was like, she’s going to have to physically grab me if she wants to stop me. Fortunately I think it was one of the nurses in training cuz she was just like “OH.” And no one came after me.

And I’m REALLY glad I stood my ground on that one, cuz when I got downstairs to discharge, cuz it was so late, everything was all closed up. I had to go outside and walk halfway around the building to enter through the emergency room and pay there.

That would NEVER happen in the US. You can’t leave without A Person…and hospital staff is pushing you out the door in a wheelchair where said person will meet you with a vehicle. Not here. They’re like we’re done with you, you’re no longer our concern. And I was really woozy still.

I very rarely feel like I need another person to help me. But that afternoon…I really wished I’d had someone to help me.

I got an uber home, got in my room, dropped my bags on the floor and plopped down on the bed, fully dressed…and woke up at 2:30am.

Thursday June 5

I had to be back at the hospital for an 8:30am follow-up with the doctor. UGH. More eye tests, more money, more prescriptions.

And here’s what she’d said to me when I was crashed out on the hospital bed. Unfortunately (that’s never a good start), while she was able to reattach the inferior retina and place a scleral band around all the bits that aren’t cooperating…she is concrned that because that retina is so thin and fragile, it may not hold even with the band. So just to be safe (uh-oh), she replaced (oh-no) the siliconoid and (what else?) it may need to stay in for (omg) A YEAR.

A YEAR!!! I was trying So Hard not to cry cuz my eye, but…a YEAR?? This stuff has been SO disruptive. To my vision, to my life…this is the vaseline-smeared funhouse mirror looking glass thing. I can just about make out shapes with that eye. I cannot read At All. Unless it’s like 6″ tall letters on the side of a bus right in front of my face. It feels uncomfortable, it makes me unable to read well, and it makes my depth perception more than just a little scary. I feel like I’m taking my life in my hands everytime I try to get on or off a bus.

And I’ve managed around Seoul because things are familiar to me. But I was very aware when I went to Japan and everything was unfamiliar, how difficult it is to travel with really poor vision. And I have a LOT of travel planned for the next year!!!!

This news just really hit me. Hard.

Oh, and I have high blood pressure in that eye. I didn’t even know that was a thing. So, more drops for that. Six different drops, four times a day, five minutes between each drop. Good thing I’m not in school. Eye dropping is like my new fulltime job.

So. Not a particularly good outcome. I’ll be flying to the US in two months, when it’s recommended to wait three…with a thin, fragile inferior retina. THAT’S gonna be a nerve-wracking flight. As is every flight after that. Let’s see…if all goes as planned, that’s 8 flights in the coming year…several 12+ hours.

I told her I’d like to take all my medical records when I go “in case something happens while I’m out of Korea,” but really so I can see an opthalmologist in the US for a second opinion on all this.

I know I complain a lot, but it really kinda takes a lot to make me feel really beaten down. And that’s how I feel right now.

I crashed (face down) when I got home (after making another appointment for next Monday)…and thankfully, thankfully, my building friends (who just started the new term the day I had the surgery) texted asking how I was and did i want ice cream? 

Silly question. Of course I want i ce cream. And when they got there with a cup of Baskin Robbins Mint Chocolate Chip, I suggested we sit up on the roof to eat our ice cream. Face Down be damned. I needed a mental health break. And some ice cream. And a distraction.

I face downed last time and look where it got me.

Friday, June 6

And cuz the rest of the week has been So Great, guess what today is??

One Year from the day that She Who is Dead To Me told me about her and Hyunggun…and I saw him for the last time  🙁

Broken Elbow. Broken Foot (nerve). Broken Knee. Broken Kidney. Broken Eye. Broken Heart. A lot of breakage here in Korea.

Wow. This is really not a cheery post.

Face down. Not allowed to shower yet.

Saturday, June 7

Ow. My eye hurt a lot again today.i think I did too much seeing. That’s not as silly as it sounds. When you’re just…being normal, your eyeballs tend to move around a lot, probably more than you even realize. And where one eyeball goes, the other one follows. So even though my right eye is still swollen shut and I can’t see out of it at all, it goes from right to left and up and down along with my left eye. And that makes it achey. Achey Level 1 it’s about what you expect. It feels a little achey. Defcon Achey Level 6 and above feels like a knife has been jabbed into your eye. I’ve been closer to 6 than to 1 most of the day.  So I’ve just been laying down a lot with my eyes shut. And then I fell asleep. Which is OK except that then I wake up at two in the morning.

Sunday, June 8

Woke up at two in the morning so I’ve felt a little tired all day. I’m weary of laying in bed. How come laying in bed is only really really good when you’re supposed to be doing something else. And when you’re supposed to be laying in bed, it gets very boring and uncomfortable very quickly.

I also REALLY want to wash my hair. This is Day 5 of no shower/face/hair wash. Without school or work to go to every day, I can easily go three days…four is getting up there. Five is a lot of days. It’s not like I’m going anywhere so it doesn’t matter how it LOOKS, it’s just FEELING ookey. 

I’ve been making some phone calls to friends and relatives back in the states cause that’s easier to do face down than writing emails. 

Sorry this is so boring. I hardly even have any pictures because I’ve just been in my room since I got back from the hospital.

I go back to the dr tomorrow. Too many follow-ups! But that’s the only thing on the agenda for this week – as far as outside the building goes. Hopefully she’ll give me the go-ahead for going out into the world after Wednesday (one week since the surgery) cuz I’ve got 10 things left on my Korea bucket list…and only 9 weeks to do them in!

I still can’t believe I’m leaving so soon! I don’t wanna gooooo!!! This is home now! When I was leaving the US, I was ready to go! But I’m not READY to leave Korea!!!

Sigh.

See ya next week.