Severe Throat Infection

"I have one?" I ask the doctor in the clinic.
"Yes."
I look over at his computer screen: the program is in English, and he's typed in all of the symptoms I told him. A list of conditions follows the symptoms, including Severe Throat Infection. Remember that Simpsons episode with the virtual doctor program?: "You've got Herpes."

I'm lucky the doctor knows English. The aides at the front desk did not. They ran and got him after he finished treating a woman for an ear infection. The clinic is set up so you can see into the examination room right when you enter. There is no door to the examination room - it's wide open. The patients in waiting could hear me gag when the doctor swabbed my throat.

He also sprayed a menthol-smelling mist into my throat, then air, then menthol, then air - he went back and forth about five times. Then he pulled out a different little metal tube and some tweezers. He pulled on my right nostril and put the little tube in, releasing a spray that made my eyes water. He went to the left nostril, then back to the right, then left again. I smiled nervously the whole time - it's pretty different from what the doctors do to me back home.

After the chair sequence, an aide showed me to another room with a bunch of tubes. It reminded me of the assisted-suicide room they showed on the news during the Kevorkian debacle. The aide put a tube in my hand and told me to say "aghh." A mist flowed from the tube, and I spent six minutes sitting and breathing in vapor.

I wasn't finished, though. The same aid showed me to the other side of the room, where she had me stick my face in a light gun (it's about as big as a cop's radar gun). At the bottom of the barrel was a red light bulb. It's super hot, but the barrel isn't wide enough for anyone to touch face to the bulb. Three minutes breathing in hot air from the light, maybe there was more herbal stuff coming from the light gun - it had a soothing smell.

That was it, though. I paid eleven bucks (I don't have insurance), took a sheet of paper downstairs to the pharmacy, and paid fourteen bucks for twelve individually wrapped bags of multicolored pills of all shapes and sizes.

Who knew being sick in Korea could be this much fun?!