One Man’s Thankfulness, Another Man’s Happiness
By Isaac Kim
It was day four of the trip, two days before we had to leave Kota Kinabalu to fly back to Korea. My once skinny arm was bloated to the size of my thighs, my knuckles nowhere to be seen and my fingers swelling by the hour. I showed one of my teacher my swollen arm, and he says it be best to go to the hospital right away. We go to the hotel’s concierge and arrange for a hotel van to take us to a nearby hospital to get my arm checked out. The woman at the concierge desk says the van will arrive in approximately thirty minutes and to wait at the couches at the lobby.
My teacher goes up to get some stuff for the hospital while I sat at the lobby, surrounded by complete strangers. A few hotel employees then walk up to me and ask me what is wrong. I say nothing but lift my swollen right arm for them to see. They cringe for they have never seen anything like this before. They ask what had happened and I tell them that a bug bit me a few days back and it had just started swelling for unknown reasons. Around twenty minutes pass as I sit on the couch bored having nothing to do but then I finally see my teacher walking towards me.
He asks if I have everything I need and I give him a slight nod. We wait a few more minutes and the woman at the concierge cues for us to follow her. We follow her to the hotel entrance and I see a blue van waiting for us. We hop in thanking the woman from the concierge and say hello to the driver, an elderly man who seems like a Malaysian native. We drive for around ten minutes in silence, not a word spoken out loud.
We finally arrive at the emergency section of the hospital, my teacher and I hop out the van thanking the driver for the ride. He gives us another big smile and drives off into the distance. My teacher and I walk in through the glass sliding doors into a very clean yet empty hospital. The hospital employees rapidly run back to their working stations and ask what is wrong. We show them my swollen arm and they cringe in disgust. A reaction that makes me chuckle. They ask what happened and my teacher tells them the whole story about the bug. They ask us to fill out a couple forms, which my teacher fills out, and they take me into another room to check all my basic information such as blood pressure, height, weight, and etc.
They then bring me and my teacher into the doctor’s room. The doctor, a young female who appears to be a Malaysian native, examines my arm closely. To my surprise, she asks me in a British accent what had happened. My teacher and I explain the whole story once again. She gives us a few nods and tell us this is an allergic reaction as well as an infection. She explains to us that the bug might have carried some bacteria and it probably transferred it into my arm. Then my body had an allergic reaction to the bite which resulted in the immense swelling of my arm. She says she will prescribe some medication but my teacher asks for the quickest recovery for we have to fly again in a couple days. She then gives us a few more nods and tell us that I will then need to receive a few shots as well as taken the prescribed medication.
The shots were very painful. They were injecting multiple types of medicine which I had never heard about. After the injections, my teacher goes to the counter and pays the bills, which were around a hundred dollars USD, and thanks the people who helped us. We call the hotel and ask for another driver to come pick us up. Around ten minutes later, the same driver comes and picks us up. As we hop in the van, we thank him again for coming back for us and he gives us another smile as well as a nod. The ride back to the hotel was once again silent but had a different mood to it. It gave off a mood of happiness and thankfulness that my hand was nothing serious. We arrive at the hotel to be greeted by multiple staff members and questions such as, “Are you okay now?”. I personally felt so grateful that everyone that I had met once was so caring and worried for me. Before going back to the hotel room, I gave my teacher and the staff members a big thank you in hopes of returning the favor and trying to make their day. One small thank you to somebody could mean a lot to somebody else and might make their day. Be thankful.
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