klutzy May-June weekend

I've never thought of myself as clumsy, but when you factor in my immoderate and lazy behavior, accidents are almost bound to happen. 

I'm happy to announce that there have been no complications from my appendectomy. I'm completely healed. I have some hairline scars on my abdomen and some staple wounds which are still healing up, but apart from that I'm cured. I just need to avoid lifting heavy objects for six weeks.

I still think I'm going to die soon, though.  

I'm talking about last Friday night (May 30), when I was walking home—admittedly under the influence of makgeolli and beer—and stopped by a public restroom near the Yangjae Stream. The stalls were somewhat cramped, which I learned to my cost when I stood up somewhat abruptly and smashed my head against the toilet-paper dispenser. 

Just...don't ask. Please. It happened, all right? That's all you need to know. 

Anyway, my head was somewhat fuzzy (makgeolli or concussion, I don't know) so I didn't really notice that I had hit myself hard enough to draw blood. This precluded me from putting antibiotic ointment on my noggin, and...

...well, sure enough, I came down with a head cold on Saturday, May 31, which prostrated me all through Sunday. Even on this warm, damp, drizzly morning of June 2, I'm not still wholly back together. Infection-induced, no doubt. What a sap I am. 

And speaking of sap, what kind of moron doesn't use hot pads to remove a scalding-hot bowl of oatmeal from the microwave? Me, that's who. The same moron who, early this morning, touched the hottest part of the bowl, dropped the bowl, tried to catch the bowl and stuck both his hands knuckle-deep into said scalding-hot oatmeal. I am now typing on this keyboard with several first-degree burns on my fingers.

I hope there isn't a university-sponsored polo match this weekend, or I'm a goner. 

There isn't too much other news. Miss H and I went to see X-Men: Days of Future Past on Thursday evening, and both got a kick out of it. We also got our Hong Kong accommodations booked, so all the hotels 'n' stuff have been taken care of for my big Southeast Asia tour in July and August. (Now I just need to reserve my train tickets.) I had a lovely time with some of my work buddies on Friday night, drinking that aforementioned makgeolli and eating tofu (dubu in Korean) made from cactus in Achasan, near Gwangnaru, where Miss H and I used to live. Then I went to a barbecue in Maebong later that night with one of the dudes I brew with and his buddies, and nearly cracked my skull open in a public restroom around 12:30 a.m. Then I spent the weekend being sick. I'll spend the three days of my workweek (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) conducting writing assessments. On Thursday evening (which is technically a Friday, as we have a three-day weekend this week) I'll have a drink with Sang-ook, the Korean fellow I shared a ward room with when I got my appendix out a couple of weeks ago. I promise I won't hit my head on anything this time. 

No, really. Honest.

Korean appendectomy, part III: the end

The previous post's title was a little misleading. The "beginning" and "middle" parts of this tale covered only the first day—Sunday, May 18—and the hospital visits and surgical operations that were performed on that day. In this post I shall tell you about the three days that followed. "End" is something of a misnomer here, too: I'm still recovering. My abdomen aches a tad yet and I still have metal staples in my belly button. (Those get removed on Monday.) 

So: let's begin. Monday, May 19. The morning following my appendectomy.

A recovery ward room in a Korean hospital, similar to the one I stayed in (only way too big). Photo courtesy of Ask a Korean!, who has a rather interesting post on Korean healthcare.

I awoke at dawn. To my relief, I didn't have constant pain in my stomach anymore. The aches, however, were infernal. Sitting up took a good 30 seconds. I wasn't exaggerating in the last post when I said I felt like I'd done a million ab crunches, run a marathon and sung an opera without a drop of water in between. I didn't notice my hunger too much; I guess I'd reached that stage of starvation where the bellyache settles down to a dull, ignoble drone. I was, however, burning with thirst. Jeremy (my Korean roommate, remember?) ominously hinted that I might not even get a sip of water until the following day. Fortunately that proved untrue. At high noon, after a long dull morning of Jeremy watching bad daytime TV and me trying to plan the Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore leg of my Southeast Asia trip, lunch arrived: a bottle of ice-cold water. 

Splendid. Hospital dining at its finest. To be fair, it was a haute bottle of water: crystal-clear beads of sacred moisture gleaned from volcanic rock springs on the distant tropical island of Jeju, bottled by the purest maidens and spirited away to Seoul on the gossamer wings of azure dragons or some shit. 

Jeremy, on the other hand, was chowing down on a full tray. So I unfolded myself from my bed like a rusty pocketknife and hobbled to the door to call the nurse. 

"Shiksa?" I asked. "Lunch...?"

She explained to me on no uncertain terms that "Lunch water. Dinner food." 

Wow, she cleared that up for me in a hurry. Who needs verbs?  

At 5:00 a heaven-sent tray clunked down upon my rickety folding table: juk, sludgy plain rice porridge, accompanied by a bowl of spicy white radish soup and smaller bowls of soy sauce and crunchy vegetables in brine. I was to eat this exact same meal—the only variation of which was the type of soup—a further four times during my stay at Songpa Chung. It was bland, but substantiating, and it tasted like a king's feast after my 33-hour fast. 

Miss H finished work at 6:00 daily, but she'd obtained special permission to leave after her last class finished at 5:20. She arrived just after 6 p.m. and bore with her a load of mercy: orange juice, a huge jug of water, yogurt, and my laptop computer. I was past ready to see her. It had been a long, hot, sticky, muggy, sweaty day, and I must've looked and smelled as crusty as I felt. But she was her typical angelic self and made no mention of this fact. She and I spent several happy hours together, playing Monopoly on her iPad and casting the occasional glance at the utterly incomprehensible Vin Diesel film Babylon AD on the idiot box. 

I had contacted the assistant director of the General English Program at Sejong University by this time to inform them of my circumstances, and he had kindly canceled both my Monday classes for me. Tuesday, May 20, was a school holiday, and I never had any classes on Wednesdays. But Thursday I would have a full load, and my usual two on Friday. I still felt beat to hell. Time would tell if I would be okay to return to work. 

I wrote down some questions in Korean for the nurses and Miss H delivered them. It seemed that I would be released when my fever disappeared: a brace of nurses appeared at our ward room door every hour to check my, Jeremy's and Sang-ook's temperature and blood pressure. That could be Tuesday or Wednesday. I was informed that the surgeon himself would speak to me on Tuesday, the next day, and let me know either way. 

It was right about the time that Miss H had to leave (at 9:30 p.m.) that Jeremy and I got a new roommate, whom we would later find out was named Sang-ook. He was accompanied by a skinny, shriveled old bat with a hectoring voice and a face like thunder, whom I took to be his mother. She hardly spent any time by his bedside except to kvetch at him. "Poor sap," I noted in my journal. 

Just as Miss H was about to head out that Jeremy came back. He and his girlfriend had stepped out for a while. That is correct: Jeremy, in his hospital-issue PJs and with his clattering IV stand, had taken to the public streets. This is something done in Korea. No one looks askance at it. Countless times I have seen hospital patients, still in their whites, wandering zombie-like along sidewalks and storefronts. The first time was back in 2008, not long after I'd arrived on Geoje Island. Some bony middle-aged dude with a sour look was standing in his pajamas on a busy street corner, in the ridiculous plastic bath sandals they use here, IV stand by his side, smoking a listless cigarette. 

Anyway, Jeremy and his lady had been to a nearby juk restaurant. My faithful roommate promptly informed me that the hospital's official breakfast had been canceled on Tuesday morning for reasons unknown. He brought me and himself a huge heaping takeout portion of beef-and-vegetable rice porridge, plus sides. I nearly wept. What a guy. I had had Miss H bring him and his girlfriend a bottle of soju and a chocolate bar (respectively) to repay them for their kindness on Monday, when Jeremy had unhesitatingly given me some of his snacks and orange juice. Now they'd doubled down on me, the ungrateful bastards. I immediately fell to scheming about how to get even with them, generosity-wise. 

After a long, humid, stagnant Tuesday morning spent trying to call my mother on a phone card that Miss H had generously brought me, and finally getting through, I was ready to go home. I was fed up with lying still, trying to get comfortable on a rock-hard hospital bed and watching bad daytime TV with Jeremy and Sang-ook, who had the most arcane taste in comedy/variety shows. Not only was changing the bandages a painful thing, but the tube—

Oh, right. Didn't I tell you that I had a tube in my stomach? 

I did. I had three keyhole incisions, one on the bottom rim of my navel and two below it, right about on my waistline. The tube led into one of these waistline incisions. More embarrassingly yet, it emptied into a little plastic squeeze-bottle that was clipped to the stupid belly-band I and all the other recovering appendectomy patients had to wear. Looked exactly like the Velcro straps you'd wear to keep yourself from getting a hernia while lifting heavy objects. Anyway, this little squeeze bottle, the nurse explained to me, was to collect...er...seepage. Yes, seepage. Sure enough, there was a minute amount of blood and intestinal juices in it, which sloshed hideously whenever I moved. I tried to avoid looking at it. It reminded me so much of Bailey's and grenadine that I thought I might be put off bartending forever if I stared at the bottle for too long. 

Anyway, about 1 or 2 in the afternoon I went downstairs to have my bandages changed. The tube was taken out. It felt like they were pulling a tapeworm out of me. It was slitheringly uncomfortable and painful in areas that I'm too polite to mention. "Felt like my wang was being turned inside-out," I noted impolitely in my journal. 

The surgeon was present, however, and he answered my most immediate questions: I would be released upon the morrow, Wednesday. I could go back to work on Thursday if I felt up to it, and I had a follow-up appointment on Friday—at which time, I hoped, the metal staples that had been used to seal up my incisions in place of stitches would be removed. 

On Wednesday I was up early, ready to be liberated. The nurses handed me a note which they'd obviously gone to great lengths to translate properly, and which told me to avoid foods with flour, fizzy drinks, and alcohol for one week. Working, showering and "normal activities" were okay. 

Jeremy was out all morning. At about 10:00 a.m. Sang-ook looked over at me and said "When you go home?" 

I said, "I wish I knew," turned around, marched out of the ward room and down to the nurse's station. I asked them when I could be let go. They asked me when I wanted to be let go. I said, "Right now." They told me to go downstairs and settle up. I did. Then I hurried back upstairs, changed out of my PJs, put on my normal clothes, shook Sang-ook's hand, wrote Jeremy a note and wished him well, and fled the building. I took a jouncing, sickening cab ride back to the apartment, where I changed back into my (proper) PJs and collapsed. 

I didn't feel up to working on Thursday, so I sent out a mass e-mail asking my coworkers to cover for me. The response was overwhelming and heartwarming. I was able to take Thursday to recover, and went back to work on Friday. 

It's Sunday now, and I feel right as rain. I still have staples in my stomach. My Friday appointment was intended merely to change my bandages again. I get the staples out tomorrow, and not soon enough. The dietary restrictions shall lift on Wednesday, and I shall celebrate by having one of those hazelnut-vanilla ales that the boys and I brewed a few weeks back, which matured on Monday but which I was in no shape to drink. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my Korean appendectomy. 

Whoof. 

Korean appendectomy, part II: the middle

Midsection, more like.

Were you wondering why my mind jumped to appendicitis so quickly on the morning of Sunday, May 18? Well, to be honest, I've always had a secret fear of the disease. It wasn't just that episode of Madeline that I mentioned, though it played a part. Ever since I was a boy, I've worried that I was going to get appendicitis. More precisely, I worried that I'd get it, wouldn't catch it in time, and die from it. As a lad, whenever I'd get a mysterious pain in my side, I'd panic and think that it was my appendix swelling up with toxic waste. Side stitches and gas attacks gave me undue pause. It was my worst and only venture into the world of hypochondria, and while I won't go as far as to say that it spoilt my childhood, it did put occasionally put a damper on things like playing sports, swimming, and eating baked beans.

Before we get back to the action, I think it's time I described the scene: Songpa Chung Hospital. 

What comes to mind when I say the word "hospital" at you? A big building with patients, right? 

Well, not Songpa Chung. Picture a surgical hospital specializing in appendicitis and hernias crammed into a skinny glass-fronted seven-story building with a single elevator and only four or five rooms per floor. The first-floor lobby doesn't have enough room to swing a cat in. The second floor does, but that's because the inner walls have been knocked down to create a reception/waiting room. The third floor has just enough space for an operating room and a...I don't know, bandage-changing room? The fourth floor has two ward rooms with three beds each, one male and one female, plus a recovery room with four gurneys, a nurse's station, and a unisex lavatory. Space is so limited that the microwave, water cooler, trash cans, and spare wheelchairs and IV stands are stashed in the corridor outside the elevator. As for the fifth, sixth and seventh floors...I couldn't tell you. Never got up that high. But I can imagine they weren't much different from their predecessors.

Now that I've set the scene, let's get on with the story.

I woke up in the most intense pain that I've ever known in my relatively short life. The first things I noticed, apart from the screaming, clawing agony in my midsection, was that I was on a gurney in the recovery room, the nurses were clustered all around me, Miss H was seated by my head trying to catch hold of my flapping right hand, and the clock on the wall read 10:40 p.m. I remember wondering why that was. I'd gone in for surgery at 9:00 and the procedure was only rumored to take 40 minutes. The extra hour left me with a sinister impression. I was too distracted by pain to take much notice of X-Files-esque time dilation, though. I was busy pounding the nearest wall with my left fist, thrashing about like a gaffed fish and screeching at my fiancée to go find whatever goddamn nurse was in charge of this cockamamie place and get her to cook me up the most powerful painkilling speedball on the pockmarked face of the earth, for the love o' Gawd. Finally, after barely three minutes of my bed-shaking, wall-rattling tirade, the near-panicked nurses stuck me with something. The anguish in my belly quieted down somewhat and I was able to converse like a normal human being. With saintly patience, Miss H and the nurses escorted me a few steps down the hall to the ward, where my roommate Jeremy—

Aw crap. I haven't told you about Jeremy yet, have I? I'll get to him in a minute. 

Anyway, the nurses helped me into the rock-hard hospital bed. I stretched out, bent and twisted and feeling like a scarecrow after a pack of flying monkeys had finished with him. Miss H never left my side. At no point during this debacle was the surgeon present or even visible. I imagined that he was likely at the nearest bar, smoking a fat stogie and reading the sports news or maybe getting some action from his pie-eyed assistant.

The most painful part of the whole affair was that Miss H wasn't dressed like this when I woke up.

After a time I was able to lie still and the pain, having lived a long, full life with a steady career and a loving family, decided to retire. I could still feel him down there practicing his golf swing, though. I managed to talk Heather into leaving at about a quarter past eleven. She had work in the morning, I argued. I would have happily had her stay the night, but I didn't like the look of the hard green cot underneath my gurney, nor had she any supplies, cosmetics or conveniences on her person. She didn't want to leave before I fell asleep, but I knew that sleep was a long way off for me. So she left and I was alone in a dark, stuffy ward room with no one but Jeremy for solace. 

Oh, that's right: Jeremy. I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about him. He was a Korean fellow, too old to be a student and too brassy and buoyant to be a salaryman. Like most young Korean men he was the perfect juxtaposition of physical fitness and frailty. He was tall, lean, muscular, and wore glasses. He had a deep, rich, resonant voice, and in pidgin English we got to know each other during our stint together in the hours leading up to my surgery, which he had just survived and I had yet to. I was encouraged by how hale and hearty he seemed so soon after the procedure: he didn't seem to be groggy or aching. 

Groggy and aching, however, was all I could manage during that long, dark Sunday night. I couldn't seem to find a position that was comfortable. My guts hurt in at least four distinct places. Only then did I notice that my throat was dry and I was ravenously hungry. I felt as though I'd done a million ab crunches, run a marathon and sung an opera without a drop of water in between. After an hour (two? three?) I managed to force myself to lie still. Whatever remained of the anesthetic in my system then took hold of me, and I slept until dawn. 

Learn about the long, dull, and somewhat sticky road to recovery in part III. 

Korean appendectomy, part I: the beginning

There is no abstruse meaning in the title of this post. I had an appendectomy in Korea. Here's how it came about:

Saturday, May 17, was a pretty typical day. I relaxed at home; Miss H went out with some friends. The only thing weird about the day, in fact, was the mild gastrointestinal discomfort I was experiencing. It felt like a case of bad gas or indigestion. I'm an intelligent human being and I know where my large intestine is. I didn't think anything of it. It was odd because it was persistent. I was still suffering when Miss H came home from her day out. Both of us were puzzled. 

On Sunday the mystery was solved. I woke up around 8 a.m., grabbed a brownie from the fridge and nibbled on it as I checked my e-mail. I noticed, with some annoyance, that my abdominal pain had not dissipated. It had, however, localized itself squarely in my lower right side, right about where my appendix should b—

Oh Jesus, Mary and St. George.

My appendix! 

I clicked on WebMD (porn for hypochondriacs) and got the lowdown. Yep—it was appendicitis, all right. I'd had abdominal pain centered around the upper abdomen and navel, which had become sharper and more severe as it zeroed in on my right side. I had [ahem] been unable to pass gas for about 18 hours—which is, if I may be so bold, quite unusual for me. I didn't have a fever, wasn't nauseous and hadn't lost my appetite, but my imagination was already running wild with visceral terrors. I was now certain that one of my heretofore-faithful organs had abruptly transformed into a dirty bomb and was now ticking away inside me, waiting for the right moment to spitefully splatter the rest of my innards with glowing radioactive goo. 

Basically the polar opposite of this picture. 

I stood up, marched stiffly into the bedroom, shook Miss H's shoulder, and said "Honey...I think it's my appendix." 

She bolted upright. Let me be quite plain: she shot up faster than a horny teenager's erection in a horror film, and that's saying something. Miss H is not the sort of person who bolts upright. The only time I've seen her do something remotely similar was when we were watching The Amazing Spider-man in a CGV cinema in fantabulous 4DX two years ago and the chair hit her with a little puff of air on the back of her neck the moment that saphead Peter Parker got bit by a spider at Oscorp Labs. She about leaped out of her chair. And that's exactly what she did the moment I said the word "appendix." A student at her school had been taken out of commission by a burst vermix a few weeks earlier, so the word was already on her radar screen. Hearing me say it switched her to red alert mode. In a record-breaking five minutes she was up and dressed with brushed hair and a locked-and-loaded purse, and we were out the door. 

The cab ride was torturous. Every time we hit a bump (and bumps are plentiful on Seoul's aging, sinuous streets) my lower right side screamed for clemency. I gritted my teeth and tried to look brave, even as my subconscious regaled my psyche with every disturbing scene from that Madeline episode I'd watched as a kid where the titular character's own appendix starts swelling and pulsating. 

The only reputable hospital in the area that we knew about was Asan Medical Center in Songpa-gu, so we headed there. We were directed to the emergency clinic, where my name, temperature and blood pressure were taken (but not given back). Miss H and I then sat and waited two hours until blood and urine tests, an electrocardiogram and a CT-scan were made and three hours until the results came back. My panicky, inchoate suspicions were confirmed: I had appendicitis. Appropriate phone calls were then made to appropriately-alarmed family members. Then the nurse dropped the bombshell: every bed at Asan was full, and I couldn't be operated on there. Fortunately, there was another hospital ten minutes away which specialized in appendectomies. 

So Miss H and I waited another antsy hour for the ambulance to show up, endured another bouncy ride to Songpa Cheong Hospital near Olympic Park, and—

—and then waited another six hours until it was time for my surgery at 9:00. 

It was the brownie. 

The stupid brownie did me in—the one I'd had for breakfast, remember? One of the first questions I was asked upon arriving at the hospital and alleging that I had maengjeongyeom was "Have you had anything to eat today?" 

Well of course I had: a brownie (I said "cake" to make things simpler) at eight o'clock. Because of this, we had to wait two hours for the tests to be conducted, and had to wait until nine o'clock at night to have the offending organ excised. Splendid—not only had I sabotaged my only chance at speedy diagnosis and treatment, but now my poor dietary habits were on display for the entire Korean medical community to see. 

Culinary indiscretion aside, at nine o'clock I found myself walking from the three-bed fourth-floor ward down to the operating room on the third floor in the company of a cabal of nervous, squawking nurses. The cluttered operating room was clean and bright. Shiny steel tools were laid out on trays. Green cloth covered every pertinent surface. A fat housefly, which I could only assume had been sterilized beforehand, buzzed about the disc-shaped UFO of a surgical lamp. The young, skinny surgeon and his pie-eyed assistant spread-eagled me on the operating table and inserted a syringe into the IV tube already conveniently embedded in my arm.

"You go to sleep now," the surgeon said.

It would be my first time under general anesthesia. I wondered how long it would take for me to— 

Pop.

Fade to black.

I'll tell you what happened next in part II.