It’s official, we made the news. Although we had been told that a girl was showing symptoms but what kind of flu it was hadn’t been confirmed, the news report says different. But this is South Korea where information flow is particularly bad. Someone else just saw it on national TV news that we will be kept in the hotel until the 30th, of course we have no way of knowing if that is true or not.
I need to point out that I have several friends who are living here, and have been living here for years, and have had great experiences. We just happened to draw an unlucky straw with a particularly intense school situation and unexpected medical crisis. Hopefully soon we will get to enjoy living here, it is a pretty fascinating place, which after I’m released from hotel lockdown, I may be able to share with you. 😉
Just to alieve everyone’s stress, as well as ours, here is another medical update from our saga.
A friend of mine e-mailed me from Nashville saying that she has some spots show up on an x-ray. The first thing the doc asked her was if she had ever lived in the Ohio River Valley, which is where J. was born, raised, went to college, and hiked around many caves and mountains in. Apparently there is a fungus that is really common there that is harmless, but does show up as spots on the lungs in x-rays and such.
Here is a brief quote I pulled off the web:
The bases of the lungs are the bottom parts of the lungs. Incidental nodules are very common when CTs are done. Usually, these represent old scars from an asymptomatic infection with Histoplasmosis, a fungus that lives in the soil in the Ohio River Valley. Rarely, they can represent other things, including early lung cancer. Further evaluation of these nodules is based on recommendations that consider each person’s risk of cancer, including the size of the nodule, smoking history, etc. You should discuss this with your doctor.
So it is probably no big deal.
The good thing is that since I’m not allowed to leave, I sent Jim out for coffee and food. he he.
I’m going to do some reading, and avoid going to the sick room until they come and find me.
Update: They (the Korean government, not our school) has now quarantined all of the teachers that were in the training. They have posted guards and we are not allowed to leave the fourth floor of the hotel. They aren’t letting anyone in to see us either. Hence our problem – no one has any food! Luckily J. was able to sneak out and do a Burger King run since it was fast and comes “to go.” No one is going crazy yet, but we’re planning to combine our stocks of snacks and alcohol and have a swine flu party.
Update: There are news crews here and we have been told not to tell them anything, or to mention {our school}. I guess they don’t want parents pulling all their kids out of those schools if it gets around. No one here is even really sick. It’s all just an overreaction to one girl who has flu-like symptoms which could just be a normal flu, or a really bad cold!
So since we’ve been in South Korea, it has been a hellish week of the most intense teacher training I have ever heard of a group of foriegn students having. I won’t go into it now but if {our school} is really hell bent on pushing their curriculum, they need to have a longer training where there is more time to study (and in this case, not get the entire group of teachers really sick from exhaustion.) They have a lesson plan and curriculum they’ve developed that the teachers are required to teach down to the minute. We have a lesson plan that literaly is divided into mintue by minute instructions and if we miss any or deviate, we can be penalized in pay or hours. It’s pretty ridiculous, never mind that their mission is to “encourage creative thinking in the students”, and they really are effectivley doing the opposite.
So we had to get medical exams when we came to the country before we can get Alien Registration Cards. Jim’s chest x-ray showed some spots (light not dark) on his lungs, and they are holding him for testing over the weekend before he can teach to rule out pnemonia, TB, cancer….. Who jumps from pnemonia to cancer? So that was a huge amount of added stress.
Now it’s 4am and they went around to all our doors and woke us up. Apparenlty someone from the training session may have tested positive for H1N1. Now we all have to get up and be tested and fill out a bunch of paperwork. I’m sick. Half the session got sick, and although someone may have brought in a virus, I really don’t think any of us would have gotten nearly as sick as we have if [our hagwan] hadn’t pushed us through jet lag, new air quality, with a crazy training schedule that exhausted and depleted all of us.
So two people were diagnosed with walking pnemonia, two people had to go back for catscans and chest exrays because of spots, and now we all of the swine flu. I’m starting to think this country is a bunch of overreacting, paranoid, hypochondriacs.
But, if they swine flu does show up in South Korea, you’ll know where it came from.
6am Update: Some government officials just came to the hotel and put us all under quarantine. We’re now not allowed to leave the hotel, and have to all stay in seperate rooms to keep from spreading stuff to each other. So that’s that. I’m going back to bed.
Ruby Ramblings 