My Experience with Korean Doctors (Part 1)

Welcome to a new series on this blog, the Korean healthcare system. Since this will likely be ongoing, I'm going to call this post Part I.

I finally went to the doctor today after being here for 7 months. At the slightest sneeze our bosses want to take us to the doctor, but we've been resistant. Until now, I didn't really see a reason to take advantage of the "sparkling" healthcare system of Korea.

Michael forced me to go to the doctor. I kinda knew that I needed to go, but I have a distaste for doctors after the last few painful incidents. So, to make sure I went, he told the head teacher that I needed to see a doctor. Let's get a little TMI now: I have a lump in my groin area. That was just as embarrassing for me as it was for the head teacher. To make matters worse, she had to discuss it with her "boss."

She kept coming back in to our room to ask about various symptoms. Then they finally decided they didn't know what to do. They didn't know what doctor to take me to!

The next day, the head teacher talked to a doctor friend and decided to take me to a regular physician. This is what is normally done in the US, but here in Korea you don't need a referral so you could go directly to the oncologist, for example, if you wanted to have them look at your tumor. I met up with the head teacher on Thursday morning and went to a woman doctor. I never learned her name and the head teach did most of the talking.

I walked in, the doctor asked me to pull my pants down and she looked at my "lump." It took about 90 seconds for her to diagnose my hernia. I have managed to do it again: get a seemingly rare condition that affects a small percentage of people. An inguinal hernia occurs in %2 of women, I've learned, and most of those are of middle age.

For those of you don't know, an inguinal hernia occurs when you create a hole in your stomach muscles and part of your intestines pops through. Yeah, I have intestines hanging out in my neither regions.

The next thing the doctor wanted to know was when I wanted to have the surgery. What? Luckily I already know what a hernia was and what was going on inside my body, but she explained none of this to me. The doctor and the head teacher had a lengthy conversation in Korean. I had absolutely no knowledge of what was going on. The doctor pauses her conversation to tell me it's not urgent, but she wants me to have the operation as soon as possible. Um, okay?

Guess what? I'm going to have surgery in Korea! Woohoo!

The head honchos at our hagwon want me to have the surgery during our vacation time so I won't miss any work. This is turning into a problem since our "vacation" coming up is actually a national holiday called Chuseok. All of the doctors in Chuncheon will not be performing surgery during this week and will not see any new patients next week for a consultation. This means we are on to bigger and better places: Seoul.

It's going to be down to the wire: I might be having surgery in 10 days, I might not! We'll see.