Today was my first experience with urgent health care in the context of Korean universal health care. Or in the context of any kind of universal health care, for that matter – I have only ever gotten sick before in countries and places where universal health care was only a fantasy. I can only say: the $10 I paid probably didn't cover much more than the cost of charging me with their fancy computer system. My national health card has my name as 우이제레드 [u-i-je-re-deu], but the quality of the transliteration didn't seem severelyto affect the quality of my care.
In my three years living here, I've never been to a doctor or hospital, except for a mandatory health check-up / drug test. I probably should have gone in sooner. Like on Saturday. But my distrust of doctors and medical care is well documented, so, as is my wont, I procrastinated, hoping it would "get better on its own." It did, but only… sorta.
I spent the afternoon in the county hospital, after my department head, the competent and kindly Ms Ryu, took one look at me and said, "why are you at work?" At the hospital, the good doctor Ryu (no relation to the department head), with his excellent English, put me at ease. I am eternally indebted to him for rendering what might have been a stressful experience a rather less stressful one.
So, anyway. Yes, I was diagnosed with climbing down off of a nasty case of severe food poisoning. Probably. It sounds about right, although it's hard to figure out what I ate that brought it on. I'd already realized by Sunday that it wasn't just a bad case of stomach flu – I've had those, and it's not nearly the same level of fun, fun, fun. The food poisoning, in and of itself, is probably mostly already past.
The explosive, high-pressure vomiting I got to experience over the weekend (and apologies for the no-doubt unwanted detail), however, had some additional unfortunate and undesirable side effects. Possible "superficial" internal bleeding – hmm… sounds about right. Ick. Conjunctival hemorrhage – which is a fancy name for the fact that I vomited so hard, I caused a blood vessel in my eye to burst, giving me a rather vampiric look. Yuck. An inguinal hernia – which is to say, I somehow managed literally to heave an intestine right through my abdominal wall. Squorlk. Ouch.
I was dehydrated (which I sort of knew) from my weekend with the porcelain goddess, so he put me on a 1 liter IV. I sat and listened to the elderly people around me in the emergency room confront their various ailments, while their adult children carried on around them. I watched the drip-drip-drip. I read the pharmacy prescription he'd given me, which was in Korean, so I didn't really understand much.
After a while, Dr Ryu brought me a cup of instant pumpkin soup from a machine, after he thought the medicine he'd given me had had a chance to quell some of the nausea. That's one of those smells/moments that will probably be indelibly engraved on my memory now: instant pumpkin soup = Yeonggwang General Hospital, an IV in my arm. But not unbearable, for all that.
I'm home now. My stomach is a little shaky, still. But I'm going to try to eat something. Sorry for the disgusting details – such is life, a-blogged-right-here.