Broadcaster Do Kyung Wan has opened up about how multiple hand surgeries left him depressed — and how the insurance payout led him to become a watch collector.
Appearing on the YouTube channel “SHW 생활인의 시계,” Do Kyung Wan said he developed acute osteomyelitis and had to undergo repeated surgeries that moved bone around inside his hands. “I worked at KBS for exactly 12 years, quit, did one year of freelance broadcasting, then had several hand surgeries,” he said. “I lay at Asan Hospital for months in a patient gown.”
He confessed that the surgeries changed how he felt about himself. “I thought my hands were pretty, but they got shorter and ugly, and I got a bit depressed,” he said. Back in August on his own channel he had revealed that a fingernail was removed and bone was operated on, leaving him with no nail — “so I always wear fake nails.”
The hospital bills ran to several million won, he said, which he paid with his wife’s card. A few days later the entire amount came back through insurance, without his wife knowing. She took the money to Hyundai Department Store in Pangyo just to cheer up — not to buy a watch. “I had bandages on my hands, and I saw a Longines and thought, if I wear a watch like that, people will look at my face instead of my hands,” he said. That became his first watch, bought “after getting sick” without much deliberation.
He also said in August that collecting wristwatches has been his only hobby over the past three years. No official statement was available.
