hell Samseong

I'm glad to hear that Samseong is doing well as countries pivot away from China and toward other countries for trading purposes. Samseong is now apparently taking business that would have gone to the untrustworthy Huawei, a typically Chinese firm that produces crap products that spy on you. Alas, Samseong's hospital, which is up the street from where I live, is a bureaucratic clusterfuck of an establishment.

This past Thursday, my boss had ordered me to take Friday off because I had put in extra hours earlier in the week. This turned out to be a good thing: by Thursday evening, I was feverish and a bit dizzy, and when I pulled off my shoe and sock to look at my foot at around 10 p.m., I saw that my toe was pretty seriously infected thanks to a nail-clipper incident. This made me mad: why did my foot wait almost two weeks to get infected? Everything had been fine for so long. Luckily, with Friday now a mandatory rest day, I had the luxury of hitting the hospital to get treatment, no matter how long it might take.

Upon leaving the office around 10:30 p.m., I grabbed a cab and arrived at Samseong Seoul Hospital. Once there, I decided to chronicle each phase of my stay, not knowing, at the time, that I would end up spending nine fucking hours on the hospital's premises. I called up my cell phone's memo pad in order to take notes. Every time something new happened, I added a new entry. You will see these entries below in boldface.

10.40 arrival

I got out of the cab at the hospital's main entrance. When I got inside, it was a bit like meeting up with airport security: I got stopped by some hospital staffers acting as guards, and my temperature was taken with an ear thermometer. I said I had an infected toe, so where should I go to get that taken care of? "Not here," was the reply: "You have to go out the door and around to the emergency room."

So I walked out into the pleasantly cool, quiet night—out the main entrance and around to the left in a wide arc as I followed the shape of the main building. My path took me along a side access road, and there were signs pointing to the eungeup-shil, i.e., the ER. Koreans routinely visit the ER for the most minor of complaints, and I was feeling guilty about doing this myself because, while the flare-up of my infection had been scarily rapid, I didn't think I was in any danger of losing my toe, bleeding out, or dying. It felt a bit embarrassing to be limping over to the ER for a toe problem.

A minute or so later, I was at the ER, which didn't look crowded. A chirpy nurse asked me some questions and bade me fill out some forms that were on a clipboard just outside the ER.

10.49 filled out forms

My Korean isn't good enough for me to blow through such forms; I relied on my cell phone's dictionary to help me figure out some of the questions. Luckily, the tenor of the questions was easy enough to figure out (patient history), which in turn helped me guess at each question's specific meaning. There were plenty of questions about whether I had been out of the country and had visited such-and-such locations in Seoul. The obvious emphasis was on COVID-19.

When I was on the third and final page of the forms, the nurse popped out to ask whether I needed help. Ah, how impatient Koreans are. I said I was almost done, but was going slowly. She laughed and left me alone to finish. Once I finished, I stepped inside the ER's anteroom and was asked to sit down at a window, in front of which was a massive blood-pressure machine with a cuff that could easily hold Arnold Schwarzenegger's arm. I was asked to slide my arm in the cuff.

10.56 bp

Let's just say my blood pressure was really, really high. I've been off my meds since about January, not wanting to use them up if that meant having to risk infection by visiting my local clinic and sitting with all those sick people, just so I could replenish my meds by getting another prescription. I also haven't been walking regularly or dieting lately, so there were plenty of reasons as to why the BP was high.

Then came the bad news.

10.58 told to wait 3-4 hrs bc of Corona fever-related procedure

The nurse asked me a few more questions as she completed my history. Because I had a fever (my temperature having been checked again along with my BP), I was now subject to COVID-19 protocols. This meant that I couldn't be admitted into the ER right away: the standard procedure was that I would have to wait three or four hours before I could be let in. I asked the chirpy nurse whether I could just go home and wait. She hesitated long enough for me to understand the answer was no, and she explained that the staff preferred that I wait on the premises: when the call came for me to enter the ER, I would need to do so within five minutes of being called.

I nodded resignedly and said I'd be nearby, but I told the nurse that, when the time came to call me, she should send a text message instead of trying a voice call because my cell phone was dying. She nodded and said okay. I turned around, walked over to the ER's massive sliding door, hit the "open" button on the jamb, and let myself out into the night.

The first few benches along the access road were occupied.

11.00 found a bench & sat. Will recv txt.

In the back of my mind, I cynically expected the nurse to forget that she was supposed to text me. I walked a few dozen yards down the road to the front of another building whose entrance said, "Gate 4." There were a few empty benches by that entrance, so I went over to one and made camp, lying on the bench and using my right shoe as a pillow. It was a cloudy night that promised rain, so I stared upward at the clouds and tried to ignore the electric lighting radiating out from the building I was next to. The ambient temperature was very pleasant, but my fever was starting to give me chills.

11.04 feeling hot & a bit dizzy. Toe aches and throbs. Looks nasty, too, from what I saw in the ofc.

I had nothing to do but wait, so I did what most modern people in 2020 would do: I alternately tried napping, and I groggily looked at my cell phone. I'm not one of those people who go stir-crazy if they suddenly have a ton of time on their hands and nothing to do with it. Blessed with a rich inner life, I can entertain myself in all sorts of different ways; even boredom isn't all that boring for me. Maybe it's thanks to my experience with meditation, or maybe it's because of my artistic side, but I can normally find something new and interesting to observe when I'm in a situation where I'm not supposed to move around much. Some people get itchy and antsy in such situations, but I find it's easy to settle into a sort of peaceful tranquility, accepting whatever is going to happen.

Hours passed. Mosquitoes were attracted to my cell phone, but thanks to my getting the chills, I solved the mosquito problem by putting on my windbreaker, which both shrouded me with my own feverish warmth and shielded me from the skeeters. I may have managed to nap, but as you'll see, I never successfully dropped into a deep sleep.

1.42 started raining

Almost three hours into my waiting session, a few cold, gentle drops of rain tapped me in the face. "Fuck," I muttered, wondering whether I needed to shift to some place with an overhang.

Then my phone rang.

1.43 got a call to go ER

Sure enough, the nurse had forgotten that I had requested a text message, not a voice call. Maybe it wasn't her fault; maybe she was too busy to write herself a note about contact preferences. I switched to my speakerphone to be able to converse with the nurse; she wanted to know where I was, and she said it was time to go to the ER. I told her I was by "Gate 4," and she said, "Oh, then you're not far. Please come over."

I slipped my right shoe painfully back onto my foot, gathered my stuff, and lumbered back over to the ER. Once there, I had my temperature taken again (still feverish), and a young male staffer beckoned me to follow him. This is how the rest of my night would go: I would always be meeting new medical personnel. My nine hours were a series of introductions, with no one providing any explanations of why tests were being done, what program or protocol we were following, or what the big picture was.

1.50 led into Isolation 2

As a presumed COVID-19 patient, I was led into Isolation 2, an airlocked room that you accessed by stepping through a set of two doors. You were to step through the first sliding door, then wait for it to close. Only then could you open the second sliding door by touching your foot to a kickplate.

I haven't mentioned it thus far, but in my interactions with all medical personnel, I had my cloth mask on my face the whole time. This was also true as I was led to the isolation room.

The room had a bed, a restroom, and some medical equipment. A security CCTV camera sat bug-eyed in a high corner, just under the ceiling. The bed's frame appeared to have been sloppily painted over several times, but one corner of the metal frame was covered in rust, obviously neglected. I was told to wait, and if I needed assistance, there was a button I could push. I knew I wouldn't be needing any assistance.

1.52 quick interview w/ med staffer lady

The taking of my patient history wasn't finished. Another young nurse came in to continue to ask me questions, most of which were similar to the questions I had already answered both verbally and in writing. Hospitals really need to figure out a way to unify the data they gather so that it doesn't always feel as if one hand has no idea what the other hand is doing. This overlapping redundancy felt, if anything, more inefficient than efficient.

Will get blood test, xray, & antibiotic

The nurse mentioned that I'd be getting a blood test, an X-ray, and some antibiotics. In the meantime, I would just wait. So wait I did. I tried napping, but in vain.

2.15 xray blood sample, iv

I must have drifted off. The door suddenly opened, and two people stepped in: a man and a woman. The man told me I'd be getting a chest X-ray (more COVID-19-related stuff); he tilted my bed so that I was sitting in a slouched, not-quite-upright position. he slid an X-ray plate behind my back, swung a heavy, crane-like machine over me, then asked me to take a deep breath and hold it while he snapped X-ray pictures. This occurred twice. The plate was removed from behind me, and the lady stepped forward to hook me up to an intravenous drip. She also said she'd be taking a blood sample, and this how I was introduced to my first two needles of the night. I started to think of the multiple penetrations as "skin-rape."

It was very strange to just lie there in silence, then get interrupted, seemingly randomly, by medical personnel who would perform tests with little to no explanation. I had to wonder if this was what an alien abduction felt like. Lucky for me, I managed to survive nine hours in Samseong Seoul Hospital without being anally probed.

However...

2.37 nasal swipe + mucus sample

The first truly cute nurse of the night came in. It became obvious that she, too, was there to test me for SARS-CoV-2. She had a friendly, cheerful manner, which made her the first person—aside from the chirpy nurse at the beginning—to show off any sort of personality. Looking apologetic, she told me she would have to do a deep nasal swab. She showed me a Q-Tip from hell that was about eight or nine inches long. Pinching the Q-Tip at a certain point, she said she would be inserting the swab this deep into my head (about five or six inches), and that it would hurt. ("Apeugesseoyo," she said, which is literally, "This will hurt.") I nodded resignedly because, well, what the fuck else could I do? Scream and freak out? I realized, in that moment, that I was an ambassador for all expats, so I would need to comport myself in an exemplary manner. The nurse leaned close and gently inserted the lengthy Q-Tip into my right nostril. I felt the cotton swab slide deeper into my head—deeper... deeper. This wasn't skin-rape so much as face-rape, but I held still. The nurse said "This will hurt" a couple more times, which I found hilariously un-reassuring. She turned the swab while it was inside my head, probably in an attempt to grab whatever gunk she was trying to sample. The swab went deep enough to exit my nasopharyngeal region and poke into the back of my throat. Satisfied that she had raped me sufficiently, the nurse gently pulled the swab back out. I smacked my lips meditatively, taking note of the state of my inner tissues. I told the nurse that, if anything, the experience hadn't hurt so much as it has felt strange, which was no lie. The invasion of my head hadn't been painful at all, and maybe that was the point of warning me about pain: the painless reality of the probing would prove more comfortable than the expectation of agony. I also told the nurse two other things: (1) that I now knew everything inside my head was interconnected, and (2) that I was the kind of person who was open to new and interesting experiences. She giggled.

Handing me a tiny plastic cylinder, the nurse then asked me for a mucus sample. I tried and tried to hawk something up for her, but nothing came up. She said that a sputum sample would be just fine. It seemed strange to gift this cute woman with spit after she had just raped my face, but such is life at Samseong Hospital.

The cute nurse left, and all was silent again. I should note that the isolation room wasn't designed for a sleeper's comfort: it was brightly lit, the way I imagine an interrogation chamber might be lit for a session of sleep-deprivation torture. (This is what I get for watching "Burn Notice.") As the minutes ticked on, I tried once again to sleep. I might have woken myself up with my own snoring a couple times, but as before, I wasn't able to pass into deep slumber. An hour crept by.

3.50 bp & shot; wait again in bed

The door suddenly opened again; my blood pressure was taken once more, and I was given some sort of shot. Another few minutes of silence. This whole experience was feeling surreal.

4.05 moved by wheelchair to crit care

A bit after 4 a.m., a strange-looking and strangely talking orderly came into my room, pushing a wheelchair in front of him. "You're moving," he said tersely. I slowly heaved myself up, and the man and I began the weird, time-consuming process of transferring me from the bed to the wheelchair—which was too small for me, of course. Large people don't fare well in Korean health-care facilities. Despite the increasing number of Koreans who are as large as or larger than I am, Korea as a whole still thinks of itself as a land of relatively petite people. You can see this not only in the lack of proper hospital equipment for larger folks, but also in areas like fashion. Koreans who are more American- or European-sized must shop at the big-and-tall stores, the way I do. I wonder when Korean senses will recalibrate to acknowledge the reality that, these days, Koreans as a whole are significantly larger than Koreans from two generations ago.

The strange orderly had the difficult job of pushing my wheelchair while also wheeling along my IV stand. The chair was flimsy enough that I felt every bump and vibration of the ground as we left isolation, left the ER, and exited the building to go to another building. We rolled along bumpy sidewalks and cracked asphalt, finally stopping at a chain-link fence with a huge swinging door. The orderly called out for the door to be opened. I contemplated the fence, which looked like the sort of barrier you see placed around construction sites to hide the work from the general public. I had to wonder what section of the hospital was so secret that it needed this kind of shielding. And I was about to find out: the fence swung open, and we passed through. We went up a ramp and into another building; I paid attention to the signs as we trundled along, and I saw we were going to a section labeled "Critical Care" in English. (I don't remember the Korean designation.) Well, "critical care" wasn't "intensive care," so I wasn't too stressed out about my new location. I was guided to Berth 2, which did have a bit of an ICU vibe about it: the entrance to the berth was shrouded by a clear-plastic curtain held in place by a fringe of magnets. Inside the berth was another bed/gurney and more mysterious equipment. This was my new home for the time being.

4.10 bp taken, then given bp meds(?)

Another nurse visited me soon after my arrival in my new berth. My blood pressure was taken again, and I was given some sort of meds. With no explanation, the nurse then disappeared. By this point, I had conditioned myself simply to roll with the circumstances.

4.34 blood culture lft ankle, then foot top

Yet another nurse came in, and this person was apparently my designated torturer. She spoke in Korean but mentioned the term "blood culture" in English. I could tell she wasn't very good at her job: she couldn't find the vein she needed to get her blood samples. She tried my left ankle, then she tried the top of my left foot, which is where she apparently struck gold. The needle hurt like a bitch; I tensed up and grunted, but otherwise kept silent. I was an ambassador representing all of us expats, as you'll recall.

Finished with her torture, the nurse left.

4.50 blood for culture taken lft hand (back)

I'm not sure, but it could be that the same nurse came back a few minutes later, armed with more needles. When I asked what this was all about, she said she needed blood samples from two different parts of my body. This time around, she skin-raped the back of my left hand. There wasn't as much fumbling about for veins this time, thank Cthulhu.

4.55 meds in IV switched

My IV stand had two bags hanging from it: one was obviously saline; the other was some sort of medication. I had been noticing that my fever had dissipated, so whatever voodoo was in that smaller bag was working. Another nurse came in and switched out the smaller IV bag for another bag. More voodoo. Good.

5.44 bp med 1 tablet

"Your blood-pressure medication!" called out the nurse who entered my berth at 5:44 a.m. I had been transferred to the critical-care ward before sunrise, but I knew the sun was out now, and I was starting to get impatient. Almost none of the tests performed on me had been about my toe infection, so this entire experience was starting to feel rather pointless.

The nurse left me with a single white tablet and a tiny plastic container of water—which reminded me of the mucus/sputum container into which I'd expectorated. There was barely enough water in this container to help me swallow the pill, but I made do.

6.29 bp check, iv needle removed

And just like that, I could feel that the care I'd been receiving had shifted into eject-the-patient mode. The time for my departure was approaching. I switched from lying in bed to sitting in the berth's lone chair. Another unfamiliar nurse came in and took my blood pressure after the BP tablet had had some time to do some work. She frowned when she saw my BP was still high, but I told her that it was much lower than when I had first had my BP checked. The nurse set about the delicate task of removing the IV needle from the back of my right hand; she still managed to allow a splash of my blood to spatter onto the floor. "Sorry," she said. She made no move to clean the floor. I took a cell-phone picture of the droplets just lying there. The nurse also managed to get droplets of my blood onto the bedsheets thanks to her mishandling of the IV needle and tube. Some of my blood had crawled out of my hand and into the tube while I'd been waiting. I took a picture of the blood on the bed as well.

The nurse had taped up my right hand rather poorly. The gauze tape she had wrapped around my hand kept popping open. When a random nurse passed by my berth, I called out to say I needed more tape to secure my bandage. The nurse made a face and told me to just re-secure the tape. Lazy fucking bitch.

7.00ish toe sterilized & wrapped

About half an hour later, another nurse came in, and this one finally dealt with my foot. Alas, she didn't do very much: she had me take off my shoe and sock, and then she swabbed my right big toe with alcohol wipes, painted on some iodine, and smeared on some Neosporin-like antibacterial cream. Lastly, she wrapped my big toe in a disturbingly thick, spongy pad, which she secured with several strips of gauze tape. I half-joked that I wouldn't be able to fit my foot inside my shoe. (This proved not to be true.)

Once she was gone, I waited a few more minutes, wondering when someone would tell me where to go to pay for this hospital visit, where to go for meds, and what to expect next. I tentatively tried leaving my berth, pulling aside the plastic curtain, and a nurse called out that I shouldn't leave. Glumly, I sat back down in my chair, staring at the bottom of the clear curtain, where a lone mosquito was bumping gently against the plastic. The mosquito appeared particularly sluggish (I know my mosquitoes), so I stood up, walked a step over to the curtain, reached down toward the mosquito, and killed it with a strong flick of my middle finger. What business does a mere skeeter have in the critical-care ward, anyway?

Around 7:40 a.m., a different chirpy nurse showed up. She handed me a set of meds with instructions on how to use them. These included three different tablets and a small tube of first-aid ointment. I asked about simply lancing my infection to get it over with, and she said not to do that: it would be dangerous. She also told me that the results of my COVID-19 tests would come via text message around 9 a.m. Confusingly, the nurse said something about "We'll leave together," but that's not what happened, so maybe I misunderstood. Instead, I waited a few minutes, received a call from the office that deals with payments, dictated my credit-card number over the phone, then got called again when my American Visa (it's an Amazon card) failed to work. I tried again with my Korean debit card, and that transaction went through. Not long after that, a man who looked like a security guard stepped up to my curtain and, without making eye contact, said in English, "Follow me." We walked a maze of hallways that eventually led outside, where it was now daylight. This was, it seemed, the end of my time at the hospital. It was 7:45 a.m. The guard called out for someone to open the weird fence's makeshift gate. Someone did, and I was outside, on my own. The guard left without saying goodbye. The access road had a steady stream of cabs, so I grabbed one and went back to my apartment, thoroughly exhausted by my experience.

I hadn't understood much of what was going on during my nine hours in hospital. I can say that there's this paradoxical feeling that comes over you, though: on the one hand, you're being taken care of, but on the other hand, you're made to feel as if you're gravely ill. The hospital experience is shot through with unnecessary rules and procedures; I imagine this is true in the States, too. I can see why people in the States talk about the need for patient advocacy; this was a topic I harped on back when my mother was dying of cancer. Having someone there to help make sense of the experience—someone who knows the procedures and can tell you why you're going through what you're going through, as well as what's coming next—that's crucial for minimizing stress. For me, the experience was a disjointed series of encounters with strangers, along with a series of painful tests that had nothing to do with my original complaint. I can't say that I'm sold on Korean hospitals; this experience has only confirmed my hatred of Korean health care. Oh, yes: I did get a text message, but it merely said that "We have sent you a voice message with your COVID-19 results." That's bureaucracy for you: never do something in a single step if you can do it in two steps. The message included a phone number to call if there were questions; the office hours were only until 5 p.m., and by the time I saw the text message, it was 6 p.m. Friday afternoon. Fuck.

I did, however, deduce that I wasn't infected with SARS-CoV-2. South Korea has been aggressively contact-tracing infected people; had I been confirmed infected (a hwakjin-ja, to use the Korean term), I doubt I'd have been allowed to leave the hospital, and I'd have ended up being one of the people that the government sends out text messages about: "50-something man in Gangnam area confirmed infected; recently visited the Dogok Station area, works in the Daechi area, and lives near Daecheong Station." I would probably have been slapped with a phone app to monitor my movements, and I'd almost certainly have been told to self-isolate. None of that happened, though, so I was pretty sure I was in the clear.

Sat 3.29pm called hosp: NO CORONA

The following day, Saturday, I called the number from the text message and spoke with a real human being. I gave her my patient number, and she reported back that I was indeed negative for COVID-19. This wasn't a surprise, but it was still a bit of a relief, not to mention a vindication of the safety measures I've taken since this crisis began. It wasn't my lungs that betrayed me: it was my right big toe, the bastard.

I won't soon forget this hospital experience, especially since the hospital charged about W310,000 for everything I went through: isolation, the battery of tests, the skin-rape, the face-rape, the fumbling attempts at needle-poking, the meds given as an afterthought—all of it. From now on, I'll take my problems to the local internal-medicine clinic, which is far faster and cheaper. I'm supposed to go back to Samseong Hospital on June 25 for a followup visit, but fuck that. I barely have any money in my Korean bank account (I send most of my salary to my US account); when the hospital rejected my credit card and had me pay via my Korean account, they drained about half of my month's supply of ATM-ready cash. A second hospital visit will clean my Korean bank account out like a cotton swab up the nose. I can't have that.

Friday was spent sleeping all day. I was like a prisoner who had just gotten out of the joint and was enjoying the free world. Unfortunately, my sleep schedule this entire weekend has been fucked up by the hospital experience, so it's going to be uncomfortable coming into work Monday morning. Ah, well. Nothing to be done about that.

Here are some pics of my experience. A pic from inside Isolation 2:

My bed in Isolation 2:

My restroom in Isolation 2:

Hooked up to an IV:

Critical Care Berth 2. After being stabbed during the nurse's quest for a blood sample:

That's my blood, refluxing out into the IV tube. This is a fairly normal occurrence, and it can be cleared up by holding one's hand (and the IV tube) up and allowing gravity to do the rest.

Saline bag:

Small bag of voodoo meds (Cefazolin = antibiotics):

Droplets of my blood from after the nurse pulled out my IV needle:

My blood on the bed linens:

A gross shot of my lubed-up, infected toe:

A way-too-thick pad taped around my toe:

More tape, as if to prove a point:

Below is the shoddy tape job that the nurse did. The tape kept snapping open, which meant there was nothing to hold the gauze pad in place over my needlestick site. A lazy-bitch nurse could've given me some more tape to secure the gauze, but no. She was lazy, and a bitch.

The term "Hell Joseon" is used these days to refer to how South Korea is a hell both for young people seeking jobs and for "salarymen" living the wage slave's life. Personal fulfillment has been replaced by the desperate search for steady income, which often seems elusive. Part of the problem is all the deficit spending: within two or three generations, South Korea went from being a "savings" culture to a credit-card culture, and now the country is awash in mountainous waves of personal debt. "Hell Samseong" is my riff off "Hell Joseon."