Drinking injuries and a Korean hospital

A fellow expat and friend wound up in a Korean hospital recently. He had too much to drink one night and crashed down a flight of stairs in a subway station. This has left him immobile, and he lies in bed patiently waiting for the bone in his ankle to heal.

I went to visit him last week, and to relieve him from the ordeal of Korean hospital food, I brought along some muffins and yoghurt. A decent idea save for the fact there was no spoon in the room.

Korean hospitals are different from their Western counterparts. Nurses provide only the most basic of services, with the patient's family expected to pick up the slack. Everything comes with a price, and in any case, what you want usually isn't even there. All of this I knew, as I walked downstairs to the nursing room to ask for a spoon.

I did so in as polite as Korean as possible. The nurses looked mildly surprised, first at me, then at each other. One of them said in Korean, "Go and ask at a restaurant."

In a country that takes such immense pride in their rising economic power, and such immense resentment at the way Westerners hold them to it, they told me to go to a restaurant to get a spoon. In a country that tells anyone who will listen that it's on the verge of becoming a globalized, internationalized "hub" of North East Asia, they told me to go to a restaurant to get a spoon. All so a Canadian patient on the fifth floor could have some yoghurt.

I tried my best to look pitiful and just shrugged my shoulders. They resumed a search of the room until finally locating a thin metal stick that looked more useful for breaking into cars than eating yoghurt. It would have to do though, and the nurse asked that I please bring it back when finished.

Sometime mid-morning one of the nurses walked into the room to announce the results of my friend's blood test. My friend's Korean being non-existent, mine being unreliable in general and horrible when it comes to medical terms, we struggled to figure out exactly what she was telling us. Despite being in a rather unlucky predicament, my friend did come up aces on one count. One of the other patients in his room had spent a long time in America, and it was about this time he strolled in.

A much-needed translation revealed that she was telling us my friend's liver was in bad shape, and that he needed to quit drinking.

I felt nothing but sorry for my buddy at that moment. Unshaven, smelling, laid up in a hospital bed for the past two weeks because of a smashed ankle, and out of nowhere a nurse with no spoon is telling him in a language he can't even understand that he has a liver problem.

I could see the 8 years that have passed since his university days, marked by constant abuse of his blood-cleaning organ, passing before his eyes, the look of panic from someone who realizes that a lot of fun has finally caught up with him. It's a day many of us imagine from time to time, but never actually think will come.

We tried to reassure him. The other Korean patients in the room weren't necessarily helping by screeching with laughter and shouting "Soju no!" at the top of their lungs. After all, I told him, of course he needs to cut down. The fact he's lying in a hospital bed with an injury caused by an intoxicated tumble down a flight of stairs should be proof enough of that.

But what makes all of this most preposterous is what I found out after further discussion on the matter. Which is that while my friend was getting a justifiably earned warning about alcohol abuse, the other Korean patients in the hospital DRINK SOJU EVERY NIGHT IN THEIR ROOMS.

I would like to say, only in Korea, but I'm sure people drink in hospitals somewhere else in the world. Most of the patients in there are only scamming their insurance companies anyways. Koreans get a painfully low number of holidays each year. I don't actually blame them for hanging out, getting drunk and playing cards for a week or two. I'd probably do the same. It's a small community hospital and I guess there's some sort of tacit agreement between patients and staff on the matter

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The quasi Korean-American mentioned earlier is riding out his time in the hospital, waiting to go back to America while his lawyer tries to win him a whiplash lawsuit. There's not much actually wrong with him so he's a bit bored. He told us how much more he's been smoking since he'd come there. (The patients also smoke, a lot, in the stairwells). The Koreans got a freebie in the above paragraph, but the last word goes to my hobbled friend: "Only in Korea could you start smoking MORE after checking into a hospital."