I’ve missed a few Instant Messages and the like and here’s the update on me and my leg.
There I was sitting in my fabulous private hospital room that looked more like a hotel room with a weird looking single bed rather than a hospital room – there was a little couch, a fridge nearly the size of me and a remote controlled TV on the wall, plus my own bathroom in the room. It was fantastic.
Anyway, I had a consultation with the resident, who ironically had much better english than the specialist surgeon that I had originally seen (who would be operating on me). He started to give me much more information that I hadn’t been told before, or wasn’t made fully aware of.
The biggest part was that when they cut the tumor out of my leg (and for anyone that doesn’t already know it’s only a benign tumor, but unfortunately it’s the size of a horse at 13cm odd) … anyway, when they cut out the tumor out of my leg they will also being taking muscle away as well. Muscle doesn’t repair, it doesn’t grow back – once it’s gone, it’s gone! This will mean that I will have problems moving my ankle for the rest of my life. Before, I was only lead to believe (or maybe I was kidding myself) that there was only a chance that could happen. (Just so you know I didn’t have a translator or anything when I saw the original specialist because this is a hospital that prides itself on everyone speaking english – cough cough)
I could have handled this end result, except a friend of mine that is a nurse who spoke to an orthopedic surgeon in Oz told me that in Australia they don’t do the big cut, or the big cut is a last resort and perhaps there are other things that can be done. I was also told by that friend that these tumors have a 50% chance of coming back … so I could be potentially cutting out muscle for no reason.
Now there I was, in a lot of pain, hoping for the end to be near but I suddenly realised exactly how permanent this was going to be for the rest of my life … words like cripple kept popping into my head (along with visions of a permanent limp). I also thought that if I didn’t at least go to Australia and investigate possible other options I would wonder “what if” for the rest of my life.
So, it’s probably likely that I will go to Australia and be told that the only option is to have the big cut but at least I would have investigated further and have all the information.
So that is why I promptly checked out of the hospital, and confused the hell out of an entire orthopedic medical staff at Yonsei Severance Hospital. As a side note of humour there was nothing funnier than checking out and having to pay the bill for my one and only meal that I had there (as I hadn’t stayed the night I didn’t have to pay for the room – meal cost $26 though) but the cashier, did a double take, thought the computer wasn’t working, made a phone call it was kind of hilariously funny at that point. It took me nearly as long to get out of the hospital as it did to get into it. I feel really quite bad about that though.
My contract here finishes in 6 weeks, so I’ll be back in Oz to pursue it all further then.
If any of these tags bring any foreigners here looking to do research about Yonsei hospital because they are considering having surgery done there, I’m going to write another post about my dealings with the hospital itself. Or if you want to contact me about it just drop a comment here and I’d be glad to answer your questions.
