Tina Tuna

Monday morning, I feverishly finished my dishes before work, to have my apartment ready when I returned home that night. I was expecting an evening visitor--Tina, a girlfriend who worked at a hagwon in Dongtan near mine and whom I had met on Bus 27. Each time we saw each other on our ride to work, we would sit together and chat just like old friends. She was supposed to come over to enjoy homemade curry, meet Frankie, and help weed my wardrobe of its drab, droopy articles. "I won't be able to make the fashion show tomorrow," her email read that afternoon. "I went completely unconscious [...] at a park [this weekend] and fell face first onto the brick ground."

She had fallen like this before--randomly losing consciousness and diving headlong into whatever lay in front of her, be it stairs or, as in this case, concrete. Towards the beginning of July as we rode together one day, I noticed a square gauze-like bandage cushioning her chin and asked her about the new accessory. Over the weekend, she explained, she had blacked out and fallen up the stairs at a local park. Her two stitches from the injury came out in a week, replaced by a prominent red line along the right side of her jaw bone. The result of the latest fall, however, left her medical care much more extensive and tripled her recovery time.

"I'll be out for three weeks," she wrote. "I exposed my jaw bone and had to get two sets of stitches under my chin. I also fractured my [...] jaw [...] in two areas. It was fractured enough to the point where it created a large gap between my two bottom teeth. I have a wire keeping my jaw together right now. The second fracture shifted my bite and I can't chew or close my mouth properly. The combination of both fractures caused me to completely shatter eight of my molars on my right side... I'll be in the hospital for one week." She told me what facility she was in, the Ajou University Hospital in Suwon, and I determined that before she was released I would go see her. I looked up the bus number to catch from the station and after work Wednesday night, I set off.

"I [am un]able to eat," another of Tina's messages said. "I'm wired for the next week and a half[.]" By the sound of that description, I was picturing a metal, cage-like structure surrounding her oral cavity and clamping her mouth shut like a vice-grip. I knew she could still write but was uncertain about her ability to speak if she couldn't open her mouth. I half-imagined her laying in the hospital room like a patient with recently-diagnosed hearing loss: having continuous thoughts but without a way to express them. I took a pad of paper and two sharp pencils to the hospital for old-school communication, in the event she wouldn't be able to talk. It surprised me, then, to hear her voice when she wheeled her IV drip over to the seat where I waited for her. She looked like she was smiling curtly as we chatted. She could still speak, she assured me: "All you need are your lips and tongue." I tried it her way for several sentences and found it surprisingly easy to form intelligible words. What isn't so easy to control, however, is the urge to move one's bottom set of teeth.

Not only could she speak, but there were no visible signs of clamps. Instead, what sealed her teeth together were strong rubber bands attached to screws inside her mouth, what had taken the place of the metal wiring they had originally installed. The "wire keeping [her] jaw together" that she had mentioned was a petite thread of metal demurely fastened around her two bottom middle teeth like a surgical bread-tie. Other than these foreign objects in her mouth and another bandage covering her chin, she looked herself. "You look really good," I told her, then relayed my mental picture of old-school dental care. "I wouldn't have wanted anyone to see me that way," she laughed.

That conversation began a series of laughing matters for us that night. Only minutes after I first saw her, Tina was summoned to another hospital outing, having just returned from one such errand. This time it was to take an hour-long stress test which supposedly would induce her to faint. A nurse came, gurney in tow, to take her downstairs for the procedure. It took all three of us working together to untangle the tubes from her IVs and place her onto the rolling bed. As I walked beside and tried to help steer, the lone nurse commanded me to push and I found myself at the back of Tina's head while maneuvering her down the aisle. The entire ordeal was absurdly comical--me with my travel bag slung over my shoulder, pushing an otherwise able-bodied woman through corridors while the tiny Korean nurse guided the gurney with one arm and pulled a rolling defibrillator along with the other. Tina wondered aloud during her taxi-ride why such transport was necessary when she could have quite easily just walked.

The excursion to the testing room both looked and felt like we had just stepped from modernity into the post-war era of the 1950s. Tina's hospital room, the start of our trip, could have been a tiny hospital ward from a Korean War triage unit, crowded as it was with five other patients. Dimly lit hallways leading to our destination evoked a sense of the developing technology from the time period. Tina commented that even the nurses' uniforms reflected the standards of that era. As we wheeled into the examination room, the only reminders of the current century were the "push" buttons for the electric door and the large flat-screen color television mounted to the wall.

Other parts of Ajou (pronounced Ah-joo) University Hospital look quite impressive. It appears crisp and modern to visitors, with a broad entrance and artwork in the foyer. Ground-level walls and flooring are made of an impressive, shiny, granite-like material. There are several statuettes lining the hallway. A large painting resides on the wall just opposite the nurses' station. As you enter the wide glass doors from the front of the building, you notice to your right a display of what appears to be ancient farming equipment. The lobby looked more like the reception area for a museum than a hospital. It's a much cleaner facility than the public hospital I visited in Chungju last October.

Perhaps the thought that the hospital evoked a sense of being in the 1950's is partly due to the book I'm reading--The Motorcycle Diaries by a young Ernesto "Che" Guevara. It is a reach back into the post-World War era, written in 1952 and 53 in South America while on the road with a traveling companion. In the book, Guevara and company seek out hospital beds to sleep in for the night instead of trying to find hotels. Broke most of the journey, they were also medical students and felt that the staff would have compassion on fellow colleagues with such a bleak financial state.

The testing facility that we arrived at, little more than a back room of the hospital, evoked the feeling of such bygone days the most. On the ceiling along the left wall as we came in were screwed a series of protrusions that resembled fixture-less chandeliers: two-foot-long metal rods with hoops and curly-q's at the end of them, presumably for holding instruments. Just underneath that and mounted to the wall were black dial-like structures whose function seemed long-outdated. They were both so high I thought attending orderlies and nurses wouldn't have been able to reach them. Also affixed to the ceiling were crooked curtain rods with cream-colored curtains hanging from them, pulled back and bunched to one side. Upon contemplating the scene, the room appears to have been some sort of sickbay from the early days of the hospital.

The centerpiece of the room looked like a relic from mid-century: a large brown-vinyl examination table devoid of crinkly white sanitary paper, with a wood-like plank attached at a 90-degree angle on one side. Instead of legs or wheels, what supported the mammoth structure was a clamp-like mechanism used for lifting the surface upright. It resembled an operating table from that era, as big, bulky, and heavy as it was. It could almost have been a hand-me-down from a long-emptied asylum: Dangling from it in two places were thick black straps for securing patients to the horizontal surface.

I watched as the nurse strapped Tina first below her knees and then over her ribs just above her stomach. I half-expected him to retrieve a straight-jacket from around the corner for my friend to don. For the test, the hospital technicians set the table to its upright position, bringing Tina vertical and causing her feet to "stand" on the wooden plank. The straps kept her from tipping over and held her fast like an orderly's strong arms. With the limited knowledge about the test that floated around my brain, I thought they would repeatedly raise and lower the table while monitoring her body's reaction to the movement. But the table stayed upright for the duration of the forty-minute procedure.

To pass the time, Tina and I chit-chatted in English while the attending techs talked away in Korean. As is my habit with such perplexing medical problems, I wondered aloud what could be causing Tina's fainting "condition." Rummaging through what I knew of the human body and general nutrition, I offered a few suggestions as to why these black-out spells could be occurring. We talked about a possible upset in hormone chemistry, a low supply of hemoglobin, and a lack of nutritious food. "My diet isn't very good here," she admitted. "I eat a lot of rice and Spam. And tuna."

My eyes twinkled as I looked at her. "You could be Tina Tuna!"

Tina continued to feel nothing strange throughout the ordeal. She was so relaxed that I pulled out my Scrabble game--the "deluxe travel edition" my grandmother had given me when I was little that had tiny letter tiles and a raised plastic grid for holding them in place. As it was a little unorthodox to allow such a distraction, the technician asked, a bit annoyed, "What is this?" I explained it briefly and we kept playing, Tina filling her plastic tray with letters while I held out the bag and modestly looked away. Her first word, "timber," was all-too-appropriate for a woman who was strapped to a table and leaning strangely forward. Our scores stayed neck-and-neck and by the end of the game--consequently also the end of the procedure--I had only won by three points.

We finished the night with some rice porridge and a couple of rounds of Quiddler "on the roof"--or rather, in the lunch room--spelling words like "eve" and "ray" amid sips of rice porridge through a Capri-Sun-sized straw. After only two attempts to eat, Tina decided to give up on the night's dinner. Her straw did nothing to suck up the thick broth and was too tiny to successfully bring even one kernel to her mouth. The staff had advised her not to even try to open her mouth, so spooning anything into it was unthinkable. It was during the third hand of the game that Tina started feeling nervous and anxious. Her heart rate was pounding beats faster than mine and she was beginning to shake. "Maybe it's because I haven't eaten," she reasoned.

"Well, they did just give you medicine," I suggested gently.

She looked at me, then down at her quivering hands again. "Maybe I should go tell them."

I helped wheel her down the corridor to the busy nurses' station and tried to get their attention in Korean. "Shilehamnida," I offered meekly. Excuse me. Tina then took over with her own English description of the matter. Whether they could understand her words or not, they definitely knew something wasn't right. While observing a slight red rash that was along her collarbone and which extended to her sternum, the nurse commanded: "Go to bed!"

Moments later, she was shuffled to her room and I was left to clean up what was left of dinner. I was sad that I'd have to leave her like this, but knew if I stayed any longer I would have surely out-stayed my welcome. By that point, I wanted to be as least in the way and as little-noticed as possible. "Goodnight, Tina," I called softly as I backed away from the scene and toward the exit. As I left the hospital that night, I knew she would be well-taken care of and watched over for as long as she stayed.