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Hospitalized Abroad!

Ever Evolving Primate: Travel, photography, food, cooking, and just about anything else.: Hospitalized Abroad!

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Hospitalized Abroad!

This weekend was one of the most memorable and painful weekends on record for my life. As you probably know, I've been living in South Korea with my fiance since February 2011, and we work in the public school system here. One of the things we were excited about was being on a national health insurance plan, and we've used it sparingly over the course of our year and a half here. This weekend we got to test it out on a bigger event.

Friday afternoon I had a quick turnaround between classes, and I started to feel a bit of pain in my back. I always attribute back pain to the chair in my office, or my concrete slab of a bed, but this was sharper and more localized. I went to my class and winced here and there as I made my way through the 45 minutes. It subsided, school ended, I grabbed a snack and went home. At home there wasn't really any more problems, just a dull ache. We watched a few episodes of Modern Family and No Reservations before we crashed.

At about 6:00 on Saturday morning, I woke up and made my way to the bathroom. I wasn't sure whether I was going to vomit or "other" and I kept changing positions while I was trying to figure out what was happening. I got very hot, started sweating, and eventually started vomiting without end. Carolyn woke up (I was apparently screaming) and went to get some juice, but the pain just got worse, so we grabbed my health insurance card and headed to the hospital.

Our first stop was Bogang Hospital, about a mile away. We caught a cab and took the quick ride over, as I continued wretching into the bucket Carolyn grabbed for me. We stumbled into the emergency room, and there were no English speaking staff members. I called my coteacher, and Carolyn called her Korean friend and they translated for us. Bogang Hospital had no facilities with which to run blood tests or anything, and they wanted to send us to a different hospital. They called a cab for us, gave him directions, and we piled in. We rode about 20 minutes or so to Daegu Catholic University Hospital, my head in the bucket, and the pain just got worse.

I stumbled into the E.R. saying "help me" and an English speaking doctor said he'd help. Carolyn got me admitted with the front desk, and I sat down on a gurney. The doctor came back a few minutes (that seemed like hours) later and took my vitals, I think, then came back another few minutes (again...they seemed like hours) later and started an examination. He asked where the pain was, before punching me in the back. My response was a loud scream, then he had me lay back on the gurney and felt my abdomen, once again inducing screams. A few minutes later they were inserting an IV, pain medication started flowing in, and I stopped panicking.

They wheeled me around the hospital on the gurney, but I was feeling better at this point. X-rays and a CT scan revealed that I had a kidney stone on my right side, and that it would require a shockwave treatment for me to be able to move it along. Okay, now we're getting somewhere, I thought. They gave us a referral card and address for a urology clinic on the complete opposite side of the city, we hailed a cab, and headed on. The fee was about 150,000 won for all of the service.

We were both struck by how nice Suseong-gu is compared to where we live. The doctor's office was pretty posh, with comfortable chairs in the waiting room, and clean, clean floors. The doctor here spoke impeccable English, and told me that the run of x-rays and treatment would cost about 300,000 won and take about 2 hours. It went by quick, and before I knew it I had gone through a whole lot of x-rays and been splayed naked over a shockwave machine that broke the stone up. I felt better right away.

Carolyn's Korean friend came along to make sure we were okay (and not over billed or otherwise taken advantage of as foreigners). Her boyfriend was nice enough to give us a ride home, not before I had to run to a bathroom to vomit again and start sweating and turn pale. The pharmacy at the ground floor of the building gave me 8 days of painkillers and antibiotics, and a 30 day run of anti-stone drugs. This cost about 30,000 won. We got home a bit later, I laid down, and managed to eat some to get my first run of drugs down.

The doctor warned that I would probably experience more pain as the stone fragments continued to pass, and sure enough at about 1:00am, I was up again, having the same vomiting reaction until more moved along. I felt better by about 4:00am and went to bed. I woke up Sunday morning feeling quite a bit better, but with no appetite. Carolyn went shopping, made lunch, I took my pills, and started to feel better. I made it through the rest of the day with little pain, until we laid down to go to sleep for the night.

A dull ache awakened me at about 3:00 on Monday morning, and kept me awake, mostly out of fear that the big pains would return, I think until 6:00 or so. I called in sick to work and spent the day at home resting, eating when I was hungry, and taking my pills right on time.

This leads me to a few points about living overseas that I think people could take a note from:

  1. Have a local friend who speaks the language. It makes it way easier to get your point across if you can't communicate very well and you need treatment.
  2. Have a foreign friend who can handle your affairs. I could not have filled out the paperwork at the hospitals myself, and having Carolyn with me provided an unreal amount of comfort and assurance that there was someone that at least knew there was something wrong with me.
  3. Have insurance. Almost 500,000 won isn't a huge amount of money, but it's not insignificant either. Have travel insurance or some other coverage wherever you go, otherwise a hospital stay could ruin your travels for a while.
  4. Know where a few hospitals are just in case you ever need to find one.
  5. Know the easiest place to catch a cab, because stumbling down the street clutching your kidneys, you don't want to struggle to find a ride.
  6. Make sure you have a phrasebook with a medical section. Our $12 Lonely Planet Korean phrasebook had nearly everything we needed for our hospital conversations, and was worth every penny.
So there's my experience of needing acute medical treatment while living abroad. It's nothing out of the ordinary or even dramatic, simply an experience. Make sure that you have the coverage and tools (phrasebook) you need on your travels to make potential hospitalization a little more do-able.

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1 Comments:

At June 19, 2012 at 12:57 PM , Blogger C dub said...

What a crappy way to spend a Saturday babe! But, you made it through, and I am impressed with you and your ability to deal with a very tough situation. I'm not glad that this happened to you, but I am glad that we now know that we can get through so much more than we have before. <3 you!!

 

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