[Letter to the editor] 

“His bone is broken. No, he can’t get up to his feet,” a woman’s voice came to my ears from among the crowd of onlookers gathered around me. As I lay flat with my belly on the ice, my body grew colder, and my coats and pants stuck to the ice. I thought that I should be able to get up in a few minutes. Five minutes, 10 minutes, I had a few tries to lift myself, but I failed each time because my left thighbone was seriously fractured.

On a very cold winter evening years ago, I fell on that notoriously icy road in front of Pungmoon Girls’ High School in Seoul. I fell on my back but turned over on my belly on the icy road in spite of myself. I may have done so to stand up to my feet. After half an hour or so, my wife, who had been informed of the accident by a kind passerby, rushed to the spot with my niece who was staying with us.

Then a nice young man offered to carry me on his back, but I had to decline his kind offer because if I moved a little bit, I felt a severe pain in my thigh. I also had to decline for the same reason the kind offer of the two policemen who drove up in their police car and tried to help me into it. I couldn’t let them touch me because even a slight movement of my bone caused an acute pain. They had to send me to one of the local hospitals in some way or other, but the trouble was that they couldn’t put me in a car.

Then the very woman whose voice I had heard thought of a good idea to call the fire brigade to bring an ambulance with a stretcher. Sure enough, an ambulance came, and two firemen offered me a stretcher. I had them spread it before me so that I might crawl onto it by myself taking care not to shock my left leg because no one but me knew what kinds of movements could minimize the pain. That was how I succeeded in getting in the ambulance.

As soon as I was immediately taken to a hospital, I underwent a difficult orthopedic operation for more than five hours. The pain I had for about 10 days after the operation was too much for words. The pain persisted without pause for 240 hours or so. I was plunged in an illusion that I was being tortured by insurmountable hellfire. Even the drugs and injections could not alleviate the pain.

My bone fracture brought home to me the preciousness of physical freedom. After about three weeks of careful treatment, my doctor put my left leg in a plaster cast from around the waist to the foot except the toes and let me leave hospital. I was carried home by ambulance, and had to lie stiff in bed for over four months.

I could neither think of sitting up nor lying on my belly, and so I suffered a lot of inconvenience in not a few things. When I wrote a letter or a note, I had to hold a piece of paper on the wall of my room and twist my neck so that I could see what I was writing.

When I had meals, I had to have my wife feed me with a spoon and chopsticks because my not being able to sit up made it impossible for me to feed myself without spilling. When I wanted to relieve my bowels, I had to call her to help me onto the mobile toilet bowl and watch me go through the whole process. Over four months after the accident as I have implied above, I again called on my doctor at the hospital to have him get rid of the plaster cast. For several months thereafter, I had to practice walking at home with a pair of crutches before I could walk on my own.

In retrospect, I think that the reason why on that very cold winter evening I fell on the icy road and broke my left leg was that I was pressing my way to work because I had no time to lose. So you need to remember that when you are on an icy road, no matter how urgent a thing to do you may have, you must not run and nor even walk fast.

By Yang Heung-seok

Yang Heung-seok lives in Seoul. ― Ed.