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| © Ross Brown |
Thursday, July 16, 1998
The call came through at nearly half-past three. Chul-won listened for some time and then translated for me. “She has three stitches in her ankle,” he said. “She has very little money and cannot afford the cost.”
“How much is it?” I asked. Even though it was the woman who had run out from the front of the bus and into me, I understood that it was the driver of the vehicle who was typically at fault. Linda, a teacher from Kwon’s hagwon, had told me that she learned this from one of her students, who explained it to her after she had witnessed an accident and told her class about it.
The student said that the biggest vehicle is usually most at fault. He then joked with her: “If you ever hit a pedestrian with a car, be hopeful that you killed them and nobody saw. And then, get out of there.”
After Chul-won spoke some more on the phone, he said to me, “She says the bill is ninety-thousand won.” Less than one hundred Canadian dollars. I could certainly afford that. The repair to my scooter was twenty-thousand won and a replacement face shield for the helmet was another ten thousand. The cost of the crash was starting to add up, but it wasn’t astronomical. I was still unable to retrieve the tiny piece of stone from my hand.
“Tell her to let me know when she needs me to pay it and I can meet her. Or, better yet, she can come to our office and I’ll pay her then. Tell her to bring the bill with her so that you can confirm the amount.”
Chul-won translated and then hung up. “She said she’ll call back.”
“Thank you for your help, Chul-won. I hope the matter is settled quickly.”
***
Friday, July 24, 1998
The phone on Chul-won’s desk rang just as I was gathering material to head to a class. “It’s the woman from the accident,” he said as I rose from my own desk to head out of the office. “She says she’s still in the hospital.”
“What?” I said, incredulous. “She went in more than a week ago. Why is she still there?”
Chul-won spoke and then listened as the answer was provided. “She says the hospital won’t release her until the bill is paid.”
“That’s ridiculous. For three stitches? They kept her in the hospital for more than a week for three stitches? Why didn’t she have me come last Thursday?”
More translations. More listening. More speaking. I don’t know what I would have done if it weren’t for the help of Chul-won. After a while, he asked me, “Can you go to the hospital today to pay the bill?”
“Tell her that I can be there for two o’clock. Please find out where she is.”
“I can go with you to translate. This sounds suspicious to me,” said Chul-won. He spoke into the phone, wrote down some details, and hung up.
“Thank you for your help, Chul-won. I’d be helpless without you.”
“It’s my pleasure. Now, go teach and don’t worry.”
Teaching was the easy part. Not worrying was a whole different matter.
***
We arrived at a small hospital, no bigger than the clinic that my private student, Goh Jae-eun, owned. Doctor Goh was the student that I inherited from Jamie, after he and Jodi returned to the United States. But unlike Doctor Goh’s clinic, there was no pharmacy on the ground floor, only a reception area and offices, and a hall that seemed to lead to an OR. A few people sat in a large waiting area, some badly bandaged and others wearing masks, presumably protecting others from whatever ailment was troubling them. I had learned, in more than a year of seeing Koreans walking the streets donning cloth masks, that, as a courtesy to their fellow citizens, people covered up if they felt unwell. Seeing that as a good idea, I had purchased a similar mask from Kwon’s pharmacy. So far, I hadn’t felt the need to wear it, as I had only suffered a few sniffles over my stay and a couple of bouts of food poisoning. But at the first signs of something more serious, I would don the mask.
Chul-won led us to the reception desk and spoke to a pretty woman who was sitting on the other side. He explained the reason for our visit and she nodded before picking up her phone and punching a couple of buttons. After a short exchange, she hung up and spoke to Chul-won again, who gave his typical nod and a hum.
“The doctor will come to see us in a few minutes,” he told me.
I looked around the waiting area, trying to find the woman that ran out in front of my scooter, but there was only one woman in the waiting room, and she had several decades on my victim.
“I wonder where the woman is,” I said. “When we said the time that we’d be here, I would have expected that she’d be raring to leave.”
“Mmm, perhaps she is with the doctor,” suggested Chul-won.
“Perhaps.”
She was not with the doctor. We waited for fewer than five minutes when a middle-aged man in a white lab coat and glasses came to greet us. His dark hair was full and brushed straight back, and his tall and portly state was carried with confidence. His face was expressionless and businesslike. He was a man who wanted to be taken seriously and treated with respect. He introduced himself as Doctor Lee and spoke English.
“Would you like to see the patient?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “where is she?”
“In her room, in bed.” He led us to a stairwell and we began climbing the stairs.
“In bed? I was told she received three stitches for her injury.”
“Yes. I also have her on a round of antibiotics to control any infection.”
I thought of the injuries that I had sustained in my lifetime, and my hand instinctively went to my chest. I also looked at the wrist of that hand, which still showed a faint scar from when I was a young child in North Berwick. I was with Billy Gentleman and we were racing our bikes along Rotary Way, a narrow pathway along Elcho Green, the park along East Bay Beach, not far from my house. We were going far too fast for the path, especially with small sailing crafts on trailers parked on the grass, on either side of the path, awaiting the weekend’s regatta. As I passed a dinghy to my right, a man about the age of my dad, who was standing next to it and with his back to me, took a step backwards and into my path. As I swerved to avoid him, I collided with Billy and his bike, and we both lost control and veered off the path. I struck another dinghy on my left, hitting its rudder full-on.
“Oy,” cried the man who had nearly backed into me. “Watch where you’re going, lad.” He walked to where I was pulling myself up and checked the rudder for damage. I had held my arm out to protect myself and my wrist had taken the force of the impact.
As I stood up and reached for my bike, a line of blood ran from my fourth finger, up over the back of my hand, and under the sleeve of my navy jumper. Lifting the sleeve, a three-centimetre gash on my arm, just past the wrist, showed peeled skin and bare bone. Both Billy and the man let out a gasp. The man grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket and immediately wrapped it around the wound.
“I’ll go fetch yer ma,” cried Billy, who turned his bike around and pedaled toward my home.
“What’s yer mum going to do?” said the man, applying pressure to my wound.
“She’s a doctor.” My knees were going weak and I started to drop to the ground, but the man scooped me in his arms and began to walk quickly toward Beach Road, cutting between the parked crafts.
Five stitches later and my incision properly plastered, I had stories to tell my mates for days on end. My mother had thoroughly disinfected the wound when we reached her clinic and I received no antibiotics. By dinnertime, I was back to my old self, though it would be another week before I felt confident to climb onto my bike again.
We reached the second floor of the clinic and the doctor led us down a poorly lit hallway, where patients smoked in the hallway and soiled linen overflowed from equally soiled bins. We entered a small room with three beds, all occupied by patients either sleeping or being tended by a nurse, or reading. The woman with the cut ankle was the third one, dressed in grey and white striped pantsuit. She was sitting on top of the bed, which was made. She saw me and started to smile. Sitting beside her bed was a man who was watching the small television that was attached to the wall at the foot of the woman’s bed. I assumed that he was the woman’s husband.
“Annyong haseyo,” I greeted the woman. She immediately started speaking quickly, smiling and looking at me, but Chul-won was next to me, listening intently. Halfway through her speech, Chul-won raised his hands and interrupted her, seemingly asking her a question but with a tone of surprise. The woman’s smile stopped and she gave my translator her full attention. All the while, the woman’s husband remained silent, fully engrossed in the program he was watching.
After a short exchange, Chul-won turned to me. “She says the cost of her hospital stay is now nine-hundred-thousand won.”
“What?” I said. I looked from Chul-won to the woman. “I agreed to pay for her ninety-thousand-won procedure. Not ten times that amount.” I said ninety thousand won in Hangul, just to be sure that the woman understood me. I turned my attention to the doctor. “Why did she need to be in the hospital all this time? She only needed the stitches, perhaps something for the pain. She should have been home.”
“Are you a doctor?” the doctor asked.
“Of course not. But I have experience with stitches.” For emphasis, I held up my wrist. With my skin tanned from the summer sun, the thin pink line was more visible.
“I’m the doctor and I decide what’s best. My patient needed rest and antibiotics.”
“Rest, she could get at home, I’m sure. As for antibiotics, she could also take them at home.”
“She could not inject them herself.”
“Injections? Why wasn’t she given tablets to take? Who gets antibiotic injections?”
“Again, I am her doctor and I make the decisions.” Clearly, he was not accustomed to having anyone question his decisions.
It was at this moment that the husband decided to join the conversation, and he rose from his chair as he spoke, his voice both whining and forceful. He caught Chul-won off-guard but my colleague kept his calm demeanor. While the husband continued his rant, Chul-won dismissed the rant and turned to me. “He says that because he was worried about his wife, he missed winning a contract and wants you to pay him one-and-a-half-million won. Plus the hospital fees.” He listened more, as the man continued to speak. “He says we should go to the police station to make a report.”
“This is crazy,” I said. “Mee-chin!” I repeated to the ranting husband.
The doctor intervened. “May I speak to you, privately?” he asked me.
In the hallway, with poor Chul-won left dealing with the husband, his wife having gone back to her book, the doctor closed the door to give us a bit more privacy. “I think you should pay the bill and let everyone get back to their respective lives.”
“Your English is perfect,” I said, “did you live in the United States for long?”
He seemed derailed by my change of the subject but answered. “I studied in California. I spent ten years in Los Angeles.”
“Why did she need to stay in the hospital? We both know that a small incision that was closed with three stitches didn’t require even an overnight stay. I may not be a doctor but my mother is. She’s told me about patients who have required surgery but were only in hospital for a couple of days.”
“I needed to oversee that she received her antibiotic injections on time.”
“That’s another thing that I don’t understand. Why couldn’t you have prescribed pills? I’ve been on antibiotics several times over my life and not once were they delivered in a syringe.”
“You know,” he said, his voice low and unmistakably repressing anger and frustration, “if this had happened in America, it would cost you a lot more.”
Our eyes met and I could see everything clearly now. They saw me as an American, from the land of milk and honey. The doctor wasn’t just looking out for his patient: he was looking to fleece me. Had the woman even been spending the whole week in the hospital or had the doctor looked for an easy opportunity to milk an American for money? She was dressed in her own clothes, rather than the hospital gown that I had seen on every other patient I had encountered in these halls. She was pretty chipper and didn’t seem like she was bed-ridden.
I dropped my voice to match the doctor’s and locked eyes with him. “Here’s what’s going to happen, doctor. You see, I have a Korean friend who is a doctor. He is going to ask to see this patient’s medical record and make his own determination about whether she really required hospitalization for a small incision, and whether tablets could have done as good a job as injections. If my doctor friend decides that hospitalization was not required or that the antibiotics could have been delivered in tablet form, I will then go to another friend of mine, who owns a newspaper, and I will ask him to investigate you and your clinic. He loves a good investigative story that uncovers corruption.”
I continued to hold my gaze. Inside, however, I was trembling. I had no idea whether Doctor Goh would be able to request the woman’s records. And while I knew that no Canadian or Scottish hospital would keep a patient with this injury overnight, maybe things were done differently in Korea. But that made me think even more.
“And by the way, doctor, I’m from Canada. If this had happened there, it would have cost neither me nor the woman anything.”
The doctor blinked and turned his head away. I opened the door to the patient’s room and beckoned Chul-won. “Do we have to accompany them to the police station to file a report or can we do one on our own?”
“Yes,” he hummed, “we can make our own report.”
“Good,” I said. “Please tell the husband that that’s what we’re going to do. We’re out of here.”
“Will you pay the bill?” the doctor asked.
“I’m still prepared to pay the original amount of ninety-thousand won.”
The doctor fell silent. The husband, still ranting, fell silent long enough to listen to Chul-won translate my offer. As soon as he heard the amount, the rant started again. Chul-won told the husband that we would make our report separately, and we left. Both Chul-won and I left the hospital, and we took a taxi back to the university.
After all, we still had bigger responsibilities.
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