Jen is Free at Last and Twenty-Eight to Boot

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and by now most people who care know that I am (blessedly) out of the hospital.  I survived!  It was really touch-and-go there for a little while… except that it wasn’t at all.  

I was released from my own personal hell on April 15, the day millions of accountants look forward to each year and also known as My Birthday Eve.  Upside, I got out just in time for the weekend so I could indulge in some brain-invigorating human interaction; downside, total bill was 1.1M Korean won.  That sounds way worse than it really was, which was around $1,000, but still.  Ouch.  However (as the one sort of tactless doctor who happened to be the only one who spoke English well was quick to tell me numerous times), it was still much cheaper than it would have been in the US.  Which is undeniable.  Even with my old BCBS insurance through McAfee, my deductible alone was a grand, and after that it was an 80-20 thing.  So in some backwards kind of way, this was perfect timing.  If you can call anything about this situation ‘perfect’.

I am planning on doing a mini case study comparing the cost/treatment of having this procedure here in Korea vs. back home in the States, but that will be somewhat of an undertaking, so nobody hold their breath.  Just stay tuned.

I got out of the hospital around noon (with the shut-down catheter still protruding from my back and an appointment with a urologist for a week later) and headed home to embrace freedom for the afternoon.  Then Jess, Brittany, and Sarah came over for a Homecoming/Birthday Girls’ Celebration.  It was JUST what I needed.  Sarah brought me a chocolate cake and Brittany a plum tart/pie type of thing and we grubbed down while Brittany also read our Tarot cards one-by-one.  Spoiler alert: my life is going to be awesome.  Really, that’s what the cards said - basically I can’t go wrong and everything is going to be killer.  As if there were any other alternative.  But it’s still nice to have it confirmed by the omniscience of the Tarot, right?

Sarah and a surprise cake.

Too delicious to stop.  Or get a picture of either in one piece.

Nom, nom, nom, nom.

Lady Brittany knows all.

The cards don't lie.

On Friday, my actual birthday, I slept late and prepared for a low-key night out, far more excited about the re-entering society part of the evening than the birthday part. About 8 of us went to Rock ‘n’ Roll (one of my favorite home-like bars with great American food) for dinner, then we headed over to Metal City to see Poko Lambro play.  PL is a couple from Texas who have a fantastic sound, and I had been planning on making that my birthday scene for a month or more. I even wore my gator-skin boots for the occasion. Not for the first time, I marveled that I would come all the way across the Pacific only to love the things best that remind me most of home.  Absence really has made my heart grow fonder of Texas.

The night did not disappoint.  I made a rule not to talk about the hospital stay on my birthday.  Jess gave me a birthday hat that ruled the evening, and at the behest of Marcus, Jenny made me a gigantic “Happy Birthday Jen” banner.  

THE hat.  "Kiss me, it's my birthday!"

Jess, the hat idea was genius.  Everything is better when there are props involved.

My super mega awesome banner at Metal City.

Banner designed and painted by the lovely and amazing Jenny P.

The beautiful Violet Lea of Poko Lambro fame.

Marcus, who made things happen.  Because he's the best.

Love these girls.

Leah's just doing what the hat says.

The hat. Was. A. Hit.

Turns out those Tarot cards were right on the money.  Best first birthday on foreign soil yet. 

Jen Goes Under the Knife in Korea: The Squeaky Wheel

Since the first day in the ER, I have had this tube coming out of my back, draining fluid from my kidney.  At first they were draining the remaining fluid from the cyst, but after a while they realized that the kidney fluid was not decreasing in volume as quickly as they had expected.  Some tests revealed that the cyst had drained fully, but there was a tear in the kidney where the cyst had been, so what was draining now was just fluids from my kidney.  Basically they were just syphoning off urine into my bag - so I was a colostomy bag person for a week.  What an achievement at such an early age.  They debated whether or not to undergo another surgery to repair the tear, or whether or not to let it heal on its own.  In true wait-and-see fashion, they decided to wait and if the fluid decreased each day, once it got low enough they would take out the tube and let the kidney heal itself.  This culminated yesterday when they shut down the tube and took the bag off.  The tube is still coming out of my back and connected to my kidney, but it isn’t draining anything any more.  I was told that if I had any pain after shutting the tube down, they would have to decide what else to do, but if I didn’t have any pain, I could go home today and just be an outpatient to a urologist in the future.  And I haven’t had any pain, luckily.

I spoke to my doctor when he came around this morning during rounds with a bunch of other doctors, asking him if I would be getting out today, since that’s what everybody had been telling me yesterday.  All I could get out of him was, “Tomorrow”.  Awesome.  This is how most interactions with my doctor go.  Very little information flow from him to me.  And people keep telling me to throw a fit, or to be the ‘squeaky wheel’, but it’s just not that easy.  If I ask the nurse to tell my doctor I need to talk to him, she either tells me she could not reach him or he’s in surgery and he will come by later, which he never does.  This has gotten really old, but by this point I have basically resigned myself not to get worked up over it.  I know that part of it is the language barrier - I am stuck between a rock and a hard place.  I don’t speak the language, so it is really easy to avoid me, and there’s not really much I can do.  Especially if I ask for my doctor and I am told that he’s in surgery.  What can I say to that?  I can’t exactly demand he come and see me when my whole point is that I’m perfectly fine.  In the States I might threaten to rip someone a new one if they don’t let me out of here, but A) I can’t take it out on these sweet, giggling nurses and B) they wouldn’t understand what the hell I’m saying anyway.  And when I do say something adamant such as “I’ve got to get out of here.  I have to go home.” the doctor or nurse just looks at me sort of pityingly, giving that uncomfortable laugh that Koreans do in awkward situations.  

Dad pointed out that also against my crusade to be released from the hospital is the fact that there is no insurance company involved.  The doctors here are much more apt to use the wait-and-see approach with patients because there is nobody breathing down their necks to make a move or let me go.  I am pretty much the only one here whose main goal is to get me out of this hospital ASAP.  Who knew I would be making a case for big insurance?  It’s like Korea is bizarro world.

Jen Goes Under the Knife in Korea: Jen is Tired

I’m not really physically tired.  In fact, I feel almost as good as new, which sort of adds to the mental tiredness because it begs the question Why Am I Still In Here?  I’m tired of the hard beds. I’m tired of relying on friends or coworkers for food and moral support and to watch my cat.  I’m tired of old, sick Korean people.  I’m tired of a shared bathroom down the hall.  I’m tired of waiting, and I’m tired of not knowing what I’m waiting for.  I’m tired of hearing people vomit.  So yeah, I’m pretty much tired of the hospital.  

My daily schedule looks something like this (and I’ve been here too long if I even have a daily schedule):  

Three times a day - nurse checks vital signs (blood pressure, pulse, and temperature), another nurse brings me my meds (1 pill for nausea, 1 codeine, and sometimes 1 something else I don’t know) and explains every single time that I need to take these 30 minutes after I eat my next meal, another nurse gives me antibiotic shot that is painful and makes me briefly nauseated.  These three things do not happen at the same time.  I would vote for consolidation of efforts, but I think there is a “Vitals Signs” nurse, and a “Antibiotic Administration” nurse, and so on.  I hate the antibiotic shot the most, however, all of these things suck the most in the morning, when they are all performed between the hours of 5am and 7am.  Most annoying part of the whole thing is “Body Weight” which sucks because I have to get out of bed and also the way the nurses say the words “body weight” (bah-dee wait?) with the emphasis and a slight question mark on the word ‘weight’.  Grrr.  

During the day - sometimes someone comes and draws blood, and every day for the past week a lady has come to change the bandages on my back.  This part is not so bad, and it breaks up the boredom.

Evening - someone usually comes to visit me, whether it be friends or coworkers, for a couple of hours, often bringing me food.  I simultaneously look forward to this and dread it because I look and feel so gross now after so many days without a proper shower.   But now that I’ve been here over a week, I do welcome the visits because I really miss human interaction.  So I still don’t really welcome my coteachers, even though some of them do technically speak English, because much like at school, the language barrier is still enough that enjoyable conversations aren’t really possible.  Mostly it’s just them asking me if I feel better (I have said yes to this question since Day 2 in the hospital), who has come to visit me, and what I have eaten.  

The hospital has been much more bearable since last Wednesday, which is when I started sneaking home to use the internet and cook myself some food twice a day.  I usually go in the afternoon for a couple of hours and then come back for a while, then head back home for a couple of hours after dinner.  It’s simple to sneak out of here, and I’d say my apartment is maybe a quarter mile, round trip, from here.  The hospital is located in a busy area with tons of restaurants and shops and the back area opens out onto a street, so I just walk out that way.  Nobody has missed me so far.

Jen Goes Under the Knife in Korea: Day 2

I don’t know if this is a Korea thing, or a hospital thing, but the people here do not respect sleep.  For example, if I walked into a room where someone was sleeping, my natural response would be to speak quietly or not to say anything.  Not so here in the ICU.  I know they need to check my vital signs, but that does not require yelling at me to wake up in a voice far too cheerful for 6am.  It technically doesn’t require me to be awake at all, although the motion might wake me.  Nor does putting antibiotics or anything else into my IV.  Giving me my meds and telling me to take them 30 minutes after breakfast does, I guess, require me to be awake and alert, so that I understand.  Even if I don’t like it.  Beginning on Day 2, I wondered why all of these actions were not consolidated.  Why did they have to wake me up 3 times to perform these 3 tasks?  But I couldn’t ask this question A) because I am a polite southern girl and more importantly B) because I don’t speak the language.  

So I had a fitful sleep the first night, or morning rather, because I kept going back to sleep after each of these wake-ups, and every time the nurse came back she would say “Wake up!” with a little lilt at the end of the word as if wondering why I wasn’t already awake.  I wanted to ask, why should I wake up, so I can just sit here?, but again, I couldn’t.  I was very groggy the entire day, and I mostly just laid in my little corner of the ICU in a vegetative state, watching movies, surfing the internet, and reading Chuck Klosterman in between cat naps.  Trips to the bathroom were an event for me because I was still very tender and nervous to move around.  An added obstacle was that my IV drip pole was too tall to make it into the bathroom stall without having to tilt it at a strange angle, so that gave every trip a little more of a taste of the unknown. 

I couldn’t eat much, which was fine.  I was being fed intravenously and plus I had been eating a LOT of fried chicken from this place near my apartment ever since I learned how to get delivery, so I figured a day or two off eating wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.  It is almost beach time.

I was taken to get x-rays but no new CT scan yet.  Other than that I was mostly chained to my bed.  I did have a shelf behind me where Mrs. Kim had put a bunch of the things she had brought me, but unfortunately it was nearly impossible for me to turn around and reach any of it with the rails up on both sides of the bed and my very limited mobility.  Sarah and Marcus came by for a while, as did my man-friend and a bunch of teachers from my school, including my principal which was awesome.  There are few people I’d like to see less when I am wearing a button up hospital shirt and lime-green corduroy draw-string basketball hospital shorts with Pikachu ankle socks.  Certainly this has been a humbling experience.

I wrote these posts while in the hospital without internet, so I could not post them as they happened.  The following posts about being in the hospital happened over a 2 week timespan from April 1, 2010, to April 15, 2010.

Jen Goes Under the Knife in Korea: Tales of Sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt

I have pretty much had only 2 kinds of experiences with Korean women, and by women I mean women older than me, I’d say women from their late 30s to their 50s, not necessarily grandmas, but not someone I would consider in the same age group as me.  The first (and by far the most common) is complete, unadulterated disdain and contempt.  (I assume this is based on preconceived ideas about white girls, coupled with my wearing what they consider to be a revealing shirt.  This is because for whatever reason Korean girls can wear the shortest skirts imaginable, but showing anything lower than the collarbone is a no-no.  In Spain it was the opposite, a girl could show her entire chest and/or torso, but shorts seemed to create a frenzy.).  The second is a sweet kindness and open curiosity.  This is a story about one of the (rare) second kinds, a lady I call sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt.

I met sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt in the ER on my first day before the surgery, during one of my trips down the hall to get an x-ray.  I was laying there looking pathetic, I’m sure, when she came over to hold my hand and comfort me.  I assume she was visiting someone else in the ER, though I never did see her with anyone.  She was so kind, and though I couldn’t understand a word of what she said, she could tell I was alone and scared and her motherly instinct took over.  She murmured calming words in Korean and petted my free hand with her tiny, soft one.  It was a Chicken Soup for the Soul moment.  It was something I could imagine my mom doing in a similar situation, and it really did make me feel better. 

Over the next couple of days, I had numerous encounters with sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt, and the tides of my feelings slowly changed, although her intentions were always true blue.  Here are the details of our brief hospital relationship as I remember them.

April 1, early afternoon: Sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt notices me on my way to get an x-ray, and comforts me sweetly in the hallway outside the x-ray room.

April 1, early evening: On my way back to the ER from surgery, sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt sees me again in the same hallway as before, and prays with me while clasping my hand.  I know this because the one word I understood was her “Amen” at the end, which she says with feeling, probably to help me understand that she is praying. It is surprisingly welcome to see a familiar face. I think she must be a purple-clad angel.

April 2, around 11am: Sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt (still wearing the same clothes as the night before, but I am too, so who am I to judge?) finds me in the ICU and brings me some bananas and strawberries. I am pretty sure she also asks if I want coffee or milk, both of which I am not fond of.  I try to be nice while telling her that I can’t have coffee anyway because of the whole kidney thing and that unless she wants me to vomit again, I can’t have milk either.  She may or may not understand this from my hand gestures and slow English.  After disapprovingly removing the cup of ramen my male friend brought me the night before, she eventually goes away.  

April 2, around 1:00pm: My head co-teacher and self-proclaimed “Korean Mom”, Mrs. Kim, comes by at lunchtime to check on me and bring me some donuts and coffee.  She too seems oblivious to the fact that people with kidney problems should probably lay off the diuretics.  Sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt comes by while Mrs. Kim is there.  Purpleshirt putters around my bed, bringing me a small carton of milk, even though I try to gesture that I don’t want it.  She goes so far as to open the milk, sticks a straw into it, and tries to put it into my mouth.  I envision miming gagging and putting both hands to my neck as if I am choking, but instead I ask Mrs. Kim to tell her I don’t like milk.  Mrs. Purpleshirt still tries to hang around and act motherly before eventually leaving. I imagine Mrs. Kim feels territorial about this, but it could be all in my head.  However, I would not be completely against a Kim vs. Purpleshirt throwdown.  When they have both gone, I hide the coffee and the milk behind a big bag on the counter near me.

April 2, around 11:00pm:  Lights are out in the ICU, and sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt barges into my curtained-off area as if she owns the place.  I am watching a movie on my laptop.  She starts fiddling with my stuff, presumably trying to help make me comfortable.  I have scarcely been less comfortable in my life.  I convince her I am okay by repeating “I’m okay, I’m okay” at least 10 times and she leaves.

April 3, 1:00am:  I am still watching something on my computer, with my headphones in.  Sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt comes back again, entering again without being invited.  She gestures to me to take off my headphones and go to sleep.  I gesture back that I am 28, not 7, and I will go to sleep when I please.  And I also say “I’m okay” a bunch in a tiny whisper until she eventually leaves.  I try not to imagine what she would do if I was asleep when she came by, which is probably what she expected.

April 3, 10:00am:  Sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt (still wearing said purple shirt) comes into my ‘room’ again, invading what I feel is my very limited personal space yet again.  She starts cleaning up the area around my bed, which is now littered with cups and donut boxes and plastic bags.  She sees the abandoned milk and picks it up, clearly confused as to how I could resist a perfectly good carton of milk.  She pantomimes that she wants to take the milk, and I let her know that that is perfectly okay with me.  She also wants to take the coffee Mrs. Kim gave me with her, and I say okay.  "Okay" is an important word in most of our communications. She tries to give the day-old coffee to an old Korean lady in the bed next to mine before reappearing with wedges of grapefruit.  I don’t hate grapefruit, but it is not my favorite, and I have not been very hungry since the surgery.  Purpleshirt tries to feed me a wedge of grapefruit no less than 20 times before finally getting the hint that I don’t want it.  I keep shaking my head and rubbing my stomach, indicating that I can’t eat it because I don’t feel good and/or I am not hungry.  She FINALLY leaves me alone.

April 3, 1:00pm:  I return from a trip to the bathroom to find sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt in my ‘room’ yet again.  I curse my bum left kidney under my breath for getting me into this. This time she has brought the milk back, and now it’s been heated.  This is possibly the only way day-old milk could be grosser to me.  I again gesture that I don’t want it.  She has also brought with her 2 small gift bags.  The first one contains 2 brown eggs.  The other contains a bruised miniature banana and an open and half-empty pack of Kotex pads.  When I pull out the Kotex, she mimes how to use them in a way that has me scared she might diaper me right there.  I convince her that I know how to use them and that “I’m okay”.  She starts to leave, but then comes back and gestures to me that she wants some of the bread Mrs. Kim brought me the day before.  I think it’s strange for her to be taking things from someone in an ICU bed, but in an effort to grease the wheels of her exodus, I gladly let her take some.  She eventually leaves, never to be seen again, and so ends my relationship with sweet Mrs. Purpleshirt.

Jen Goes Under the Knife in Korea: Day 1

I am not one who many would consider ‘shy’.  I’ll even admit that sometimes I like to be the center of attention; however this does not include times when I am down on my luck, or if something bad has happened to me.  I usually don’t like to advertise negative things in my life, not (just) because I want people to think my life is perfect, but because I believe in letting go of the negative and focusing on the positive.  I couldn’t stand to feel pitied.  That being said, it is difficult for anyone to go into the hospital for 10 days without having to tell the story, so here goes.

To start from the beginning, I have a bum kidney.  When I was four years old, doctors discovered that I had 3 ureters, which are the tubes that connect your kidneys to your bladder.  You’re only supposed to have 2 of them, but I had an extra one that was screwing up my ability to control myself, a fact that was only discovered by my mother one day while giving me a bath. (I always wonder about these situations - as a child, you don’t know that your vision is blurry, or that you are supposed to be able to hear better than you do, or that you’re not supposed to wet yourself every day a little.  It seems so sad to me that kids are reliant on others to find these things out and remedy the situations because what if Mom hadn’t noticed?  How long would I have gone around not knowing?  Poor baby.  Luckily I have an awesome and observant Mom.)

So in November of 1986 I had surgery to remove the superfluous ureter, during which they also removed an unknown mass from my left kidney.  It never seemed like a big deal to me growing up, but now knowing people with 4-year-old children, I can only imagine how scary it must have been for two people in their twenties (who were practically kids themselves) with their first child undergoing an invasive surgery and being hospitalized for 7 days.  So gold medal to my parents for surviving that. Because of this operation, I have always had a scar on my lower stomach that’s about 4 inches long, but it’s covered up by bathing suits so I never really think about it much.  Over the years I have had a few kidney infections, always in this left kidney, but never requiring much more than a round of antibiotics and drinking a lot of water.  Through these experiences, I learned that the key indication it is a kidney infection is when you wake up with what feels like a cramp in your back and side, up near your ribs.  Turns out, it is not a cramp, it’s your kidney becoming so infected it hurts.  It is a little strange when an organ you rarely think about (and probably don’t even know where it is located) becomes swollen and painful.  This is what happened to me at around 3am on April 1. 

As usual, I was surprised at how quickly and severely the pain came on.  I had been awake not 4 hours earlier without a clue, and I knew immediately when I woke up that this was a kidney infection and that I would have to take a trip to the hospital for antibiotics.  At first I thought I could make it until 9 when Pusan National University Hospital (which is maybe a 1/4 mile walk from my apartment) opened up, but by 6am I realized this pain was excruciating and I would have to go to the Emergency Room.  I didn’t know if all hospitals have ER’s, but I figured if not, I would hop a cab and somehow get the point across in my pretty much non-existent Korean.  Luckily, I quickly located PNU’s ER and was within an hour given some morphine for the pain, so at least I could then lie down semi-comfortably.  

After numerous x-rays and scans and an IV being hooked up and me vomiting into a bag after being injected with the first round of antibiotics, a doctor who spoke very good English came to explain to me that I had a cyst on my left kidney, and the cyst was infected.  In fact, it was so severely infected that the doctors were afraid it would burst and that I would become septic, which could possibly put me into a coma or even kill me. They were going to have to perform surgery within the hour to drain the cyst of the infected material, and I would be hospitalized for 5 days while it continued to drain and they pumped me full of antibiotics to kill the infection. 

This came as a big surprise to me.  I had expected to be prescribed a Z-Pack and to head home to lie in bed for a couple of days drinking gallons of water and watching The Wire on my computer.  I was actually surprised when they began doing the x-rays and scans, but I thought maybe it was just an ER thing or a Korea thing.  I have become really go-with-the-flow living abroad (I would like to say because I am really adaptable and flexible, but it’s mostly because I just don’t have much choice).  I don’t speak the language and I’m a visitor on their turf, so I am pretty much completely at their mercy - especially in times when I am in dire need of medical attention.

So they wheeled me downstairs to the operating room, had me roll onto my stomach and place my arms above my head, and put some kind of general anesthetic or pain killer (I can’t be sure because of the language barrier) into my IV.  They did not put me under, so I’m not sure exactly what was going on there.  I could see different images on the computer screens around the bed, and I asked the nurse where was the kidney they were about to operate on.  I could see what I thought were the kidneys and one of them had a mass on it about half the size of the kidney itself, but I wanted to be sure, and the doctor wasn’t in the room yet, so we had time to kill.  Plus I was feeling woozy because of the drugs and nervous for obvious reasons, so I wanted something to distract me from just waiting.  The nurse pointed to where I had been looking, and I was correct about that being the cyst, which was a pretty impressive size.  

Soon, the ‘Professor’, as the nurse called him, came in and began by giving me local anesthetic in the kidney area.  There was some pain, but it was mostly just uncomfortable.  It was over very quickly though - I probably only spent half an hour in the operating room altogether.  When he was finished, the doctor held up a fat syringe halfway full of a reddish-pink, opaque substance he had drained from the cyst.  It looked like a lot to me, and it was pretty gross.  

After that, I was wheeled back down to the ER and for a while I thought there was no way I would be able to lay on my back for days.  I was in pain, and of course the area was tender and I was scared to move a muscle in my back, but my arms were already going numb from being held up that long.  By this point, my co-teacher Jiwon had arrived, and Sarah and Marcus showed up not long after.  They helped me roll over onto my side, but I was still scared to move much more than that.  I was soon moved to the ICU, the only place they had empty beds available.  Not surprisingly, this is where things are blurry, but I know that Sarah brought my computer and some things for me from home, and Mrs. Kim brought me some mandu (dumplings), which I once mentioned I liked and now she says remind her of me every time she sees them.  I do like them.  I don’t know if that means I should be forever associated with them in someone’s mind, but whatever.  I was happy to find out that there was internet in the ICU, albeit spotty internet, so I could have access to the outside world.  I don’t remember much else, but I slept for quite some time that night, in an awkward position on my right side with my right hand (the IV hand) sort of held over my heart.  I had realized too late that for the second time (the first time being one time in college when I was very dehydrated but did not stay overnight in the hospital) the bad kidney was on my left side and my IV was in my right hand, so I was doomed to be stuck in an uncomfortable position any time I tried to be horizontal.  Next time I’m sure I’ll remember this... but I’m planning on there not being a next time.