10th grade Trauma - Busan

Zeke's 10th grade class planned an end of year get-away at Busan. There was a national holiday on Wednesday, so they wanted to go Tuesday night and then go to an amusement park on Wednesday. When your 16-year old asks if you will chaperone him and his friends, you say, "Yeah, sure, if you need me to, 😐" trying to sound all casual, when on the inside you are screaming,  "YES!!! 😁" and hoping he does not see that you are way too excited to be a part of his plan. 

The evening started out with us moms, being me and Sarah, dropping the kids off for dinner,

while we enjoyed dinner on our own.

They did their own fun things and we met up with them to walk to the hotel around 11:30.

I was in the boy room, thinking about getting ready for bed. At midnight a couple of the girls knocked on my door and informed me Zeke had had an accident and cut his eye. He was using the manual pump to air up an air mattress and it broke, flying through the air and landing right above his eye.

Being midnight, we had to find an ER that was open. We had to drive about 30 minutes to get there. You have to ring a bell for them to come to the door. The dude would't let us in, but asked why we were there. When he saw that we were there for a laceration on the eye, he gave us a big, fat, "NOPE." He said we had to go to a plastic surgeon in the morning. For real?

Mind you, we are still standing outside the ER. He told us to wait, and a nurse came out with wet gauze to clean the boo-boo and a bandaid. I asked to use the restroom, and she let me in. Otherwise, we did not see the inside of that emergency room.

I called our insurance to have them give me the address for a plastic surgeon for the morning. They weren't even sure they could find one because it was a holiday. I was like, "I know it's a holiday, but don't people have accidents on holidays?" They said the ER would be open, but they weren't sure if there would be a plastic surgeon there or not. The Korean people take very good care of their skin, and a general surgeon was not going to touch a delicate place like the eye because it would leave a scar. There are not doctor's offices here like in America; general practitioner stuff is done in the hospital.

Finally, insurance found a hospital that had a plastic surgeon working, but they informed me it could take a very long time to be worked into his schedule. We went anyway, hoping for the best. It only took about an hour or so, which wasn't bad.

First we sat in the outside admitting room.

Then we got called back. It was just another room full of nurses desks.

The nurse came out with a little trolley full of cleaning supplies and cleaned his wound right there, with everyone else who was hurt and waiting for stitches sitting all around us. There was a dude with a cut on his leg and a little boy with a gash on his head who also got their wounds cleaned with me sitting right beside them.

Ironically, when he got the actual stitches, he went into a nearby room and I was not allowed in there with him. It's OK to clean cuts with lots of people around, but parents are not allowed in the room for the actual stitching part--that's private.

The kids' plan was to attend Lotte World Amusement Park. We dropped off our car riders on the way to the hospital; Zekers joined them once we were done with the stitches.

An interesting side note: Korean parking lots got it going on. There are little red and green lights above spaces in parking garages so you can see from afar if there is an open space on that row. Genius. Sometimes restroom stalls at rest stops have the same lighting system so you can tell if the stall is empty or  not.

After just one week Zeke got his 6 stitches removed.

Three weeks later and it looks amazing. The scar right below it from when he was a toddler looks worse. I guess the plastic surgeon was worth the wait.

[June 1]