Last week, my mother-in-law got in a car accident. She wasn’t at fault. She was parked at an intersection with her handbrake engaged (Korean style driving), and a car smashed into her car’s bumper and rear ended her hard enough to send their engine into flames! After being questioned by the insurance investigators, they cleared her support and she got money to repair the car and pay for her initial hospital stay.
She got put into the hospital with a light concussion and and some whiplash. She picked her hospital the basis knowing a woman that worked in the cafeteria from church. This is the kind of thing that strikes me as insane about Korea. Yes, the hospital is well known, and it has been around for a while, but knowing a lunchlady is not a good reason to pick it! Sure, hospital food is important, but not THAT important.
Anyway, when we visited her in the hospital, she seemed fine. She had gotten some pain medication and wasn’t limping around. She was working via phone, and was asking people not to visit her because she wanted a nice rest in the hospital where she wouldn’t need to do any housework.
She was released after a few days. They had done some X-rays but hadn’t found anything serious. When she got home, and off the medication, all of a sudden her back started flaring up and she was laid flat and unable to sit. She was having shooting pains in her legs and was not looking like the same person she was in the hospital. She missed church, which is a once in a life time sort of occurance for her. That’s when we got really worried.
The advantage of living in the city was once again confirmed when we found out that she had checked into a well respected spinal hospital only two blocks away from her apartment. Spinal surgeons in the same neighborhood as my school? I had no clue. It’s amazing that there are so many things in that area of town.
Visiting the spinal hospital to help her check in was difficult for me. I’m completely useless in a place like that with specialized vocabulary and losts of old people in intense pain. Other than showing support by showing up, the best I could do was guard purses when my wife went to speak to doctors and sign papers about the surgery.
I won’t go into the details of what is wrong, but she’ll have surgery sometime today. She stayed at the hospital last night, and has at least a week of recovery. I’ll be living at home more or less alone while my mother-in-law is in the hospital. I really hope the surgery goes well and there are no complications. She needs to recover fully and have time off to get back to full strength.
EDIT: She has been in the hospital and has shown signs of recovery. After the surgery (4 hours), she could move her feet and had no pain in her legs. She won’t get out of the hospital for another week. She is on her way to recovery (fingers crossed).
