"119"

may 30th - "119"
I met up with my friends Jessica and Belinda this weekend to catch-up. I hadn't seen Jessica since she fell in a hole at the D.J festival. I learned through the grapevine that she had been very, very ill after that and hospitalized for a full week. I felt like a terrible friend for not knowing and not visiting her in the hospital or anything. I found out she had had peritonitis, something like all your organs are inflamed and hate you. Terrible stuff. She almost died, and might have had her mother not called the U.S. embassy and fought to get doctors to do the necessary tests.

In my opinion, Korea is a seemingly modern nation, priding itself on its technological sharpness and leap to advancement since the Korean War, while in fact, it's quite stuck in the 1950s in many areas. I assert that this is the case with some aspects of Korean medical care. Allow me to site a few examples. Doctors do not question each other here, as everyone must save face. There is no option for getting a second opinion if they learn that someone has already examined you. And nurses? Jessica's Korean friend had to literally bribe nurses to take care of her. Administering drugs is the nurse's sole purpose here, excluding basic care like helping you get to the bathroom, bringing you a blanket or glass of water, etc. They expect that your family will take care of such needs. But if you have no family... yeah, you're pretty much f*cked.

Payment is their biggest concern, apparently, certainly with foreigners. The night I met up with Jessica, we ate Thai food and she started to feel a little sick. She was on antibiotics still from her hospital stay and had only been discharged a week ago. She started to feel ill and asked if she could go take a rest at Belinda's house. We brought her home but by then she had started shaking. She began to suffer the same symptoms she had been hospitalized with a week ago. We were all scared. I ran down the hill to get a taxi as we figured that would be faster and cheaper than calling an ambulance. We asked the taxi to bring us to the closest hospital. I said "Il, Il , gu" which means "119", the Korean equivalent of "911." He understood and got us to an ER within ten minutes. At the ER, they continually asked us for money. Belinda and I had money but our ATM cards don't work after 11pm. Jessica had no money after being docked pay from missing work last week and paying a million won for her hospital stay. They refused to do anything until we could give them money. We pleaded with them to "DO SOMETHING!" as Jessica lay there doubled up in pain. They asked us what we would like done. As if we knew!? After about an hour of trying to explain that she had been sick last week and asking them to contact the other hospital where they had her medical records, we requested an ambulance to transfer us there. We had to pay cash for the ambulance.

At the next hospital, they did remember her which was a relief, but they just sent over doctors and nurses to push on her stomach, asking repeatedly,"Does this hurt?" It was obvious it was causing her terrible pain. They drew blood without gloves and let the blood shoot out onto the floor. The blood pooled on the floor next to me and was mopped up hours later by a cleaning lady. I had seen some pretty terrible medical treatment as an HIV case manager back home, but this was a new level of horrific. Jess had chronic diarrhea and almost constant urination and was unable to walk at this point. I got to pull out my social work skills and advocate through the night for her care. I also had some on-the-spot CNA training, as I was basically her nurse, helping her to use the bedpan and emptying it myself many times. They gave her a saline drip, and an expensive ultrasound on her belly and sent her home at 9am with new antibiotics. I thought of canceling my health insurance as it appeared that I'd been wasting my money the last 8 months. Her insurance covered only a 1/4 of the cost of her ER stay that night. The whole experience was nightmarish.

Jessica went in the hospital again that Monday when she fainted at work, but is thankfully feeling back to normal now.


may 27th - "wet n' wild and employer-sponsored"

My employer took everyone out for galbi this Wednesday after work. There were about 25 of us, foreign and Korean teachers and our management. Unlike our other work dinners thus far, this one included many, many bottles of soju and beer. It was Esther's last week and she insisted on doing a shot of soju with everyone that would concede. I must admit I was a big encouragement.. Since it was on our boss, we kept ordering more and more soju until the restaurant owners eventually cut us off. (We had a private room, but we were gettin' pretty rowdy by this point.) Our boss, "Slick Rick," as we fondly refer to him, said, "Let's take the party back to GDA!" The story ends with everyone jumping in the school swimming pool with our work clothes on, our boss included. In the morning we found out we had dyed the pool water with color bleeding from our clothes and had left the pool littered with beer and soju bottles. I'm sure we won't be taken out to dinner again for a while, but it was one of the best times any of us have had with our coworkers and was truly great for morale.