a scary weekend..

this past weekend was planned to be sweet gathering at jessie and justin's place, enjoying the cultural festival in their city. However instead of going and hanging out with friends, I stayed at home and worried about my health..

you see, about four months ago my neck became stiff and sore - and it's been the same ever since then. i figured it was stress, or a bad mattress or pillow, or a cold draft in my apartment, or some other non-serious thing. but after two months of the annoying neck issue i went to see a doctor. he said (in "konglish", 'korean+english') that my muscles were just sore and tired. he prescribed three different pills to be taken three times a day; one pill for the pain, one for the swelling, and one more for the side affects of the first two. i decided that i would be worse off if i took them, so i let time carry on.

then a few weeks ago, after complaining to my boss, he got his father (a traditional oriental doctor) to give me acupuncture. it was weird having someone put little needles in your face and arms and legs, but it did relax my muscles. yet, my neck was still sore.

finally i decided to go back to search around and find a doctor who speaks english and who would take my complaints seriously. this past weekend i headed to an international clinic at 'dong eui medical center' and had a doctor there check me out. after being unable to find the problem he suggested an x-ray. my medical insurance deductible is at about $100, so it didn't quite cover the $50 x-ray (though i was surprised at how cheap it was!)

about 20 minutes later i was up in the doctor's office looking at an x-ray of my neck (it's pretty humbling to see an x-ray of your body- proof of our mortal bodies). it looked normal at first glance, but then he pointed out this 'jellybean shaped' mass in between my cervical and thoracic vertebrae. "i worry about that", he says. i didn't know what to say.

he calmly told me that "it was probably just arthritis or degeneration of the joint, but that there was maybe a 20% chance that it was a tumor". shit. he booked an mri for me on monday, which would be two days from then (who knows how long i would wait in canada).

so i left the hospital, only about an hour and a half after i had arrived. i came looking for a solution to my neck stiffness and left with a one in five chance that i had a tumor on my spine. it was mid saturday and i didn't know what to do. i felt more alone than i've ever been, and i was (of course) over analyzing that 20%.

time ticked by.. and monday came around.
monday was mri day. i took a sick day at work and went to the hospital with becky. i really feel for those people who have to get mri's on a regular basis.. because it sucks. anyone with even the slightest claustrophobic tendencies would have to be sedated.

for those of you who don't know what an mri.. uh.. machine looks like, here's a picture. the worst part about it is that, before they put me in there they explained in very broken english about when, and when i couldn't swallow. while taking an mri of my neck, i couldn't be swallowing spit and blurring the picture.

anyways, with that finished, then began the waiting game. i was told that i would have the results on wednesday (yesterday), at 9am. tuesday night was one of the worst sleeps of my life, anxiously awaiting the phone call at 9:00. the doctor hadn't called by 9:02 so i called her.
... talking on the phone with someone who speaks broken english is a tricky thing to do, especially when the subject is of dire importance. the message that i took from the phone call was that 'there was no problem', but had to go to the hospital to talk about it.

the doctor told me that the mass-like picture on the x-ray was actually bone that was made denser by the arthritis. apparently i have arthritis in that part of my neck, and it might have been caused by some trauma that i had recently, or up to ten years ago.

anyways, the important thing that i took from the experience is that the mri came back clean - no abnormal 'tumor-like' stuff in my spine. WOO! i was so relieved.

even though i was told that it was a relatively small percentage, i spent from saturday until yesterday thinking about how it was all going to go down - in the most negative light. i thought about deciding where to have the surgery, here in korea or back home in canada -if i would have to wait a long time there, or if i would even be covered under health insurance... it was a horrible experience, but extremely relieving in the end. all this went down in a span of just a few days. life is short.

this experience gave me great respect for life... and time... and how important each moment is.

crazy..