I followed up another weekend trip to Daegu with another visit to the hospital. For once, these two things were unrelated. Well, this particular trip to Daegu was not the root cause of the hospital visit. I hadn’t felt like my usual fantastic self for at least a couple of weeks, what with the nagging chest pains and all, but decided that rest was for quitters and went to Daegu anyways. No! I wasn’t sick! Everything was A-OK! Yes, I’m a little bit of thick. “25 Wise Choices for a Healthier Lifestyle” is not a title that I’m likely to author; possibly because that would be a terrible title, and I refuse to associate myself with anything less than awesome. Self Help books tend to have awful titles and be significantly less than awesome. More on how I hate Self Help books another day.
This past weekend’s excuse for going to Daegu was a birthday party for a friend of mine. She was actually more of a friend’s friend, but I happen to consider every other whitey in Korea my new best friend for life. Hence, my not attending would have been grossly inappropriate. I had decided that I would make an appearance sometime after dinner and then disappear sometime after 3am. Unless “taking a nap at 9am on somebody’s couch” can pass for “sometime after 3am”, I deviated from The Plan.
The Plan had been to make Friday a relatively early night so that I’d be fresh for the ice skating plans which had been arranged for Saturday, after which I was to return to Busan for dinner and a trip to the hospital. I had accepted that I needed to go to the hospital; I just didn’t consider it to be an urgent matter. Surely that surging pain on the upper left side would take care of itself after a few beers, right? So, as per usual, The Plan and I did not see eye to eye. Something had to give. I never lose, so The Plan had to go.
I was woken up around 11am by a new Daegu friend, who was calling to see if I was interested in grabbing some lunch. I most certainly would have been up for lunch if I hadn’t already made plans to go ice skating at that time. I am always up for lunch! I’m rarely up for ice skating. I certainly wasn’t up for ice skating when The Hoover called me at 11:30am to see if I was still coming. So, I ignored the vibrations of my cell and continued my pathetic slumber. The Hoover had suggested the night before that I might end up being too hung over to join. While she was probably right, I wasn’t in the mood to be That Drunk this weekend. So, when the clock struck 12 I rolled over, glared at it for a moment, and then rolled off the couch. Then I moved three feet over to a chair and sent The Hoover a text to indicate that I was So! Totally! Up! For! Skating! A hobo-shower later and this slumber eventually made its way into a cab downtown to meet The Hoover.
Ice skating! It was going to happen! And it totally did! Somehow it slipped my mind until I was standing on the ice that I had really never bothered to learn how to skate during my youth. I stood there gingerly for a moment before remembering that I will always have my remarkable athletic talents to fall back on. These “remarkable athletic talents” which I refer to are also known by fans of hockey and figure skating as “the boards”.
Somehow my folly ice skating venture became coffee, which in turn became dinner. By the time I returned to the core of Daegu it was almost 7:30pm. My options at this point were to catch the train home and just see a bloody doctor already, or wait until 9:30 to have coffee with SGTF then see how the rest of the night played out. Given that the former would have been the wise choice, I decided that continuing to ignore my ailing chest pains would be the best course of action. Going to the hospital is for sick people! I wasn’t sick!
When I finally left Daegu at 6am Sunday morning, I wished that I had accepted something was wrong and simply gone to the hospital a week earlier. Even then, I still wasn’t quite ready to find out what was eating me. Upon returning to my apartment in Busan I did the next best thing to going to the hospital: I slept. All day. It was fantastic. And how was that nagging chest pain after a solid 8 hour nap? Still there, now working its way around to the back. Fantastic!
Multiple posts on my multiple hospital visits this week will follow, whenever it is that I’m not too tired to write them.
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