I have been very fortunate that I have never contracted any truly foreign disease, broken anything, or fell into a fire pit while drunkenly trying to hurdle it (which happened at least once a summer to someone in Korea). However, I have had plenty of normal mishaps and illnesses that are a little more interesting (in retrospect) since they happened abroad. Here are my top (or maybe bottom) five.
#5 New Year's Resolution: Work Somewhere with Sick Days
This is actually two stories but they're related. My first two New Year's in Korea did not go so well. I learned a lesson from both experiences. Unfortunately, it was the exact same lesson that just didn't stick the first time.
New Year's Eve of 2006-2007, I made it through a nice buffet dinner by the beach but not to the midnight countdown. I could tell I was getting sick and went home. I had been a little sick (mostly from hangovers) before in Korea but nothing I couldn't handle since I didn't have to be at work until about 3:00pm. I loved that part of my job. The downside? No holidays or sick days. And I mean it. I worked every Western Holiday and most Korean Holidays. On the two days of the year we did get off for absolutely mandatory Korean holidays, we made those up on weekends. And as for the sick days, when you are hired from another country (over the phone) mainly for being a native-speaker, it's because they don't have many just hanging around. And I worked for the rare company that didn't have Korean co-teachers in the classroom. For the first year or two in Korea, there was no one to replace us if we got sick. So we were politely told that we don't have sick days. The reality of this didn't really hit me until that first week of 2007.
And it wasn't just me that was sick. Four of our five teachers were sick that week. I was shaking with chills and fever for two or three days, living on pain medication. One of the other teachers was leaving his classroom every few hours to puke. And another teacher seemed to have contracted both our strains of the flu simultaneously. This was the week we realized our lack of time off. We worked December 31st and January 1st...at a school. We all taught sitting in chairs with our winter coats, hats and scarves. We were obviously sick and the kids didn't really bat an eye. It was expected that we would still be there. Oh how I missed the Western work ethic...
The next new year went on much better. I made it through midnight with a good crowd of people at a house party near my own house. I was getting a little drunk but not New-Year's-quality wasted. I was feeling very spirited as well since my friends made some homemade eggnog. Thank you Canadians!! At least, I felt that way until the next morning. I know what a hangover feels like, and I know when it's more than just a hangover. This was more. And I knew exactly what the "more" was: raw eggs. I was so in the spirit and grateful for something that resembled home (I don't even drink eggnog at home!) that I had two glasses. In a usual hangover, my head hurts so much, it tells my stomach what to do. I had that going on a little but my stomach was doing flips all on it's own too, and way more often than any normal hangover I've ever had. And so I had to tell myself again, so maybe it would stick, work somewhere with sick days.
#4 Korean Remedy: Stop Talking So Much
No one really knows why they get TMJ. It could be long term stress or you could have bit an apple wrong once. Any which way it happened, my jaw started popping on one side a few months after being in Korea. I ignored it like an idiot and eventually couldn't open my mouth wide enough to put two fingers in between my teeth. Around the same time that my mouth locked up I had a cold brewing as well with a pretty sore throat. That was enough sick for me to finally bring myself to go to the hospital.
Someone told me about a hospital that had one English speaking nurse for the whole hospital. (It sounds bad but there wasn't a huge demand and it meant that I was guided around the hospital the whole time.) She was a really nice nurse and I got to know her well over the years. I went back many times after that for acupuncture which is cheap and common in Korea. (That leads to whole other stories about med students, needles, and traditional Eastern sludge medicine.) The nurse took me around to all the doctors I needed except the Dentist for my jaw. Apparently, the local expert on TMJ had offices just down the street and I could go there (alone) after I was done at the hospital. First, though, the doctors needed to look at my infected throat and yet I couldn't open my mouth. And so I cursed my stupidity and procrastination as they shoved a scope down my nose and I watched my throat open and close on the video monitor next to my bed. Will I ever learn?
I found the dentist's office, opened the sliding door, and the first thing I notice is the shoe rack next to the door with a nice array of slippers to choose. Oh, Korea. Take your shoes off at home, restaurants, and now the dentist's office. The girls at the counter looked at me like I was the first Waegook (foreigner) they'd seen walk through that door. This may have even been true. But I knew what to do by now in situations like this one. I just handed them my ARC (Alien Registration Card, got to love the honesty) and sat down. They seemed quite pleased about this.
Fortunately, most doctors, most places you will go will have to know some English because some of their textbooks in medical school were in English and/or English proficiently is a requirement to get in since med schools have high standards. I actually got to see one of those textbooks because it was the best way this Dentist could explain what had happened to my jaw. And it didn't look like a med school textbook. It looked like a book written at a high school science level. Between that and some pretty pictures, I sussed out that the cartilage between my jawbones had actually popped out and the two bones were rubbing together. This was just the imagery I needed to forget about the tube down the nose. At this point, his wife, who was the other dentist at the Bubu ChiKwa (literally "Couple Dentist"), was finished with a patient and came over. She spoke much more English than her husband and was actually thrilled to be practicing. What a great day for them.
"You should come when the jaw is popping, the dentist can make a splint to fix it. Now it's bad, maybe you need surgery." Great, thanks for the guilt trip and terrifying possibility in the same breath. "He tries to put back first manual." Manual? Not a splint but not surgery? Exactly how do you pull the jaw apart enough to put the cartilage back "manually"? I figured this one out as it was happening. That piece of cartilage wants to be between the jawbones so if you separate them, hopefully it will just pop back in on its own. How do you separate them? The dentist sticks his thumb into the patients mouth and grabs the lower jaw. Then through a few quick moves in different directions, tries to dislocate the jaw just enough to allow the piece to pop back in there. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't have to go through the anticipation of knowing what he was about to do. The idea would have probably been worse than it actually was.
"The doctor did a good job, no surgery." Did he just dislocate my jaw? "We make you a splint now. You come back every month to adjust the splint." Which all turned out to be over $800. "The doctor gives you a list of foods not to eat." No cuttlefish, no problem there. "And you need to stop talking."
"Um, I'm a teacher, it's my job to talk."
"Stop talking so much."
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More stories to come! My current sickness is catching up with me and I need to sleep.
