Road to Recovery

It's been a while since my accident, exactly nine weeks today to be precise, and it's seems like it's been FOREVER and even with trips to Thailand and China in the meantime.

Last week I made my last daily trip to the hospital for physiotherapy which I'd been having every day after school for four weeks. From the beginning to the very end, all the hospital staff looked after me so well and were so kind and helpful despite the language barrier which was a huge initial worry for me. But I needn't have worried. I got treated better than I could have ever imagined at Hongik hospital and especially so by my orthopedic doctor, the receptionist and my lovely physiotherapist/ friend. Their care was outstanding and I'm going to miss them a lot.

To thank them for all their help and care throughout my recovery I gave each of them a card that I wrote completely in Korean. Before you get excited, I'm still at a level where I can write only single words and phrases, no where near being able to express my gratitude to them. So I wrote down in English exactly what I wanted to say and my friend Yuseon from school translated it for me. I then copied (what turned out to be a huge paragraph) into the card. And even just copying took me forever. But I really wanted to make a bigger effort than simply writing in English because each of them had had to work so much harder to speak in English every time for my benefit. So it was my turn to work a bit harder for them. I really wanted them to understand that I was more thankful than I could express in words for them being able to help me in English because I understand what they had to go through to be able to communicate with me at that level (the endless English lessons until ridiculous hours that they had to endure and generally having a miserable life throughout their education as most Korean students do!) If they've never seen any other benefit for all those hours of misery then it was of more than benefit to me during one of my most difficult times in Korea when I didn't have to people I needed to get me through it. So I'll be forever grateful to those people at that hospital for being the people that did help me through it.

My wonderful physiotherapist and friend 아람 (Aram) during our little 'food, drink and photo' party on my last visit. She was really touched by the card and she said to me, "I don't have enough English to tell you how happy I am about this card!" Sooo cute. 

This week I have taken the cast off which also means no more stupid big blue shoe thing and instead a matching pair of shoes (yaaaaaaay!!!) I'm also beginning to walk to school in the mornings again instead of having to take a taxi (but this means getting up at the earlier time once again though- not so yay!) Despite the occasional pain, everything is beginning to get back to normal! And according to the doctor, within the next few weeks I should have made a full recovery! Yay!