I am not sure why, but I have really been noticing the differences that Korea has to offer, lately. Because of all of these differences (and that a lot has happened since the last post), I have decided to turn this into a 2-part post; this being the first part.
A couple of months ago I decided to have a mole on my body checked out, you know seeing as how I have full coverage health insurance (or so I thought, but I will get to that later). I went to the doctor and got it examined. She told me that it would need to be tested for cancer and then removed. She also quoted me a price because she thought I was going to do it right there on the spot. After I got all of my affairs in order, I decided to go in and have it done. There were a few things that the receptionist told me would need to be done first. Her English was not so great, but she got the main point across. I was supposed to go have a couple pieces of paperwork signed, then make a payment, then head over to the blood testing station. I will stop right there, because this is where I started to freak out.
If you know me well or have read a couple of my previous postings, you will know that I don't handle needles very well. I get tunnel vision and go through cold sweats if I even think there may be a chance that I will have my blood drawn. When I walked up to the blood station with my paperwork in my very shaky hand, I told the man behind the desk that I was going to need a back room so that I could sit or lie down in case I fainted. He looked at my papers and then looked at me like I was crazy. He stamped the papers and handed me my medicine prescription. I looked at him and asked if that was all. He then told me that I didn't look so good and that he was glad that I wasn't getting my blood drawn today. Whew! What a relief!
I took the prescriptions back into the dermatology area and was taken into a back room. Now, when I say "back room," this is what I actually mean...I was taken down a hall where people were lined up sitting on benches against the walls and around the corner, into a very tiny room with two other rooms branching off of this one room. I could tell that this was intern alley (as I like to call it) because there were textbooks open everywhere and everything was super unorganized. This was also funny and a little scary to me because the textbooks were primarily in English yet only one intern in the whole place (there were probably about 15) could speak decent English. Now, I don't know if these kids knew what they were doing or not, but it scares me when they are practicing/learning medicine in a language that they don't even speak!!
Back to the room, there were a few desks and a few of those beds that you would see in a school nurses office. There were people lying in the beds with no curtains and the doors were all wide open so everyone out in the hall could see right into this room. They asked me to lie on a bed and remove my shirt because my mole was on my stomach and they needed to be able to get to it. They offered me no garment to put on for the removal and no privacy to change. When I was finished with my peep show, they draped a couple of surgical cloths over me and began to go to work. I had watched a couple of the other minor surgeries while I was waiting and there was always only one doctor/intern/nurse, sometimes two around the patient. For my surgery, which was very near my breasts (and in case you don't know, Korean woman area generally VERY tiny and this includes their bust size...my bra size doesn't exist in Korea), there were not one, not two, not even four, but five interns standing around my table as they proceeded to remove this mole for testing.
The guy doing all of the work gave me several shots to numb the pain and began to remove it. A woman, who was an actual doctor, would walk by every once in a while, I guess to make sure that they weren't killing me. The intern would always talk to her as she walked by. Ok, so technically I don't speak Korean, but working at a school with children has helped me to learn some words and a few simple phrases. One phrase that has really stuck was, "Teacher, is this ok/correct?" At school, this phrase is acceptable and even encouraged, but in the hospital, while someone has a knife and is cutting on your stomach, those are not the words that you want to hear said over and over again.
I was especially nervous and it got worse when the guy started doing my stitches. For a 3-4 mm gash, I counted that he gave me 9 stitches. When I got home, there were only 5, which means that he had to have messed up at least 4 of them and had to redo them. Honestly, the stitches were the most painful part of the whole procedure. AWESOME!! They suggested that I come back every day for the next week so that they could, "...change my dressing." I thought this was kind of funny because it sounded like I was a salad. I know the terminology is correct, but the word "bandage" seemed a little more appropriate to me since it was so small. On all of those days that I came in to get my "dressing changed," I had an audience of at least 3 interns.
On the last day of the bandages being changes, one of the interns who spoke very little English, told me that I need to go and get some "povidone at the pharm." The problem was that he was saying, "...pobidon at the farm." After a 5 minute explanation, where he simply repeated the words over and over, I finally figured out that he meant iodine (also known as povidone) at the pharmacy. I thought he wanted me to go and check something out on an actual FARM! Crazy times! Luckily, everything has healed up nicely and there is only a tiny mark to show where the surgery took place.
To be continued...
