I always wanted to be a world traveler. I grew up on stories of travel, far away countries, and in a multilingual family of immigrants. It always sounded so fun and exotic. As a kid I never thought about how my grandparents felt leaving the only culture they knew, and all their family, and moving to a foreign country where there accents might get them beaten.
Now that I live in Korea I get to explore a whole new part of the world.
But next week?
I am going back to the US of A, to a state I’ve never been to, for all the worst reasons.
Okay, I lie, I am not going to either seize the islands from their native inhabitants nor bomb the islands, so I’m technically going for the third worst reason: surgery! Yeah. You heard that right. I’m going to Hawaii to sit in a hospital with zero beach views.
Last summer my husband was in an accident that did severe damage to his hip. He’s walking again, but with significant pain and difficulty. After exhausting non-invasive options his medical team finally decided in December that he needs hip surgery. And the best hip surgeon in our insurance network is in Hawaii.
We’re very lucky that insurance covers most of this. I don’t need to run a GoFundMe to get my husband’s hip fixed (the bar is so very low when you have medical insurance from the USA).
We’re very lucky that the surgery has a 90% success rate.
We’re very lucky in a lot of ways.
But luck doesn’t stress, distraction, or the fact that I’ve spent the past several weeks delaying my own medical appointments working out how we’re doing this. I still have four kids (two under 18 and two over 18) who are staying here in our apartment in Korea. I need to arrange things with the schools, my non-writing work, a billion other tiny things that I can’t take care of from another time zone.
If I’m a little bit quiet on social media for the next month, there’s a reason.
And, if you’ve ever been to Hawaii, let me know what I should do when I’m not sitting in the hospital waiting for my spouse to recover. I’m going to need the distraction.