Interestingly, yes.
I can now state tentatively that my linguistic anxiety has led, indirectly, to my rather unpleasant health problem.
I’ve been sick for a while. Flu-like stuff, mostly, but also, for more than a month, a persistent ear infection type thing that causes a lot of pain and discomfort, especially while eating. Probably, the ear infection thing is a lot older than a month: I had some pain in my ear last fall and early winter, but I ignored it and it seemed to go away. Then it recurred in February for a few weeks. But I avoided the doctor in both those instances.
And so I still hadn’t gone to a doctor when it returned again last month. Partly, I hate going to see a doctor, anyway. I’ve always had issues around seeing doctors. It’s not really a “fear” of doctors, but a sort of social or even philosophical dislike of them. Perhaps I don’t feel comfortable with the idea that someone else knows more about what’s going on with me than what I know about myself. I distrust doctors. I have had some negative experiences with poor diagnoses in the past, too – not least, the time I nearly died in Mexico due to a misdiagnosis and mis-treatment of typhoid.
But in Korea, that discomfort around doctors has only grown much, much worse. Aside from a single mostly positive experience with the doctor I saw for my food poisoning incident down in Yeonggwang in 2010 (which was a case where I already knew the doctor socially and thus had a high comfort level with him – I was very lucky), every other experience with a doctor, dentist, or medical professional in Korea has been deeply unpleasant, not to say downright depressingly insulting to my intelligence and human dignity. The Korean health care system is efficient and I’m very thankful for the national health insurance, which it makes it stunningly inexpensive by American standards, but Korean health professionals are, as a class, difficult people to interact with.
Korean doctors are mostly arrogant and intensely uncommunicative. More than once, I’ve had doctors make snide or unkind remarks about my appearance and language ability, too. This latter is what I’m talking about in the title to this blog post.
I’ve been feeling so much embarrassment and shame, lately, about my lack of progress in learning Korean, and this anxiety and frustration has bled over into other aspects of my life – including, it seems, the fact that I have been avoiding going to the doctor for much too long for my seeming ear infection. And so gradually it has become worse and worse. Each time I imagined going to the doctor, I would merely remember previous visits, when a doctor said things like “How can you be in Korea for so long and still be so bad at speaking Korean?” (yes, a doctor really said this to me, at the same moment he was prodding me in some ungentle manner).
Remembering this, I would say to myself, “aughg… maybe I will go some other time… maybe this pain in my throat and ear will go away on its own, like it has before… maybe my Korean will magically improve so I don’t feel ashamed to go to the doctor because I can finally talk about my ailment in decent Korean…”
I finally went to doctor today. As usual, he said almost nothing communicative, but at least he didn’t insult my effort at Korean. He even understood a few things I said, although I understood nothing he said. I can’t even be sure what language he was muttering in. He said “hmm” and “uhnn” and wrote out a prescription for some medications which I’m now researching. Maybe some antibiotics – if that’s what’s called for.
I guess I can’t really say that linguistic anxiety led to my health problem. But it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that my language-centered social phobia has worsened my health problem.
Sigh. *Popping pills*
I reproduce my prescription below, immortalized for posterity on This Here Blog Thingy™.
