Growing Up Korean: Hospital Visit

GrowingUpKorean – The Hospital Visit

It was the summer after 4th grade and I was walking around the neighborhood with some of my friends. I was walking backwards (I know, I know), play fighting with one of my friends. I slapped him in the face and turned around to start running and BAM! Ironically, I ran into a stop sign. I popped up like nothing happened -you know how you do when you try not to be embarrassed – but my friends were like “Are you okay?” I was like “yea, why” trying to play it cool. My homeboy was like “Yo, your face is covered in blood.” I touched my face, looked at my hand, and made a b line straight to the house.

Now, my momma was outside doing yard work and when she seen me running she knew something was wrong. She was like “Aigoo, what did you do to your face” (Now, Aigoo is basically Korean for “WTF” and Korean is my momma’s first language). I told her I hit my face on a stop sign. I kid you not, my momma said “you dummy”.

So we go into the house and my momma washes my face off with the water hose and I had a gash on my eyebrow. This gash was pretty deep so my momma took me to the ER.

Hold on, here’s the fun part.

So growing up, we were a military family (Like 80% of our city), which means if you went to the hospital, you went the military hospital. Military hospitals were always packed and slow for some reason. We were at the ER for 3 hours… in the waiting room. My cut stopped bleeding but my face was still throbbing. This guy sits beside my mom, looks at me then back at my mom and says “You know, they have a sign that says serious head injuries are a priority and seen first.” This is the moment I thought I was going to die.

My momma didn’t see the sign but didn’t need too. I honestly feel she was like “SAY NO MORE”.

She stood up, hid my body from view, and squoze (is that a word?) the hell out of my forehead.

BRUH!

So now guess what happened… there is blood gushing out my eyebrow. I’m screaming and crying, my mother runs over to the nurse fake panicking (you know, lying), speaking in Korean (remember, first language), the nurse has no idea what’s going on, the nurse finally sees me and they take me back to the surgery room to get 8 stitches and I was done..

As we were leaving, although I not 100% sure, but I swear I seen my mom give that guy a thumbs up…

Have a great day ya’ll

GB