“Jeongsik! Jeongsik! I can't move my hands or feet! They won't move!”
I was lying on a bed in the emergency room of a university hospital in India.
I was hooked up to a heart monitor and oxygen, but I was still short of breath, panting as though I had just finished a marathon.
The feeling began to leave my fingertips and toes.
It spread slowly toward my torso, as if I had been given an anesthetic. I tried to move my fingers, but I couldn't.
I called for Jeongsik, a colleague my own age.
He rubbed my hands and feet. The head of our local office and my fellow expatriate colleagues stood around the bed, looking worried and startled.
My eyelids began to grow heavy. As my consciousness slowly faded, my eyes started to close.
I felt that if I closed them, I might never open them again.
It was a terror unlike anything I had known.
I tried with all my strength to keep my eyes open, but my eyelids slowly descended.
Then scenes from my past flashed before me like film running through a projector.
I think I saw myself as a child.
My daughter as a newborn, crawling on all fours, pulling herself up for the first time.
And my wife holding our son, his face lit up with a smile.
I can't remember exactly which scenes appeared or in what order. It all happened in an instant.
I thought I might never see my family again.
I was frightened and sad.
I fought until the very end to keep my eyes open.
But at last, feeling tears run down my face, I closed them.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in a hospital room.
I couldn't tell whether a day had passed, or two.
I couldn't even recall the desperate moments before I had closed my eyes.
I simply woke as I would on any ordinary day.
Jeongsik was beside me. I don't remember whether he was there when I woke or came in later.
Why is he here instead of at work?
I think he may have asked whether I remembered what had happened the day before.
But what caught my eye then was a line of ants passing beside my pillow.
Horrified, I asked the nurse to move me to another room.
The room was in poor condition. I felt as though my body was all right, and I wanted to be discharged and go home as soon as possible.
As time passed, I began to understand how serious my condition had been.
Later, I was told that my heart had stopped while I was unconscious and that I had even been declared dead. I couldn't know exactly what had happened.
But feeling physically better didn't make the fear disappear.
I didn't know when I might struggle to breathe again, or lose feeling in my hands and feet.
Flights to Korea were hard to find during the COVID pandemic. I finally managed to reach Korea on a flight through the Middle East.
But I couldn't enter the country right away.
I had been hospitalized with COVID and still had a slight fever. Having come from India, I was classified as high-risk during airport screening and placed in separate isolation.
It was a temporary isolation area set up in a corner of an airport corridor.
I was told I would need a negative COVID retest before I could enter. I waited for hours in a space divided off by partitions, waiting for a doctor.
Then a hamburger came under the partition.
It was from Lotteria.
I had made the difficult journey from India to Korea, only to find myself isolated in a corner of the airport, eating a hamburger passed under a partition.
I was bewildered.
All I could do was wait and hope they would let me in soon.
At last, my retest came back negative, and I was cleared to enter.
But I couldn't go home. Under the public-health measures in place at the time, I couldn't take public transportation and had to travel in a separate vehicle.
It was also difficult to find a hospital that would see me.
Thankfully, Seoul Metropolitan Government Boramae Medical Center agreed to examine me.
I explained what had happened in India and talked at length with the doctor.
I was told I needed plenty of rest to recover, and that it would be better not to return to India for a while.
But I couldn't do that.
I had a family to provide for and children to send to school.
There was also the time I had spent in India. There was work I had begun there, and things I still hoped to accomplish.
Though I was still uneasy about my health, I had to go back.
In the end, I returned to India.
A few months passed.
The COVID situation in India was gradually improving.
At last, the day came for my family to return to India.
I waited for them at Chennai airport.
At the arrivals gate, I saw the faces I had longed so much to see.
My daughter and son spotted me and smiled with unguarded joy.
My wife was smiling, too. But even as she smiled, she looked as though she might cry.
“You've been through so much. I missed you. Thank you for holding on.”
Her expression seemed to say all of that.
The four of us held one another.
I never wanted to be apart again.
I was grateful for the time we had been given anew.
I wanted to live it more fully.
We left the airport and got into the car together.
On the way home, my wife said,
“I think our home in India feels like my hometown now.”
I was grateful for those words.
I had thought India might hold only memories of hardship for her. Yet the house where we had lived together felt like her hometown to her.
Together, we were going home again.
I preserve the days gone by in words and photographs.
Words by Yeowoon
© 2026 Yeowoon. All rights reserved.