Sick Expats are the Grossest Expats

As of today, I have been in Korea for about 5.5 months. All other expats have told me their horror stories of getting deathly ill, being on their deathbeds for weeks, and crying in brutal foreign-disease pain. Being the gentlemanly type I am, I laugh at their weak immune systems and continue my life of drinking too much soju and Hite, crowd controlling wild Korean students, and barely sleeping. This week, things turned sour...very quickly. I immediately regretted my lack of concern of others' illnesses as I now needed sympathy myself more than ever. I woke up on Monday morning feeling like small Koreans started a samgyupsal restaurant inside my face and it was full of drunk Koreans yelling and pounding the walls while they cooked up their meat at full heat. And they also poured acid down my throat. And were beating every muscle in my body with a bat. And they were using the energy from my power plant to charge all of their cellphones simultaneously. I am able to write this now because my current pain has been decreased to simply the acid.

I toughed it through a day at work, sweating clear through the shirt I was wearing while the Koreans in the building did what they do best - point out that I am clearly ill.

"Teacha you sick!"

"Teacher did you sleep with fan on?"

"Teacher face red. Drink soju today?"

I went home after drifting in and out of consciousness 8 hours later and tried to sleep, only to wake up every 40 minutes with a fresh coat of sweat. "Hospital time," I thought to myself.

I'm not one who likes to go to the doctor. In fact, I hate it. If it were up to me, I would have waited this thing out until I went completely unconscious and someone started looking for me 4 weeks later when they noticed I've been missing and found me dead. There are negatives to having your own office, you see. But I'm going to Japan on Friday, and I'm not missing it. Since my co-teacher works until 9 and he's the only Korean-speaking person obligated to help me in these situations, I was on my own. A quick Google search of "English speaking hospitals in Daegu" yields positive results. Yeongnam! Kyungpook! Dongsam! Take your pick! I suspect Yeongnam is the best choice (Because I'm young...man). Getting there is the problem. My Mega Man-related energy level would be on one notch. And you all know that the weakest little robot Dr. Wily could make knocked off at least four. I've never had a fever in the summer, and Daegu doesn't count as summer. It counts as the sun's equator. Yes, the point where the sun is closest to itself. It also doesn't help that I need to make a 10 minute walk to where taxis would consider driving near my apartment. They must not like the burning trash smell.

Flash forward twenty minutes and I'm trying to apologize for the small swimming pool I have just left on this poor taxi driver's seat. I don't go to hospitals much, but I imagine this one is like the downtown Tokyo of hospitals in Daegu. There are people running everywhere. Flat out running. Maybe there was a plane crash recently that I missed, but it was like, oh, crossing the street in Korea, except with sick people on beds instead of cars. I soon enough found the International Clinic, International most likely meaning they speak English. Because International in this country means speaking English.

The next hour or so was a rather pleasant experience. A nice little old lady speaking perfect English escorted me from room to room where they did the various tests, paperwork, payments, etc.

"Ooooh your blood pressure very high."

"True, but then again so is my temperature, my head pain, my body pain, my tonsils' size, and my intolerance for obvious things."

So I'm now sitting in an office with a nice doctor who also speaks English fairly well. She is going over my symptoms and tells me that my tonsils are hideously huge. I tell her that I knew that already because eating and drinking has been quite difficult for the past day or so. A brief Korean-conversation-with-the-nurse later, she tells me that my tonsils are too big and they may need to come out. "But I'm going to Japan on Friday!" I whine. After another incomprehensible conversation, they change their mind. Who knew! Now I'm prescribed two days worth of Korean wonder drugs (which I can account for now, are absolutely wonderful) and to come back in two days to see if I will need the surgery, or if I will be OK with more wonder drugs to take with me to Japan.

I say my kamsahamnida to the doctor and the nurse takes me for a quick spin around the building once more. I pay my fees (16000 won) and she takes me out the door and points across the street to the pharmacy I can go to to pick up my drugs. Silly me in thinking that I'm now outside means that I'm finished. I start to walk away, but nurse drags me back inside for what appears to be a tour of the hospital. We walk through the nursery, some offices, the emergency room, and finally end up in the injection room. "Do I need an injection?" I'm thinking. I've heard of other expats getting shots in the ass but I couldn't remember if that was for more extreme diseases. In my senseless nodding and smiling earlier with the doctor I agreed to have an IV attached to me for three hours because I have been unable to eat for about a day. Now I am sitting on a bed next to the oldest Korean woman in the world, waiting for this IV to drain into my blood. It was delicious, says my left arm.

I'm sitting there for thirty minutes when a different nurse comes up to inform me that I needed to leave because the injection room closes at 5:30. I ask her where to go, but she found it more appropriate to lead me out of the room, close the door, lock it, and wave at me from the other side. I still have two and a half hours to kill, not to mention that I don't know how to properly remove this thing from my arm without killing myself. Where do I go? Whenever I have walked past a hospital on the street in the past, I noticed that the patients are mostly outside the hospital with their IVs attached usually smoking a cigarette or enjoying a bottle of soju between their major surgeries, so why not go mingle with them?

Halfway through a very interesting game of checkers (at least I thought it was checkers), the same nurse that locked me out of the injection room comes out and comes towards me very angrily. She's waving her arms around like a mother would at a child that wandered off from the family picnic and started playing checkers with a pedophile. I suspect she was trying to tell me that I shouldn't have left her sight, but I've given up trying to comprehend the backwards gestures of this society, such as that locking someone out of a room and waving means goodbye in most places.

She takes me back inside to the emergency room, where I am to wait for my bag to drain. Now instead of the fresh air and pleasant games with the elders, I can listen to the spine-curling screams, agonizing moans, and watch the blood splattering against the floor in this lovely place.

I'll spare you the details of how many people I think died in the same room as me as well as how many times I passed out for a short period, but soon enough my bag was empty and I was frantically pounding the HELP HELP HELP GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE button so I could run faster than I ever had in my life.

All in all, a pleasant hospital experience for the hospital rookie, right? Every has to sit in a terrifying room for over 2 hours? I return tomorrow for my final diagnosis. Come on tonsils! Don't quit on Team Greg just yet!