health care

i wanted to make an entry about my sick day. it's coming a week late.


so last wednesday I took my first sick day. I had no idea what to expect. Supposedly we get something like 10 or 12 sick days while we are here. However, it was made well known that the Korean "sick day" is not standard.

for one, korean teachers almost NEVER take sick days. their job dedication leads them to come to school whether snot rains from their noise or not. anything short of decrippling SARS, they are showing up for classes.

this is in conjuction with the idea their national idea that korean people hardly get sick. thanks to the "miracle" of kimchi - they are loaded on nutriets all the time. and if they do feel the slightest pollutant of disease creeping toward them - off to the hospital for a shot in the bum. i envy them.

anyway, by the end of school tuesday it was pretty clear that i was not feeling well. my co-teacher gave me a few packets of cough drops, full of some chemicalized name I had never heard but she insisted was good for battling coughs and colds.

wednesday I woke up and wasn't feeling great. could i have gone to school? sure. would i have been miserable there? absolutely.

i called my co-teachers cell. she was worried. i promised her i'd go to the hospital later (note: their non-emergency doctors are located at the hospital as well as ICU's and the works. every "doctor's office" is a hospital).

I slept until about noon. Then I went to the hospital.

Now, I had been waiting for the day where I would get sick and need to cash in on my FREE, GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED health care because well, the United States could use the taunting. don't get me wrong, this way was MUCH preferable to the US but it wasn't as easy as going in and telling them my throat hurt and taking home some AFFORDABLE medicine.

i went in, after a bit of confusion and walking around, I found a "guide" of sorts, one who spoke enough English to take me where I needed. I paid about $7 for a hospital membership card (one-time cost), saw a throat doctor who said I had "tonsilitis" about as casually as you would inform someone that their hat looked nice, and then paid $9.50 for my medicine. the whole endeavor took about 35 minutes.

now, 2 factors proabably made this longer than it could have been:

1) I don't speak Korean.
2) I went to the biggest hospital in Guri, my city. It's the closest (or one of) to my house and the only one I had been to before (for my pre-work physical and drug test). A smaller hospital would have been more easy to traverse and might have made the interactions quicker. Couldn't say for sure though.

Now, what medicine did $9.50 buy me?

1) 150 pills. 5 pills 3x a day for 10 days. 150 pills. For a sore throat. 150 pills. No explanation of what any of them do. 150 pills. All 5 different colors, sizes and shapes. 150 pills. What did they give you for typhoid fever - a four-course meal of medication?

2) black liquid to be mixed with water, gurgled and spit out. tastes like M&M's. If M&M's were soaked in acid, dragged through mud and had already done a once-through your family pet. Yikes.


The sweetest part? At 4:00pm, when the school day ended, 3 teachers from my school came over with food for me: a huge tub of pouridge, 15 tangerines, a box of cereal, chocolate cake snacks, 2 giant pears, a little kimchi, and cheesy spam.

I'll have to talk about spam some other time. some of you know. some of you don't. it's got a whoooooole different cultural effect here than in the U.S.

anyway, the teachers had pooled money together to get me some food to feel better. very sweet. i really have a great staff at my school.

well, that was my sick day.


what i'm listening to (and you should be too):

Elizabeth & The Catapult - Everybody Knows

(leonard cohen cover).......(nevermind the video, it's an interesting concept, but ehhhhhh)


"i dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?"

- poet Eve Merriam


e.g.