Should you feel inclined to visit a Korean hospital, I don't recommend the route I took, namely breaking your own leg. I kept a journal of my ordeal because at the time just thinking of someone reading it made me feel a lot less insignificant and alone. Thanks for being there.

Day 1
   Across the street from Sajik Stadium you can rent little motor scooters and ride around in the parking lot. On September 17, 1998 some friends and I decided to try them out. It was fun, until I wiped out. It took only a few seconds to realize that my left leg was badly hurt. The fibula was broken close to my knee, the tibia was broken close to my ankle, and the ankle was fractured.
   Someone suggested that the hospital was close and that a taxi might be in order. I ruled that out pretty quickly so someone got someone else to call an ambulance. I insisted on holding hands with whomever was closest, needing something more solid than voices and faces to convince me that I wasn’t alone. I think they rotated to avoid having to treat anyone for a crushed hand. The ambulance drivers (I hesitate to use the term ‘paramedics’) didn't put any kind of splint on my leg. Instead a friend held it down so it didn’t get jostled too much. 
   At the hospital this lack of professionalism, bordering on incompetence, only got worse. In the States, my pants, shoe and sock would have immediately been cut away. Here, they began by slowly pulling and twisting my boot off, sending me to new heights of pain on an already excruciating day. The nurse then started to take off my sock in much the same way. I yelled at her to just cut it off, making my point with a little scissoring motion of my hand. It was just like when you want your jajangmyon cut up, except for the yelling.
   When it was time to get my pants off, they carefully pulled a curtain around me. One nurse giggled, directed me to “take off pants” and then left. Of course I couldn’t. Finally a male staff member, maybe a doctor, helped me get them off and then put my hospital pants on for me. Silly me, I thought taking care of my leg would come before modesty.
   The X-ray ordeal, however, made this other stuff seem like a walk in the park. First they X-rayed my elbow. Twice. It was okay. Then they got my knee a couple of times and my leg and foot from a couple of angles. One guy took care of the whole procedure, positioning me then running around the corner to hit the button. Every time he lifted my leg, he did it without lifting my foot. In response, I made a lot of noise and practiced some words you don't use in church.
   Finally I was taken back to the emergency room where the doctor pulled and twisted until my leg bones were back to approximately where they should have been. He splinted and wrapped it, then shuttled me back to the X-ray room through a crowded waiting room. On my third trip to the ER I was parked for a while before being taken to my hospital room. It later occurred to me that they shot pain killers into my butt at least three times, and I wondered how miserable the whole thing would have been without them.
   Mr. Bae, my hagwon manager, came and straightened out all the logistics of the hospital stay. He visited for at least a couple of hours and bought all the hospital necessities, like a towel, slippers, IV needles and silverware for me to eat with. When he told me that you actually have to pay for this stuff in advance, I assumed that it was just an hallucination brought on by pain and drugs. It turned out I needed all of it, except the left slipper.

Day 2
   After the first hellish night I started to become fully aware of my situation: I was trapped in a room with a coin-operated TV and a bunch of people who couldn’t speak English. The TV and lights were on until 11:30, but I felt too outvoted to ask for them to be turned off. They were back on by 6:00 in the morning. In between I don’t think I slept more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time.

Day 4
   By the fourth day I began to get used to being in the hospital and even felt happy at times. The other guys in the room seemed to like me: they and their wives took care of me, helped me with meals, washed my silverware, and cranked my bed up and down. Sometimes they would even take my urine to the bathroom for me. If you don't think that’s an awkward favor to ask someone, just try it sometime. The nurses seemed annoyed when I bothered them about these kinds of things, as though they were doing me a favor, not their jobs. It’s hard to know who’s supposed to be doing what though; the same women who give us injections and put in IV’s also make the beds.
   The hospital people began telling me that I had hypertension. They told me this as though I had been doing something wrong. A nurse suggested that maybe I needed some rest, maybe I was stressed. Considering that I was short on sleep, that going to the bathroom was a torturous experience, that there was always a crowd in my room, and that nobody spoke my language, I think I had every right to be tense.

Day 5
   I took some interesting TV memories from my hospital stay. Most Korean shows have all the drama of a confrontation between warm water and cool water. But there's one popular show where they take celebrities and city people, usually in their 20’s, and put them to work at regular jobs. Frequently they end up doing farm work or carrying heavy stuff. Sometimes they do strange jobs like breaking ice on small streams to catch eels. On one show, a guy got to work with a crew emptying septic tanks. He had to drag hoses up huge flights of outdoor concrete steps, all the while working really hard not to vomit from the smell. 
   My favorite was one where Miss Korea took a trip to Mexico and trained to be a professional wrestler. She must have spent a lot of time doing this, because she was good enough to actually participate in a match at the end. It was a sight to see. The women were all about the same height but Miss K was built like a fifteen-year-old girl and the wrestlers were built like, well, like wrestlers. She spent a lot of time crying during the training, but she learned a couple of throws, how to take a fall correctly, and how to climb up on the ropes and jump down onto an opponent. It was very entertaining.

Day 7
   Surgery. I had a local anesthetic so I was awake for the whole thing. They gave me my walkman and one of my favorite tapes to pass the two hours and proceeded with the spinal block. I could still kind of feel things, but not pain.    
   For the first time since Day 1, I was actually comfortable. I could hear noises that made the dentist’s drill sound like birds singing, so I turned up my walkman a bit. Sometimes they pulled and yanked on my leg hard enough that it moved my whole body. And they did some things that sent vibrations up through my leg bone (which is, by the way, connected to the thigh bone, which is connected to the hip bone, which is connected to the back bone) that I could actually feel! During the last half hour or so I started to get serious cramps in my lower torso. I put up with it all by singing along with my walkman, sometimes pretty loud. The doctors and assistants smiled at me and laughed once or twice. I kept on singing. Next thing I knew, it was finished. Then it was back to my room, where the pain didn’t start to set in for a couple of hours.
   By the way, if you thought that was bad, you should be grateful that I didn’t mention the catheter.

Day 9 
   I dreamt I was in an Escher-space hospital room, trying to sandwich as many of me in the room as possible. Whatever perspective I was working from, I found my left leg to be unwieldy and uncooperative. I couldn’t find a comfortable position from the floor, ceiling or any of the walls, and I couldn’t get any more of me in the room. 
   I woke up around 3:00 am. The dream dissolved but the problem was still there. I was  surprised to find that my back didn’t hurt for the first time since the operation some 30 hours ago and I actually slept for about four hours in a row. I should have been happy, this being a sign of imminent recovery, but instead I started thinking about how far I was from home, how different everything was, how loosely connected I was to the people around me. In other words, I went into depression mode. When you wake up hurting in a place where no one understands your language, it makes you feel more alone than you ever thought possible.
   In the morning I called in the duty nurse. She was one of the ones who treated me like a friend, tried to make me comfortable, and spoke the best English of the lot. We spent some time rearranging my leg and then I confused her a bit by telling her I didn’t have any pain as the tears ran down my face.

Day 11
   Three of my students came by to visit. They brought food and drinks and the biggest slippers they could find, then stayed and talked a while. They all asked me questions, taking turns going around the room just like in class. It was nice, but tiring. 
   A nurse came in and rubbed my butt to make me feel better. Okay, she gave me a shot in it first. Everyone’s entitled to rearrange reality to suit themselves now and again, right?

Day 14
   One of the more bizarre Korean Hospital incidents I witnessed involved the man in the bed next to mine and his wife. She came in apparently feeling more sick than he did. She laid down in the bed and he sat in the chair next to it. When the nurse came by they talked a bit, then the nurse hooked his IV up to his wife. Later when it ran out, they took the needle out and she went home. This was almost as shocking as the day they brought me different food for dinner.

Epilogue
Five months later I’m still in Korea, still limping, and still astonished that I survived being in a Korean hospital. For those of you keeping track, the score now stands at Two-wheeled Vehicles: 2, Rob: 0. From now on I’m sticking to transportation with four or more tires.