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.