A Child More Familiar with Hospitals than School

Some places live only in the soft focus of memory: the apartment courtyards where we learned to ride our bikes, the scrubby hill behind the buildings where we chased bugs with nets, the stationery shop by the school gate where New Year cash bought plastic model kits. They belong to a time you can’t return to—especially if, like me, you now live far from where you started. You can only look from a distance, the way you look at a dream after waking.

For years I kept telling myself I’d go back and see those places. But life is good at crowding out “someday.” Then one weekend I ran out of excuses. I drove to a kiosk at the district office and printed a copy of my resident registry—a document in Korea that lists your past addresses. There they were: the neighborhoods of my childhood, now reduced to tidy lines of adult paperwork.

I spent the afternoon driving slow loops past my old haunts. Time had shuffled everything. The parking lots I’d once flown through on a kid’s bike now felt too tight to swing a steering wheel. The walk to school—bookbag on my back, shoe bag in my hand—was absurdly short. The stationery shop behind the school still stood, but there was nothing inside I could possibly need. Near sunset I parked in front of the apartment where we’d lived when I was three or four. In an old peel-and-stick photo album at my parents’ house there’s a picture of those exact front steps. I got out and stared up the stairwell, and for a second I saw a small boy climbing them. Could he have imagined that decades later he’d drive himself back here to look for traces?

One thread connects that boy to me now: my name, which my father gave me himself—Shin Seung Keon. Seung (承) means “to carry on,” and Keon (健) means “healthy” or “strong.” Put together: to carry on in health. The name carried my parents’ wish that I might not need status or wealth—only a life sturdy enough to be lived well.

The thing about a wish is that it always casts a shadow. Hope and worry are two views of the same half-full glass. If one part of you believes the worry will be resolved, another part knows the hope could still be disappointed.

From as early as I can remember, my mother led me by the hand to a university hospital near Daehangno in Seoul. I didn’t know dates or departments; the adults knew. I only knew this: somewhere in that big building a good seonsaengnim—the honorific Koreans use for both teachers and doctors—would help me hurt less. Like a duckling that imprints on the first figure it sees, the first “teacher” I knew wore a white coat, not chalk dust.

My first heart surgery came when I was three—repairing a congenital narrowing of the aorta. The scar is still there, a small crescent on my left flank. I was too young to understand any of it. If we went to the hospital, we went. At night my mother would tip a milky packet of powdered medicine into my mouth with water. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was mine to swallow. (Luckily, it wasn’t bitter; taking something every day is hard enough without the taste fighting you.)

I first felt the real weight of my circumstances in fourth grade, near my tenth birthday, when I was admitted for a second operation. They put me under general anesthesia and opened my chest. Opening the chest sounds poetic. The reality is practical: sawing through the sternum, prying the ribs apart, exposing the heart, correcting what’s wrong. The operation took about seven hours. Only later did I learn what they’d actually done—widened a narrowed valve. Six years after that, in the winter of my first year of high school, we opened the chest again, this time to replace the valve with a mechanical one. Since then, I’ve been able to carry my share of life.

People often tell me how hard that must have been—three major surgeries before adulthood. It was hard. But not in the way most imagine. Operations end. You grit through the pain, and the calendar turns. What weighed more, for longer, were other things.

I had always believed school was the one place you never missed. I didn’t hunger for top grades, but I coveted a perfect-attendance certificate. Then surgery kept me out nearly a month. In a class of fifty, I was the only kid gone that long. For the first time I understood: I was walking a path different from the others.

The scar changed things too. After the second surgery, when I woke in intensive care, a thick stack of gauze ran down the center of my chest. During dressing changes, I saw the truths beneath: a hand-span of stitches, black thread poking up like little thorns. When it healed, it looked like a soft pink earthworm, from the notch at my throat to the pit of my stomach. From that day, it became the secret I most wanted to hide.

After the third operation the “earthworm” grew thicker—we’d reopened the same line. It shocked me less the second time, but my wish to hide it didn’t change. No matter how hot the summer, I avoided loose necklines. Under every dress shirt I wore a plain white undershirt. Pools were enemy territory. On the rare days I had to go, I stood a long time before stepping out, breathing slow, steadying myself.

Please don’t misunderstand why I tell this. I’m not asking for pity. I’m not trying to collect special allowances from strangers. If anything, I owe more than I’m owed; I’m in a position to offer consideration, not claim it. I bring up a hard past for a larger reason: what is past for me is present for someone else. I want us to notice them—and try to understand.

When we picture “the sick,” we think of pain and the grind of treatment. That compassion matters. But if you can, take one step further. Even at the edge of life, people fear not only suffering—they fear being treated as fundamentally other. Patients are people who want to belong in the world like everyone else. That’s what I learned, the only way one really learns it: by living it.