You know that if I’m starting a post with a quote from Marathon Man, things have not started well.
The best that I can tell, you do not want to end up in a hospital in Korea. There seems to be a fundamental cultural shift in the way that they treat their patients. Now this might be a little more influenced by their treatment of me as a someone who can’t speak the language, but I can only go by my experience.
The biggest difference that I can see is their treatment of pain. Back home after jaw surgery, I really doubt that they’d send you home with some liquid Tylenol and say you’ll be fine. But in Korea that’s a perfectly acceptable alternative, no matter if the patient is in agony for a couple of days. I also ran into this in the hospital when I was complaining that the IV felt like I was being stung by one hundred wasps. They told me that I needed to leave it in for it to finish, something that was going to take a good 12 hours. I made it 9 before I just couldn’t take it anymore, and sure enough, that’s when they pulled a Tetris block shaped needle out of my arm.
Fast forward to today. Today was supposed to be a simple stitch removal. I say simple even though my mouth is rightly a tad tender at the moment. No problem then, one or two shots of Novocaine or something to numb the area where you’ll be doing the pulling and we’re good. Take a guess what actually happened…
I even started asking them, “Do you mind numbing the area up a little? It’s been a little tender lately.” This is probably due to the cough that I have which forces my lips to mimic a horse’s. They didn’t obviously, so for the next half an hour my mouth is being pulled and pushed in all sorts of ways while I’m being jabbed with scissors and tugged on with pliers… If it sounds bad, well, it was probably worse than you think.
What was the real topping on the cake was when they finally got 90% of the stitches out, they realized that there was no way for them to reach the back ones without me being able to open my mouth. So sure enough, off came the bands holding my mouth shut and then they started asking me to open my mouth as wide as I could. Anyone who’s had their wisdom teeth out knows that you can’t open your mouth very wide for quite a while afterward, and this case was no different. So they decided to assist me. Grabbing my (hopefully) still healing jaw so they could get at the stitches in the back. OW.
This leads to the cruel irony of the whole thing… at the end, after all the pain is over, they have to band my jaw shut again. Only then do they bring out this solution that numbs my gums a little. I wanted to punch the dentist in the face right about then…
So yeah, do your best not to end up in a Korean hospital. It’s not pleasant in the least.
