VEXAS Syndrome (Complete)
After Professor Choi Youngjoon left, an awkward silence settled over the emergency room.
The nurses who, only moments ago, had been sneaking glances at me with that gleeful look of that bastard's about to get ripped apart were now shooting me looks mixed with awe and astonishment.
What are you staring at?
I saw all of you betting on how badly I was going to get torn to shreds. I am a human being with at least a shred of social awareness, thank you very much.
I could practically hear the nurses and a few medical technicians whispering from across the room.
"Is he insane? He's not even Internal Medicine — how does a first-year EM resident know a rare rheumatologic disease?"
"He didn't even call the Internal Medicine resident on duty. He called a professor directly, and instead of getting destroyed he got praised?"
"I heard Dr. Han Hyeon-jae's intern evaluations were excellent, so I knew he wasn't ordinary, but I never expected this."
Would you all shut up?
And I can hear everything, by the way. I am currently dying of embarrassment, so please, for the love of God, be quiet.
I stared blankly down the length of the corridor.
My body, drained of adrenaline, felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, but my mind was running clearer than it ever had. Something hot that had been welling up from a corner of my chest now felt like it was warming the blood in my entire body. It smoldered — a slow, spreading heat.
Is this what passion feels like?
Just those two words.
During my miserable residency so far, the only things I'd ever heard were:
"You don't even know this?"
"Are you even paying attention?"
"If that's how you're going to do it, just quit."
Of course there had been the occasional compliment, but when you consider which words a clueless first-year resident is more likely to hear, the disparity in frequency was only natural.
But today, I had heard genuine praise from a professor's own mouth. Along with it came the heavy, solid sense of accomplishment that I might have just saved a patient's entire life.
And the beginning of all of it was this insane delusion that had popped into my head.
Dead Medical Scholars Gallery
I slipped away from the surrounding stares and crawled back into a corner of the on-call room.
The moment I threw myself onto the bed, I closed my eyes and summoned that damned gallery once more.
Gallery.
A familiar, dingy blue interface unfurled across my vision.
I should probably focus a little more on what this "gallery" actually is.
What the hell is this thing?
I stared at the screen until my eyes hurt. Hmm. What kind of users even hang out here? And what's with this interface?
The design was crude enough to belong in the early 2000s, but it looked uncannily similar to a certain website I knew. The interface, at least, was remarkably intuitive. Across the top of the screen, a row of gallery names was lined up.
They'd divided it up by specialty, quite thoroughly. I currently had the Dead Medical Scholars Gallery selected. It seemed to be a kind of general board.
"Ha..."
A hollow laugh escaped me.
What if this really is just a delusion inside my own head? A sophisticated hallucination my unconscious cooked up after stress blew past the breaking point?
Lately I hadn't been sleeping, and my meals were all over the place. It could be a psychotic symptom of burnout syndrome.
Maybe I should see a psychiatrist.
The moment I diagnosed myself with that, I felt a wave of despair. And what would I even say? Doctor, I can see a community website where dead physicians gather? I'd get a shot of sedatives and a one-way ticket to the locked ward, guaranteed.
But... if this really is a delusion, then how do I explain VEXAS syndrome?
That disease name did not exist in even the tiniest corner of my knowledge, not even at the far end of my forgetting curve. I'd only learned it was a rare disease defined just a few years ago after searching UpToDate. The probability that I came up with this on my own converged on zero.
Which means... this is a real gallery?
It actually exists?
Clutching my confused head, I started lurking through other posts. I scrolled the list of recent threads.
...What the fuck.
I stared at the screen, speechless.
The language was cheap community-board filth, dripping with profanity and slang — but the level of conversation happening inside it rivaled a conference of sitting professors. Every kind of cutting-edge knowledge and in-depth medical debate was unfolding right there.
Hmm...
I propped my chin in my hand and thought it through.
So... am I the only living person here?
Judging by the tone of the posts and comments, everyone was using phrases like back when I died and when I was still alive.
...At least, that's what it looked like from the posts.
Wait. Then that means—
My heart dropped.
With trembling hands — no, with trembling thoughts — I went back to the post I had written. I scrolled down to the comments.
Beneath the last comment I'd seen — You an idiot? Looks like VEXAS, order the tests — new replies had piled up.
Oh, fuck.
I'm screwed.
It felt like all the blood in my body had gone ice-cold. Cold sweat ran down my spine. I had thoughtlessly written from the perspective of a living person.
In the middle of these dead men, I alone had used the language of the present tense.
They'd caught me. My identity was blown.
The fact that a living human being existed in this insane community of the dead had been laid completely bare.
What happens now? Do I get forcibly kicked out? Or does this delusion vanish without a trace?
The moment every anxious thought in the world flashed through my head, the mood in the comments started to shift in a very strange direction.
"..."
I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Suspicion and wariness had transformed, in an instant, into manic excitement and cheering. Like people who had found an oasis in a parched desert, these dead doctors were going wild over the appearance of a living physician.
They weren't rejecting me.
They were craving me.
Alone in the empty on-call room, I stared into empty air and muttered.
"This is a goddamn goldmine."