save me from the tonsillitis!

I suppose I should really thank Miss H's students, because when they're not driving her up the wall with their spoiled behavior (we live right next to Walkerhill, a rich, hoity-toity and upscale neighborhood of eastern Seoul, so all her seven-year-olds are complete brats), they're infecting her with a litany of diseases. One of these was tonsillitis. Miss H herself got over it easily enough, with antibiotics prescribed by a local ENT specialist, but then she passed it on to me. I started coming down with the symptoms on Sunday, September 1...the day before the fall semester began at Sejong University.

Well, crap.

I figured I'd ride it out. It was just a fever and a sore throat, nothing to worry about. I stuck it out for nearly a week, refusing treatment even when I had to cancel classes because I couldn't speak. Despite feeling like death warmed over, I kept at it, believing a turnaround was right around the corner.

Matters came to a head on the night of Thursday, September 5. I took my temperature and discovered that I had a whopping 103.3° F (39.6° C) fever. That tore it. Miss H and I climbed into a cab and rode to the emergency room at Asan Medical Center across the river in Songpa-gu. A quick examination by the attending physician revealed that I had a heck of a case of bacterial tonsillitis, which had turned my tonsils all splotchy-white and driven my temperature through the roof. Three IV drips put me to rights: a fever reducer, saline solution to rehydrate me while I sweated it out, and a hefty dose of penicillin. I went to the pharmacy the next day to pick up some antibiotics, and then visited the ENT specialist (the same one that Miss H had seen). This articulate woman sprayed and swabbed some vile-tasting concoctions on the back of my throat, prescribed me some more drugs, and called it even.

I'm finally feeling back to normal now. I have my last appointment with the ENT specialist tomorrow (Friday), and I expect her to give me a clean bill of health. That's good, because in the middle of next week I'm jetting off for China and would hate for an infection to muck up the trip.

Anyway, this little episode impressed upon me two salient facts: (a) that Miss H needs to find a new job away from those bratty petri dishes, and (b) the Korean healthcare system is well-oiled, efficient and cheap. The visit to the ER cost me around $84, and the drugs and ENT visits were almost negligible. We sat around in the ER waiting room for quite a while, but that had more to do with my slow IV drip than any sort of patient backlog.

I sure wish the insurance situation in the U.S. was such that our hospitals could offer this kind of cheap care without a boatload of illegal immigrants creating a logjam and the creeping cancer of Obamacare driving the costs up, but hey...at the end of the day, I'm just glad I have my health.