I have been here just a little over a week and already had the pleasure of experiencing the health systems here in Korea. I'll first go over my dental experience. On the way here I hurt my tooth on the plane (I had mentioned this on a previous blog). I naturally assumed it was the tooth that my dentist told me a week before I was suppose to leave I should have a root canal on. I don't have dental insurance, so the root canal would have cost me over a thousand dollars. The tooth in question has not bothered me, but through x-rays she noticed the tooth was dead. I kinda of feel like she was trying to take advantage of me because she kept trying to send me to her friend, a ridiculously expensive endodontist. I got a second opinion and they said it wasn't necessary.
The pain was pretty intense three days after arriving. I could barely talk to the students. And I was getting pissed at myself for not just getting the procedure done. I told my boss and showed him a list of English speaking dentist I found in one of my traveling books. He said they are all too far, so he took me right next door a dentist office. He took one of the Korean teachers, who speaks English, with me to be my translator. In Korea you do not make appointments, you just show up. The doctor saw me with in ten minutes. In the chair you have a TV connected for you to watch as you lay down, which is such a great idea instead of the dumb paintings that hang in my view at all my American dentist. You know the paintings I am talking about, the generic seascapes meant to relax you. So after poking around at my teeth, his assistant leads me back to get an x-ray. She takes the x-rays and with gloves in a light sensitive box, develops the image right in front of me. He looks over the it,pokes my teeth and has me bite on some marking paper. He then rambles of his diagnoses to my teacher. She in turn translates, " He is going to go in and cut out some of your root." I immediately inquire if I will get novocaine and she replays, "No." Now I start panicking and saying I don't think I can go through with this. I start to figure I have to go back to the US. Then the dentist grabs a model of teeth and in broken English explains that he is just shaving some of my tooth. He asks when was the last time I went to the dentist and then I realize I just had a tooth filled right before I came here. He explains she left too much of the filling and every time a bite down it was irritating my nerve. So literally, in three minutes he shaped my tooth and for ten dollars I was on my way. My tooth feels fine. The cheapest dental visit ever and I don't have insurance either.
Yesterday, I had to go to the doctors. I need to get a physical in order to obtain my alien registration card. There are no doctors offices. You go to the hospital for everything. You pick a ticket with a number and they call you. The system is surprisingly efficient. The receptionist sends me to an area that has waiting chairs that are empty besides for nurses and doctors watching a soccer game on TV. The one nurse leads me to a series of tables with white paper over them. Each table I walk to is another test I must complete: hearing test, eye sight, blood pressure, height, weight and chest measurements. Then finally I get to the table that I dread. The blood and urine table. I have to give blood to test for HIV and pee in a cup for a drug taste. She first send me in the bathroom with a paper cup and test tube. I have to pee in the cup and then pour the pee in the test tube. I accomplish my mission only to realize like everywhere in Korea there are no paper towels. There is just a communal yellow towel hanging. I refuse to touch it to dry of my pee tube or to dry my hands on it, after I wash them. I immediately start racking my brain trying to think if I have smoked pot in the past thirty days. I am long over my pot head days, but however random nights out, random things happen. I start convincing myself that I am going to fail and have to go home. Then that fear was subsided, when the women was preparing to take my blood. At the table there was vessels of other human blood, which started to make me feel faint. I was trying to tell nurse I am not good at this, but she didn't speak English. It felt like eternity that the needle was in my arm. I kept telling myself don't look, don't look. When she was done, she threw some gauze on it and sent me on my way with no bandage. I sat in a chair and pulled my knees to my chest and tried to breathe so I didn't pass out. Next, a doctor came and grabbed me and brought me in his office. He went over all my results and asked me a series of questions:
Do you drink? Socially.
Use drugs? No.
Do you have the following diseases...? No.
He tells me I pass the drug test and that my blood pressure is fine. He says I look good, but need to loose weight. Instantly, I forget about the piece of bloody gauze on my arm and start to get insulted. I am living in Asia. It doesn't make me Asian and I just don't have a toothpick like body like most women here. I leave his office full of self doubt and then the same nurse that stabbed me rushes over to steal my piece of gauze, still no bandage. They push me into another room and tell me to take off everything but my underwear off and put on the communal gown that probably has been used by over hundred different people. The women pushes my chest up against a box and she proceeds to x-ray me. Then she tells me to put my clothes back on. I was done. Less confident, but done. The whole process took a half hour from check in to check out and cost only fifty-eight dollars (again no insurance). I immediately ran home to calculate my kilogram weight into pounds. I realized I lost six pounds being here. And then came to the conclusion I must have been the size of a whale in Philadelphia. Then I went on a couple websites to check what my appropriate weight to height ratio should be. I am NOT in the heavy tier of my category and I am just slightly over the target weight. So fuck you doctor!
