Big White Barbie Doesn't Do Sick; Only Denial

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.

Big White Barbie Loves Needles

I love needles. There is simply no rush like the rush that comes with having some IV fluids pumped into your system. Prior to Saturday I had no appreciation whatsoever for heroin. Now I desperately want to try it out. Okay, not really. But I did need to go back to the hospital for more antibiotics. That's apparently how they make money here; health care is relatively cheap, but they make you come back every 2-3 days to spend more money. Those wily bastards! When all is said and done I will have spent 150 dollars at the hospital this week. No Christmas presents for you!

I enter the Emergency Room of the hospital sometime late Monday evening. Given that this is where I was last seen and the doctor whom advised me to come back on Monday did not indicate that I was to go elsewhere, it made perfect, logical sense that this is where I would go. Apparently logic does not apply to Mr Korean Doctor Man. Mr Korean Doctor Man, whom I had never seen in my entire life, rolls his eyes at me and explains that when he saw me last that he advised me to go check in as an out patient. Given that his English is poor, and my Korean is even worse, I let go of the fact that he is making absolutely no sense whatsoever. I smile, nod, say that I'm sorry for not knowing any better, then start wincing in pain and telling them that I need drugs noooooow!

The doctor finally moves me over to a cot and explains that they are going to run a bunch of tests on me. You know, exactly like they did two fucking days prior to this. He hasn't yet asked what is wrong with me, though he did take a moment to ask if I was pregnant. Being a foreigner there is at least a 95% chance that I'm knocked up, he figures. I explain that I'm not paying for tests which they already ran, and that he can check my profile if he needs to confirm that The Foreign Slut does not have HIV.

A few moments later I find myself lying on a cot, hooked up to yet another delicious IV. Joyful, joyful! I don't remember my first Korean IV experience taking 45 minutes to drip-out, but this one sure did. At one point, one of the nurses came over and draped a blanket on me. So there I am, lying in a hospital cot in a busy emergency room, IV in hand, eyes starting to waver a little bit. Just when I start to get comfortable enough to nod off, I see an elderly gentlemen walk by, do a double take, then run over to his son/friend/whatever, who happens to be in the bed beside me, and yap about how there is totally a Foreign Slut in the bed to his left! From this point until they finally left the room about 15 minutes later, this man made frequent walk-by-and-stares of my cot, loosely guised as trips to the water machine. Foreign Slut so pretty!!!

After Creepy Staring Man buggered off, I hoped for a few minutes of solitude with my IV bag. As with most things I wish for, it just wasn't meant to be. A moment later one of the nurses whom hadn't been dealing with me comes over to my bed and nervously hands me a slip of paper which says something to the effect of: "Hi! My name is something-or-other! I go to America in soon! You help me?!" I realize that this nurse is asking me to help her learn English. I want her to go away happy, so I smile and say "okay". She's acting like a kid in a candy store at this point, just about jumping up and down with enthusiasm. She nods back and asks "okay?!" I confirm that this is what I said, and she runs back to the nurses station and jumps up and down while telling the other nurse that Barbie totally said yes!

Now, I don't actually have any interest in doing private lessons here. Ignoring the fact that they're illegal anyways, I simply don't have the time. Or I don't want to make the time. My weeks involve sleeping in, work, grabbing dinner/drinks. My weekends involve sleeping in, grabbing drinks, doing something interesting during the day if I'm not hurting too badly, and getting the Hell out of here every couple of weeks. Anything that interrupts my routine is strictly prohibited. That said, I would consider it unwise to slight the women that are responsible for ensuring your immediate health and safety. So the right answer was "okay", regardless of my actual intentions. A few minutes later, both of the nurses are dropping their emails on me as they remove the IV.

An hour after admittance, I leave the hospital in slightly less pain than I was upon entry, with an even slightly bigger ego than before. In case anybody failed to get the memo, I'm sort of A Big Deal.

Big White Barbie Pees in a Cup

There are two topics which I pointedly don't blog about: my sex life and my health. Were I to blog strictly on the former, there would practically be no blog whatsoever. That is to say, I don't get a lot! And even if I did, it's not really my thing to write home about it. While I may live almost every last detail of my life on the internet, there are some things that have to remain sacred. As for my health, there is rarely anything going on in that regard that inspires me to ramble. The odd time that there is, it's either private or just not particularly interesting. Yet today, I'm about to break tradition and ramble off about one of things.

I woke up Saturday morning with the distinct impression that something was wrong. As a result of the discomfort, I was unable to get my hung over ass back to sleep; not the nicest 9am wakeup call of my life. I realized within about 10 minutes that I had no other option than to go to a hospital that day. There was no way that I was going anywhere for several hours, so I withered around in discomfort and pain for a few hours, as I attempted to sleep my stupor off. This was met with little success, so I finally crawled out of bed and made my way to the hospital.

There was some confusion on my part as to whether or not I could even go straight into a hospital or if I needed to find a special clinic. For all I knew there was a doctor wagon that parked next to the street meet folk. Thankfully, a friend of mine here cleared things up for me quite nicely and explained that no, there is no doctor wagon so, yes, just go to the hospital.

I knew more or less what I had, and after finally being granted a chat with an English speaking doctor, I explained to her my suspicion. Unfortunately, they had to be sure. This resulted in my peeing in a cup, giving blood, and having chest x-rays done. Yes, chest x-rays! I think that they were checking for kidney stones or some blah. All I know is that I had to have them done twice because I left my necklace on and navel ring in the first time. Had the radiologist spoken a lick of English, or I spoken a lick of Korean, this could have been avoided. As it was, they're lucky that I didn't show up to the x-ray room butt-naked. Or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it.

Now, I was suspicious that they were going through a large number of tests because I was clearly a dirty foreigner, hence I was clearly lying about my condition and actually had a nasty sexually transmitted disease. Because in case you didn't get the memo, all foreigners in South Korea have AIDS. We're here to spread the love! I suppose it's possible that they were also just being thorough, but it only required one test to prove what my issue was. Yet, I accepted my place in the hospital as The Foreign Slut and went through the battery of tests; with little other choice, I figured that I might as well enjoy the tag, in spite of being totally unworthy of it.

The first test was simply a urinary analysis; in other words, it was Pee-in-a-Cup time! One of my favourite sports in university; I was right at home! I Pee-in-a-Cup like a fucking pro. Thankfully I'm very skilled with this, or I might have been put off by the nurse handing me what appeared to be an unsanitized beaker. In Canada I had grown accustomed to urinating in a nice little sanitized cup that had it's own special lid and a label just for me! That's simply not how we roll here, in Korea. Sanitation and labels are for pussies! I took that unsanitized beaker up the hallway to the hospital's public toilet, filled it like a fucking champ, and walked it back down the hallway to hand to whichever lucky random doctor or nurse I ran into first.

After they gave up their vain search to prove that the dirty Foreign Slut had syphilis, the doctor agreed to put me on antibiotics. For some bizarre reason, they like to administer as much as possible via the needle here. Hence, I was put on an IV drip for the first time in my life. After that half hour of pleasure I was given a goody bag of pills to pop, and was on my way.

With that, I successfully survived my first trip to the hospital in Korea. I couldn't fool myself into thinking that it would be my last given that they insisted I return again on Monday so that I could pay them even more of my not-so-hard-earned cash. Round two, coming at you sometime later this week!

And you thought I was going to blog about my sex life. Tsk tsk.