강남 푸른 정형외과의원Gangnam Blue Orthopedic Clinic

It's called the "blue" clinic, but the sign uses a green font. Go figure.

So I disdained the bureaucratic nightmare of Samsung Hospital and went to a local ortho clinic: the Gangnam Blue Orthopedic Clinic. This is the sort of place where you walk in and, if you're a first-timer, you fill out a file-card-sized slip of paper with your name, foreigner's ID number, phone number, and address. After that, in principle, you wait to hear your name called. In my case, I got called up right away because the front-desk lady said that my name didn't match the data associated with my ID number. I had reflexively written "Kim Kevin" as my name because that's how I'm known in Korea. In reality, "Kevin Kim" is two-thirds of my real name: my actual surname is long and clunkily Germanic. I don't use it in Korea because Koreans (and many Americans, too, to be honest) have a hard time pronouncing it, but my foreigner's ID number is associated with my full name. So I wrote out my full name, in Roman letters this time, and it took two staffers to sort the data-entry problem out.

I sat with a bunch of other patients-to-be who were all also patiently (cough) waiting. Within a few minutes, I got called to see the specialist. The orthopede turned out to be a loud, crisp, friendly gent who actually bothered to palpate my foot while asking me questions. I explained how the pain began this past Thursday night; I told the doc what spots on the foot were most painful, and after a bit more chatting and nodding, he sent me down the hall to get X-rayed.

The X-ray tech was blunt, terse, and borderline unfriendly. I had to sit on the X-ray bench with my foot on a special plate, and images were taken with my foot placed on that plate at three different angles. The scans went right back to the doc, and when the images came up on the doc's screen, I asked his permission to take a pic of the X-ray images. Et voilà:

The upshot was both informative and frustrating: the doc saw no fracturing anywhere, and he didn't think I needed special orthotic footwear. His advice boiled down to: stay off the foot, rest up, take some prescribed meds for a few days, and come by for a couple days' physical therapy, starting today. I told the doc I had done some research about stress fractures, and I mentioned the bit about how X-rays taken right after an injury usually show nothing, but after three weeks, the fracturing becomes visible because the bone has started healing. The doc, instead of reacting to this information, declared himself impressed that I could express all that in Korean. I simply smiled like a dumb little monkey. Koreans generally have low expectations when it comes to foreigners navigating in their language.

The doc prescribed my meds, and I went back out to the front desk to receive the prescription printout. The front-desk lady told me the pharmacy was upstairs, but before I got my meds, I'd need to do my first session of therapy. I went to a quiet, curtain-filled room that held several private berths on which a patient could recline while receiving therapy. For me, this happened in two stages: ice-pack therapy followed by TENS therapy. The attendant strapped the ice pack to my foot and told me to tell her if it got too cold to bear. I went fifteen minutes without any problems, although the pack did get slightly uncomfortable toward the end. Here's a pic of my foot with the ice pack:

Next up was TENS therapy (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, I believe). I seem to get this at every clinic I go to; it's the catch-all therapy for all one's ills. When I was in Daegu and having hip problems, I got the TENS. When I had a crick in my neck a couple years back and went to the Chinese-medicine clinic, I got the TENS. And here I was again, with my old friend TENS. The suckers of the electro-squid got placed all over the top of my foot; the attendant adjusted the electrical tingle to a tolerable level, and then she left me to lie there for another fifteen minutes:

The aftermath of all that sucker-love left my foot looking like this:

I thanked the attendant, limped upstairs to the second-floor pharmacy, got three days' worth of meds (along with a long set of verbal instructions), thanked the front-desk lady on my way out, and limped across the street to catch a cab to work. And that, kids, was my adventure this late morning/early afternoon. I have to go back to the clinic tomorrow morning for more ice packs and electro-squids, and after that, I've been told to give my foot regular ice baths for no more than fifteen minutes per session. I guess that's about it. It occurs to me that I never at any point heard the doc explicitly say, "Yes: you have a stress fracture." Maybe I missed when he said it, but more likely, he simply proceeded as if we had both agreed I had a fracture.

I'm sure you won't mind if I don't blog about tomorrow's therapy session. It's going to be the same as today's, and after that, I'll be on my own. In theory, I ought to be healed in about a month, give or take. This is going to mean dieting more strictly (something I haven't been doing the past few days) and finding new ways to exercise (something I haven't bothered to figure out yet). I have some ideas on ways to get the ol' body moving. More on this later. In the meantime, I'm a bit miffed because, if I learned anything from today's clinic visit, it's that I probably could have saved myself the time and the money by just dealing with the problem myself. On the bright side, I suppose it's good to know nothing is actually broken.