The surprises just keep coming.

A couple weeks ago, I woke up, rolled over, and looked at the clock. It was a little after 2pm on a Monday. I turned off the heated blanket, straightened up the covers on the bed, stepped into my slippers and stood.

"Ahh! Oh, hello Shelby." One of the 5th graders jumped when my head popped up over the chest-high wall. Even after more than a semester, when I catch them off guard, some students still get startled by the whole "white person" thing I've got going on with my face.

"Calling in sick" isn't really a thing that happens in Korea. From what I've heard, you need to be the equivalent of chained to a hospital bed to cash in a sick day. Once you make it to work however, sleeping through the day is completely acceptable, if the illness warrants it. Last week, I wasn't that bad, but bad enough to find myself escorted to one of several beds in the nurse's office with the strict order not to get up for at least an hour. Yeah, that's right. There are actual beds to sleep in if you need to take a nap.

It all started the weekend before with some bad kimchi fries. They were good on the way down, but Sunday morning, on the way back up, they were nothing short of miserable. After spending the day doing what felt like dying, by Monday morning I was able to rejoin the human race.

I made it through the day pretty normally, but by lunch time, food still didn't sound at all appealing. Even after only scooping the tiniest bit of each thing onto my plate, I still left most of it untouched. They noticed. I'm the outsider so nothing I do goes unnoticed. HyeSeon, one of the Korean English teachers I have classes with, knew I didn't feel well.

"Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, Shelby blah blah," she said to the entire table. I don't speak Korean, but often times it's not hard to guess the general subject matter being discussed. Whatever she said, I'm sure it was at least minimally embellished. I'm sick, that's why I'm not eating. They got the idea.

I looked over at the vice principal. She was holding out her palm and pressing her opposite index finger repeatedly where the hand meets the wrist and smiling a huge, gigantic, not-common-for-Koreans smile. I'm talking the open-teeth kind. Without asking, she was asking if I needed another visit to the principal's office, which reminded me of the only other time in Korea I've had a mysterious illness...

It was last October when I ate a bad chicken sandwich. I don't actually know that the chicken sandwich caused it, but I've stuck to that story for so long, I now accept it as fact.

I hadn't eaten much for a couple of days at lunch and, of course, everyone noticed.  HyeSeon does a pretty solid job at translating things and keeping me in the loop. However, while translations are usually correct, they are not always complete. I was pretty confused when post-lunch plans to get some pills from the nurse landed me in the principal's office with HyeSeon.

So I sat on a comfortable couch near his desk and waited. They talked back and forth and I tried to follow along by watching their motions as they discussed my symptoms. He pulled out a book from his desk and flipped through the pages. She joined me in the seating area.

Eventually the principal came walking over and unrolled his fist. A row needles lined his palm.

Nope.

He is very interested in Chinese medicine.

Nope.

He reached down, grabbed my arm and started feeling around on my wrist.

"NOPE."

I attempted to jump over the back of the couch, but was held down by a hand firmly on my shoulder. Needles don't bother me at all. Having them stuck into me by basically a stranger who I don't share a common language with was a little more bothersome. But really, I just hate having my wrists touched and the idea of something poking into one of them makes me squirm.

The first needle went in and I survived it. Then the second in my hand. Then the third near my elbow. It didn't hurt. Everything happening was just so weird. It was hard to even grasp the situation. Then he reached for my leg.

Nop...you know, whatever.

After sticking the last of the needles from knee to my ankle, I waited. But I didn't wait long. He was back with a stack of chalky ceramic plates with a wire mesh in the middle. After putting them in my non-needled hand, he sat a clump of some mysterious dirt on top. Okay?

Before I knew it, in what felt like the blink of an eye, he was holding a lit match. In another blink of an eye, that lit match was being used to light the clump of dirt in my hand on fire. Half my body had needles in it, the other half was holding fire. He looked at the clock. 

"*Korean words*," he said. Blank stare from me.

"Thirty minutes!" said HyeSeon. 

At the end of the 30 minutes, only one thin piece of mesh stood between my palm and the fire. The needles were removed and the fire was put out. I went back to my desk and returned to regularly scheduled business for the rest of the day, like nothing out-of-the-ordinary had happened.

The million-dollar question: did it work?

Honestly... I don't know. By the time the school day ended I felt pretty good, and the next day, completely back to normal. But I wasn't really that sick to begin with, so it could have coincidentally worn off naturally.

Being sick in the USA meant everyone telling me to stay at home and away from them until I'm not sick anymore. It was a lot of just being left alone to recover. Being sick in Korea means, just like everything else here, the surprises just keep coming.