My first time getting hospitalized
I moved back home to Korea after living in California for the past 5 years, and recently started a part time job as an English teacher. Working with kids, in a country with poor air quality and cold winters, means you're more susceptible to contracting sicknesses. People in the US always talks about how bad the smog is in Los Angeles, but they really don't know how good they have it compared to those in East Asia. Spring season in Korea is known as the season of "yellow dust" - it's apparently nearly impossible to go around without wearing a mask. I'm not really looking forward to it, haha.
A while after I got assigned my room, I was eventually told that I had pneumonia. More specifically, mycoplasma pneumonia. Apparently, it's not common for an adult my age (23 y/o) to contract it...the doctors suggested that I may have overstrained myself recently. The areas of infection were scattered around my lungs, and were too small to show up on an X-ray, but were identified through a CT scan. So nothing too serious, I just needed to rest and take medicine. They also needed my mucus to check up on my condition, so I had to successfully cough out at least 3 mL of mucus everyday (what a challenge that was). I was hooked up to a IV drip (about 5000 mL of dextrose...IIRC) and had antibiotics pumped into my blood as well everyday.
Oh, I was also prescribed pills to take after every meal. I was honestly surprised as hospital food is infamous for being bad...it was pretty good. The pills were pretty strong though, and I had to deal with an abnormally fast resting heart rate along with insomnia for a while. It didn't help that I would have a nurse come in at 4 or 5 in the AM to check up on me and replace my IV drip. Fun fact(?), had a nurse scold me for not pressing the emergency button right away when I started coughing severely and had trouble breathing as a result. Sorry ma'am, I was literally short of breath! *rolls eyes* I didn't have any of my parents sleeping over with me as the hospital didn't have a removable bed of some sort.
I eventually got better enough to leave the hospital within 4 days. I spent most of those days either lying down or sitting, that I was pretty much walking like a penguin haha. I'm thankful for my parents for taking care of me, my relatives for pitching in for the hospital fees, and my friends for being concerned for my health when I told them about my condition. I'm still treating my asthma though, but I have a feeling that it may be a persistent, chronic condition unless I move out of Korea...heh.
Alright, I've rambled on for too long. But I never expected to find myself being hospitalized, and while this whole experience of being sick was literally a pain, I found it interesting (?) and felt compelled to write down a record of the experience. The moral of the story is, being sick is not fun.
Anyway, the flu season has been pretty bad here, and I caught a cold within the first two weeks of work. I was hoping that the cold was light and would go away soon, but my coughing kept getting worse. Nearly 5 hospital visits later, I was diagnosed with allergy-induced asthma. Took an X-ray of my lungs, got a spirometry, and was prescribed medicines to treat it. My symptoms finally seemed to start getting better, until I started getting a high fever for 3 days in a row. By this point, I had been coughing to the point that I couldn't eat or sleep well for 3 weeks. I lost weight rapidly, and had my mom worried for a long time. My doctor eventually had to tell me to get hospitalized in order to perform more tests and give me better medical treatment. But alas, I couldn't skip out on work (no such thing as calling in sick at a private academy...boo hoo) and ended up filling in my obligatory 8 hours with a 39 C fever. My boss did successfully find a substitute teacher for me, and I was able to get hospitalized the next day. I was lucky, too - the following Monday was New Year's Day, which meant no classes, and I only needed a substitute for one working day.
On my first day of hospitalization, they ran a few tests on me. Got another X-ray, a bunch of blood taken out for further tests (they suspected that I had either the flu or pneumonia, but the former in the beginning), and a CT scan. It was also my first time having a needle stuck in my wrist for prolonged period of time that I started getting a little anxious.
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| There was another syringe in my left hand...*shudder* |
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| Look at Blogger compressing my photos...iPhone 6 camera really isn't this bad... |
Oh, I was also prescribed pills to take after every meal. I was honestly surprised as hospital food is infamous for being bad...it was pretty good. The pills were pretty strong though, and I had to deal with an abnormally fast resting heart rate along with insomnia for a while. It didn't help that I would have a nurse come in at 4 or 5 in the AM to check up on me and replace my IV drip. Fun fact(?), had a nurse scold me for not pressing the emergency button right away when I started coughing severely and had trouble breathing as a result. Sorry ma'am, I was literally short of breath! *rolls eyes* I didn't have any of my parents sleeping over with me as the hospital didn't have a removable bed of some sort.
I eventually got better enough to leave the hospital within 4 days. I spent most of those days either lying down or sitting, that I was pretty much walking like a penguin haha. I'm thankful for my parents for taking care of me, my relatives for pitching in for the hospital fees, and my friends for being concerned for my health when I told them about my condition. I'm still treating my asthma though, but I have a feeling that it may be a persistent, chronic condition unless I move out of Korea...heh.
Alright, I've rambled on for too long. But I never expected to find myself being hospitalized, and while this whole experience of being sick was literally a pain, I found it interesting (?) and felt compelled to write down a record of the experience. The moral of the story is, being sick is not fun.
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