Sick

I awoke at 4am last Sunday morning to my body completely evacuating the diner I put into it Saturday night. My first thought as I was leaning over the toilet was that I had poisoned Mike and my co-teacher, who we invited over to diner. I stumbled back to bed and decided not to seek sympathy from Mike just in case he was going down with me. After four increasingly painful and noisy visits to the bathroom, Mike still slept soundly, so I gained hope that I had caught my annual 24 hour stomach bug. (four years in a row)

When Mike got up around nine feeling fine, and completely unaware of my hours of misery (sorry for the drama) I decided to call my co-teacher for help. He said he was feeling well, and agreed to speak with the local pharmacist about giving Mike some stomach medicine.

Mike paid the equivalent of two dollars, and this is what he came home with. I must have been really delirious but I was hoping for trusty yet disgusting Pepto-Bismol.

Mike spent hours and went all around Seogwipo trying to figure out how much of this medicine I was supposed to take. First he tried google translate, then he went to a café where the proprietor speaks English really well. Unfortunately the café owner wasn’t in, so we called several people who might have been helpful, none of whom were answering. Mike went back to speak with the pharmacist who seemed to tell him using drawings and numbers that I was meant to take all of the medicine. Please keep in mind that the photo above only shows the left over pills that I didn’t take.

As you can see this is a lot of medicine. It seems sketchy to consume so much medicine, but dosage aside, it was logistically impossible for me as I wasn’t even holding down water. Furthermore, of what Mike was able to translate it seemed as if the consumer was intended to take two spoonfuls three times a day. The pill dosage and the hours lapsing was unclear via google translate. Feeling like there was still a misunderstanding we finally got a hold of Master Oh from Kuk Sool. Mike went across town again where Master Oh looked over the medicine, gave his best guess of what I should take, and wondered why I didn’t go to the hospital. Finally at 1pm Mike and I decided that I probably wouldn’t overdose if I took a few pills with a few swallows of the liquid. I repeated the process four other times, and felt increasingly better as the hours wore on.

Despite feeling awful, I just kept thinking that I was so happy to be with Mike, and that he was spending so much of his day figuring out what and how much medicine I should take.

As you can see the medicine looks really different here. One time we picked up cold medicine from the pharmacy. The cold medicine was really cheap, and looked like sugar tablets. Since we couldn’t read the label, the two of us had a hard time thinking of it as real medicine. It is real medicine of course; a whole country uses it. But the medicine is so different than what we’re accustomed to that it’s not very comforting when you’re feeling sick. Stay tuned for the next blog about observations I’ve made about sickness during our stay in Korea.