Lughnasa and the Korea Moon
Wednesday gratefuls: That orthopedist in his chair surrounded by computer screens. The kind massage therapist. The weird procedures. A day of Korean medicine. Taxis. Recalibrating. Spines. Traveling like I was 60. When I’m really 76. Seoah. My son. Getting my base pass today. Seeing immigration about my visa. Being in Korea as a resident alien, not a tourist.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: X-rays
One brief shining: Do you speak Korean the doctor asked I said no so he asked do you have any spinal stenosis I don’t think so I said he ordered an x-ray and yes I do massage, muscle relaxants, slow walk, no exercise time in Korea changed.
My buddy Ode sent me off to Korea with a message, have great adventures! He’s a master at finding adventure when he travels. His openness to people and experiences insures it. Oh, the stories he can tell. About almost dying in that capsized boat in the Caribbean. About picking grapes in Provence. About visiting the uber-wealthy Chinese woman in Shanghai with Elizabeth. And many more and those only the ones he’s told me.
Me. Not so much. I find warming up to new people difficult even when I share their language and culture. There’s also a level of good Midwestern caution in my soul that feels protective but is also a bubble against anything too strange or unfamiliar. Not complaining. Describing. I still enjoy travel a lot though. I do have my moments.
Yesterday was one of those moments. My sore hip pushed me past my normal reserve and into a medical system where only a few speak my language and at that not too well.
Taxi over to a main drag here in Songtan. Up to the second floor of a nondescript office building with Seoah. A waiting room with long rows of chairs, a few scattered patients waiting. An orthopedist’s office. A reception desk to the right, the waiting area, then to the left a back room filled with curtained areas, blue and white striped curtains hanging from metal loops around metal piping. I would find out what they held later.
First I checked in. Sort of. Seoah asked me questions for a brief form. Drug allergies. No. Cancer? Yes. She put down bladder cancer because that’s what her dad has. We corrected that later. All the while I’m calculating how much I really need to know about what’s going on. Not much, I concluded right then.
The orthopedist sat at a modest desk with three computer screens around him and a keyboard on the desk. He had, as I’ve noticed in a few other Koreans, pointed teeth that made him look slightly menacing. He asked me a question or two then ordered an x-ray. That happened quickly and soon I was back in his office, looking at my lower spine on the computer screen to his left.
I didn’t need him to tell me where the problem was. Normal disc. Normal disc. Normal disc. Nice gaps between them. Then two with little space and one moved out and to the right of the others on his screen. Oh. That’s not good.
You have spinal stenosis. The medical term for those discs with little space between them. Probably arthritis. They can pinch nerves creating pain in the hip and lower back. Oh. Yeah.
That was all with the orthopedist. Onto the massage therapist. Who was a kind young man who hurt me, over and over again. Most of the time not too badly, but I did say ouch once in a while and he would back off. All in the interest of releasing muscle tension. He communicated with me through Google translate.
When we finished I thought, we’re done. But no. Now we do shock wave therapy, electrotherapy, and lumbar traction therapy. Not too sure about the first two. They both involved machines I could have imagined in a medical museum. The lumbar traction therapy I recognized. It gently pulled on my body at the lower spine.
The shock wave therapy I couldn’t tell was happening except for the cold sonagram gel my therapist squirted on my back. The electrotherapy consisted of four small cup like devices placed on my back. They crawled around over my lower back while gently heating me. Sort of like a massage chair. However. There were also heating pads underneath my chest. They were hot.
When I left, Seoah and I went to the pharmacy and picked up some muscle relaxants. All the directions in Korean of course. The pills themselves were in small clear paper pouches enough for two daily doses for three days. Five pills per pouch.
Total bill: approximately $200. The doctor and the x-ray were only $35 of that. The rest was massage, procedures, and the meds. Not bad, really. And I’ll get most of it back from insurance
