Since I got quite a few message from several people let me post here. This forum allows 2 messages to be sent ever hour so its hard to respond to everyone in a timely manner.
I will try to keep this post to my experiences rather than my opinion but if I catch myself giving an opinion I will try to say so.
Doctor:
I guess not much to say here, hes a capable doctor for sure, no disagreement here.
Oh yea.. I just remembered haha, he doesn't like people asking too many questions.
I got yelled at by Dr Lee when I was questioning my x rays too much.
To give you some background, my work is mainly in equity analysis. So understanding strategy, looking deep at 10k's, building financial models, stuff like that. So for me depth of knowledge is as important (or more important) than breadth of knowledge. So I always try to understand something deeply.
He basically said "something something... trust him hes the doctor" which is true, but in my opinion its my legs and I am the type of person that likes to understand so it wouldn't hurt to help me do so.
Also not sure what happened in the last surgery when I moved from external to IM nail to the left leg. But he made some adjustments that made my gap wider than what we agreed on. I was aiming for 5cm max, then I went up to 5.2cm right before the surgery, measured the x ray and everything and it was finalized. But for some reason after the surgery I ended up at 5.7-5.8 (close to 6cm) because my original height was 159.5 my height now is 165.xx.. It was more than I wanted and I had to lengthen my right leg around .6cm to match.
Staff:
For me the nurses was hit or or miss. This will not apply to everyone since I had to do IV for the entire 3-4 weeks I was there with new injections every couple days because the hole will close.
But personally my arms sustained some damage from it. I don't know if they were actually injecting the needle into my vein correctly. But there was 1 point when I couldn't close my left fist due to the pain in my forearm.
But you won't need to go through that.. unless you have an infection.
Some nurses were really nice, others were ok, there was 1 that was a bit growly lol (grrr grrr grrrr), its hit or miss.
The sales staff is very big on marketing and sales, so expect them to try to get the patient to leave a review or do an interview.
There was 1 person who I really liked, the x ray technician, she was this sweet lady who was just super duper nice.
The cleaning staff and other helpers were nice as well.
I mean in my opinion, overall korean people are nice people, don't get drunk and try to fight them.. they will taekwondo your butt but at least in my experience they are really nice. (if you're a different race or culture, I can't speak for anyone elses experience, just my own).
Patients:
When I was there it was mainly Korean people with some Chinese people. Including the staff and patients, the amount of people that could speak english was countable on 1 hand.
I will cover language in a separate section.
But overall I found the patients there to be very nice even though I couldn't communicate much.
But I am an Asian American.. and I lived with a lot of koreans back in LA.. so I do understand the culture already and in my opinion I think it does help that I'm not only American but my parents are from Taiwan. Usually Koreans and Japanese people get along with Taiwanese better than some other countries. And plus I've worked across Asia for 10+ years now.
So my experience won't be the same as others.
One of the Chinese kids who was there was crying for the first few weeks, I think he was home sick and he couldn't communicate much with others and plus hes immobile so it makes the situation even more stressful. But I think he eventually found some people to play video games with.
Food:
It's not great.. I mean if the locals are saying it sucks.. I'm not going to pretend it doesnt.
Language:
I would say 99% of everything is in Korean, again when I was there, I could count how many english speakers there were on 1 hand.
For me it got really lonely at times. So luckily I was there only 3-4 weeks the first time and only 1 week ish the next. So just netflixed a lot and texted the gf a lot.
But for me I think it would have been more comfortable to do the surgery in America where I know people and can speak the language. Being immobile, not being able to speak the language, loneliness.. I can see why that Chinese kid was crying.
Facility:
They have different room types depending on your budget. Of course I already spent too much money so I was always trying to get the 4 bedroom rooms.
The room is set up so there is 1 person in each corner and 1 bathroom to share.
You have a bed some space to put your stuff and a curtain.
Don't mistake the curtain as a sound proof barrier.. we all heard the chinese kid crying because he thought that closing the curtain would make him private. There's no privacy in the 4 person bedroom.. just be aware of this.
Also the doors slide to open and close, so if you wake up at the middle of the night and want to use the bathroom or go outside, you have 2 choices, either open the door as normal and wake everyone up, or open the door centimeter by centimeter to try to make as less noise as possible.
They have wifi and a tv outside, but its a hospital not a hotel so yea.. dont expect it to be a hotel.
Most people will get a helper for the first couple days, mine was snoring like crazy lol. I had to send them away after the first 2 days because the helper sleeps in your room. So technically.. in that tiny room you can have up to 8 people living there.
Some of the people here got apartments outside for cheaper. So they stayed at the facility for 1 month, then moved out with the helper to the apartments outside and just came back daily for PT.
That probably makes more sense.. honestly in my opinion I hated living in the facility. It was not comfortable, you have no privacy, and it's not the best for getting a good nights sleep to heal your broken body.
Dr Lees hospital will market the facility as 24hours nurse availability. Yea its true, but in my opinion honestly after the first few weeks, you already had your stitch out, you're doing PT and lengthening.. you don't really need the nurse anymore.
In my opinion I think the only reason people are staying at the facility now is because Dr Lee doesnt have Stryde so everyone is rolling around in wheelchairs. Once you have Stryde and you can use crutches.. you don't need to be paying an arm and a leg to be staying in the facility and eating their food and listening to people snore.. you can actually fly home and lengthen in the comfort of your home doing the stretches there..
But if you leave DO NOTE YOU NEED TO PAY MORE TO TAKE THE ERC. I think its around 2,500 USD payment (I think, or was it 5,000.. I don't remember sorry).
Business / Marketing:
They do ask patients to give them content for their youtube channel or to leave reviews for them.
In my opinion, if they think you will leave a review, spend more money, do more procedures, they will treat you accordingly.
And it is has been disclosed in this forum before so I'm not leaking any new information but Dr Lee does price foreigners higher.
From what I understand there is a price sheet for Japanese people, Chinese people, English speaking people, and for Korean locals. You can find it on this forum if you search.
But just 1 example for you: looking at the surgery only option between english speakers and koreans, the price can be approx 20,000,000 KRW different. Which is around 20K USD (approx).
So just be aware that they are marketing heavily on youtube and all that because foreigners are higher margin. Foreigners bring in the big bucks for the same surgery so of course their marketing is targeted in that direction.
It kind of sucks because in my opinion I'm not working in America making those big American dollars. And I'm sure people in lets say India will most likely not be making as much as Koreans. But for any English speakers you have to pay that premium regardless of where you're from or where you're working. Only local Koreans get the local price.
After care:
They answered my messages quite haphazardly. Sometimes it comes instantly, sometimes it can take up to 1 month before I got an answer.
In my latest x ray I was off by approximately 1.5mm (measured by Dr Lee) and I was told by Dr Lee to leave it, we can fix the total length (tibia and femur) when we do my femurs. But then I told them I just spent around 150-160K USD on my tibia (because of all the complications) and I would like to get my tibias correct because I am not even sure I have enough money to do femurs.
So I went ahead and lengthened my right leg anyways (I have the erc in my home) by around 1.5mm to match my left leg and when I took new x rays and asked them to help measure it, they got angry and said I disrespected the doctor by not following his instructions. I mean, its not like I ran around carrying 20kg weights on my back. Or I was in a stunt movie jumping building to building.. all I did was try to make my legs more even and they got angry and told me NO! I should fix it when I lengthen my femurs.. in my opinion, that's just.. not.. good.. that just means I need to spend more money, money that I dont have right now.
Which bewildered me because pre-surgey my legs were perfectly equal in length (dr lee did the measurement himself and he was like wow, you have exactly equal legs, he said its rare because usually there are some discrepancies).
After I told them I'm not even sure if I will do femurs the messages stopped. So yea.. no money no honey lol.
Did I forget anything? Any other questions? Anyways, this was just my experience. Don't take it as a be all end all.
I always promote people to do as much research as you can from as many sources as you can.
If any youtube videos are making you wide eye'd and making you want to buy a product, do your research before you put down the money.
It's like buying a car. Are you only going to listen to the salesman selling you the car? No right.. you are going to do your own research to find the car thats best for you, from reading magazines, from looking up information in forums, from meeting with other experts, from going through multiple channels.. correct?
A car can cost how much.. 20k USD.. 30K USD.. 100K USD? So if you are willing to do all this research when buying a car, you best do that research and more when you need to pay between 75K-100K USD for surgery.
Anyways, questions? Let me know. Feel free to PM me. But I can only send 2 messages per hour so sorry if I'm slow in replying.
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Topic: My surgery experience in South Korea with Dr.Lee (Read 4939 times)