So it’s been a while since I’ve updated.  I realize I’m a huge slacker and I really have no excuse.  It seems the more free time I have, the lazier I get, the less I do.  This blog will be written in pure stream-of-consciousness form, with little to no editing/censoring.  

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School is officially over.  Well, the actual school semester ended, followed by 2 weeks of summer camp with a bunch of lovely young teenagers.  I really enjoyed summer camp, especially sharing the teaching duties with Paul, therefore allowing my laziness to fester even more.  The theme of camp was “Passport Around The World” and each day was a different country where they explored games and food from that country. America, South Africa and Mexico were the stops on the itinerary…. and while America’s Candy Pong (an under-19 take on beer pong) took the cake for best game, tacos definitely won for best food.  I would like to think it was the sheer amazingness of the chicken that pushed the tacos to the top — i spent hours slaving away cooking that damn chicken just right using only the finest blend of taco seasonings… Taco Bell.

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Last week was interesting in the way of doctor’s visits.  Everyone knows I have an ongoing love affair with Korean health insurance and the opportunities it gives me to exploit my hypochondria.  

I started lactating.  Dude, not even joking, breast milk was coming out of my tits and it freaked me out.  Ask Josh who was on the phone with me when I first discovered this, who heard my increasingly panicked “OH MY GODs” until I was forced to get off the phone with him to do some extensive google searching.  Google searching did not qualm my panic — lactation without being pregnant is either:  medications or a brain tumor.  OK so not a scary brain tumor, but just a little party crasher brain tumor that’s humping my pituitary gland.  

Various blood tests were ordered, sonograms were done of my rack, and I was sent home with the promise of results in a few days.  Still lactating.  Not like spontaneous lactating — I gotta like squeeze it out.   My friend Kyle brought up an interesting idea… could I legitimately become a wet nurse?  Squeeze, pump, and sell this stuff for won on the ounce?  This idea was brushed aside by my test results which confirmed that I was not pregnant, I did not have a brain tumor, and that it was my medications effecting the level of Prolactin (the hormone that tells your milk ducts to get to work).   

So here I am, still lactating, being told to ween myself off various medications and come back in a couple weeks for another Prolactin test.  So I ween.  And I wait.

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Last week, I was also hunched over in various degrees of pain because of my lower back problems.  Legit pain that had me hunched over like a Korean grandma. So Friday morning I begged my orthopedic back specialist for another epidural.  You see, I had gotten one before, a few months ago, and it was glorious.  I was able to sit/stand/walk for hours with no pain.  However, the gloriousness didn’t last long and I was then relegated to rehabilitation and physical therapy and prescriptions that are not near narcotic enough to deal with the pain.

But here I was again, woefully describing to him my pain and pleading for another epidural.  I wanted to skip as I headed upstairs to the Pain Management Center… or in this case, shall I say, the Pain Infliction Center.  My previous epidural had been a walk in the park.  The pain was minimal — albeit a very strange, indescribable pain — and the results were spectacular.  This epidural, however, was a totally different story.  I blame it on the doctor, different from my previous epidural-giver, whose dead cold heart obviously lacked any compassion.  As I writhed in pain, tears streaming down my face, crying out for help, she chuckled.  Chuckled and asked “kwenchanayo?” Are you okay?   No, not kwenchanayo lady.  Nowhere near kwenchanayo.  

I was bed-ridden for the rest of the day, which I spent sleeping off the enormous muscle cramps the epidural had left me.  My original back pain was gone, but replaced by the pain of epidural.   24 hours later, all pain had subsided and I was able to carry about a normal existence.  

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So my hypochondria really wasn’t hypochondria this week — I had some legit stuff going on and squirting out.  

Oh and if you didn’t see, I actually wrote an article about my obsession with Korean healthcare that got published in The Korea Times. Click HERE to read it.