stupid dental appointment

Every hospital has its own way of doing things. Friday was my first visit to Gangnam Severance Hospital to see their dental division, which, it turns out, is actually run by Yonsei University. It's called the Gangnam Yonsei Dental Hospital. My experience with Samsung Hospital taught me that things can seem disorganized at first, but once you learn and master the system, you'll find it's generally well organized. After Friday, I don't think I'm going to think the same way about Gangnam Severance.

Why? Let's start at the beginning. I got referred to Gangnam by my local dentist at the Myung Duck (that's how he spells it) dental clinic across the hall from where I work. The old dentist in the office is fine with doing simple procedures like tooth removal, basic fillings, and crowns, but anything more complex, like root canals, well, that's a referral to Gangnam! I wonder if he gets a little kickback, a "finder's fee," if you will, for the business he sends to Severance. He sent the referral out; the date was set for September 27, which was yesterday. During the intervening weeks, I must have received twice as many annoying and obnoxious automatic text messages from Gangnam Severance as Samsung has ever sent me for one of its appointments. Most of these texts are simple reminders to come a bit early on the day, to go to the desk to pay first before seeing the doc, to remember what items to bring (referral sheet, alien-registration card, etc.), and to fill out the patient-history questionnaire if needed. So my first experience with Gangnam Severance was this blizzard of text messages. They didn't send the patient-history questionnaire until the very morning of the day I was to go to the hospital; thank God I was awake at 7 a.m. to fill that thing out; I read Korean very slowly, and I'm unfamiliar with most of the medical terms being used, so I generally slog through these questionnaires with Google Translate by my side and hope to finish everything on time. Friday morning, I had wanted to get to the hospital an hour early to give myself time to make sense of the place's layout, but I ended up getting there barely on time. The walk from Maebong Station to the hospital was a full kilometer; I was a sweaty mess by the time I'd climbed the large set of stairs (with a filthy balustrade) just beyond Maebong Tunnel to reach the hospital. My boss, who'd told me how to get to the hospital, hadn't told me about the stairs at the end. A warning might have been nice.

But I quickly discovered the dental clinic was on the third floor; a young staffer at B1 told me where to find the elevators up (and I discovered there are escalators, too). Having arrived in a rush and now sweaty and undignified-looking, I marched over to the dental clinic's reception desk, where a very annoyed-looking receptionist grilled me on whether this was my first time at Gangnam Severance, whether I'd brought my ID (she called it a shinbunjeung/신분증 in Korean—usually an ID card; in my case, it was my alien-registration card, which is supposed to serve in place of a passport as valid ID when you're in Korea), etc. When I brought out my ID card, she looked more annoyed and asked whether I'd brought a passport. I said no; everyone says you don't need the passport if you have the card. She told me to bring the passport next time because I'm a foreigner; later on, when I complained to my boss about that, he called bullshit, too, and for the same reason: the card, once you have it, is always used in place of the passport. Oh, well. I'm bringing the passport next time, but I made sure to tell the woman that, despite the flood of texted instructions, I'd gotten no notice to bring a passport.

Anyway, she processed me into the hospital (my patient records are now accessible via bar code) and told me to go to the "preservation department's" desk. I stepped into that section of the dental clinic—a place specifically devoted to not losing one's teeth—and talked with a second receptionist. She took my paper referral form (written up by Myung Duck Clinic), asked me whether I'd filled out the patient-history questionnaire (she hadn't bothered to read it, I guess, so who's it for?) and asked me to sit in the waiting area until I was called. Before I sat down, I told her I'd brought my prescription list from Samsung Hospital, and she could read it if she wanted: I'd been confused about how to fill out the part of the survey that dealt with meds. She nodded absently and didn't ask for the meds list, so I went to sit.

I didn't wait more than a few minutes before I got called into the area with all the X-ray rooms and reclining chairs. Severance is a teaching hospital, so there were lots of young docs- and dentists-in-training. I got some X-ray images taken (hold the mysterious, plastic-wrapped piece of equipment in your mouth while wearing an apron as the staffer steps outside of the room, and you're left to receive a full blast of radiation—several times—until the photo session is done). As Murphy's Law would have it, I developed a powerful urge to cough while the pics were being taken, but I got through the experience. I was then led to an empty reclining chair, and the girl who had done the X-rays did a cursory examination of my problem tooth (upper-right molar, now the final tooth in that row because the wisdom tooth had been pulled at Myung Duck). The monitor in front of me displayed two angles of X-ray images that had been taken. I asked whether I could take a photo of the images. Here it is:

The shadow you see on the leftmost tooth is my side cavity.

The girl was polite as she gently probed my mouth and asked me when my tooth hurt (e.g., when chewing, etc.). She shot a cold-air spray into the cavity to test my reaction; I flinched reflexively and moaned a tiny bit (not in pleasure, I assure you). She didn't say what was going on, but we probably both deduced that the cavity was deep and near the nerve but not at it quite yet. She did a few other cursory things, and the preliminary exam was over. I was told to go back to the waiting area to await the "professor" (gyosu-nim/교수님, i.e., "professor," was the term they used). Another few minutes of waiting, and I was brought back to the same reclining chair. The professor turned out to be a middle-aged woman who spoke English fairly well, but she was a terrible listener, brusque and interruptive in manner, and not very interested in anything I had to say. She did compliment the rest of my teeth for being strong and in mostly decent shape (Myung Duck clinic will be working on two bottom molars later—probably just fillings), but she confirmed the upper-molar cavity was deep, and she'd have to do a root canal. This will apparently involve a nerve treatment as well over several sessions, but nothing was to be done today because of the professor's busy schedule. She asked whether I was covered by insurance; I said I had national insurance, not insurance specific to Gangnam Severance Hospital, and she warned that the procedures could get expensive if I'm not covered. For her, "expensive" meant around W400,000 (about $300, US). That's fine; I'm rich, just back from dying, and not doing anything but saving most of my money every month.

So the plan is for me to come back on October 2 at 11 a.m. (Friday's appointment was also an 11 a.m. one). I forgot to tell the staff that there's a chance I'll be gone the rest of the month; I'll have to visit the hospital and say something before next Wednesday, or give them a call beforehand, or tell them on October 2 that I might be on the trail from 10/16 to 11/4. I imagine there's an interval between nerve treatments (my boss surmises that this is a nerve-deadening procedure done in parallel with root-canal work, but I have no idea; I'll have to research how modern dentists do root canals). The professor left after telling me all this, and a young lady staffer worked with me on fixing the date of October 2 for my next appointment. I then went back to the front desk where the annoyed receptionist sat in order to pay whatever extra funds needed to be paid (about $3.80), but I discovered that, now that I had a sheet of paper with a bar code, I could just use the machine next to the annoyed girl to pay with my card and walk out. No unpleasant interactions necessary. From there, it was just a matter of catching a cab to the office. I got to the office about an hour earlier than normal and told my Korean coworker how, basically, nothing had happened, and that I had to go back on October 2.

Oh, yeah: instead of using the elevators to go back down, I used the escalators and, when getting to about the first floor (my final destination was B1, the back entrance, which faced the street from where I'd entered), I saw this sculpture:

beeeeewwwwwwwwwwbs (2 hot cancer patients? the secret lives of mannequins?)

In all, this was an unpleasant and frustrating experience, mainly because the staffers had made it so, not because the procedures had made no sense. Now that I'm fairly familiar with the procedures and have a bar code to use for things like paying and doing the take-a-number-ticket thing, all of that will go smoothly next time, but there's no magically changing the personality of the rude and brusque staffers. Only the young ladies who did my X-ray; my manual, intra-oral examination (that sounds... interesting); and the arranging of my next appointment were polite. So was the young, male staffer on the B1 level who had directed me to the elevators. But everyone else was some degree of rude. I noted the irony of the assholes who worked at Severance and the large, wall-sized paintings of Jesus that showed off the hospital's missionary roots. Were Samsung Hospital staffers nicer because Samsung was bigger?

I'm not really looking forward to a return visit to this place. If anything, I'd rather go back to Samsung, but I guess Myung Duck clinic doesn't have the same connections there.

EPILOGUE: one sad thing at the dental clinic: at one point, a very old and frail patient was brought in for dental work. His family was with him, and the son, who looked to be my age or older, was able to lift his father out of the hospital gurney and place him gently in a reclining chair. I had to stand by while this was happening because the old man and his gurney were in my path, but I certainly didn't begrudge the family this awkward moment. Imagine being on the edge of death and in the hospital for one thing, then being taken to the dental clinic for another thing. As my mom used to sigh, getting old can be very sad. I hope the old man got proper treatment from staffers who weren't rude.