The Weird One (2)
When I came to my senses, I found myself dragged into the Emergency Medicine Residents' Office, standing there like a man awaiting sentencing.
"What the hell? Han Hyeon-jae? Was that clueless, bumbling act I've been watching this whole time just a performance?!"
The fourth-year chief resident, Lee Min-jae, stood in front of me.
...Son of a bitch.
Why am I even standing here.
My mind went blank.
It had been right after I'd sent the ciguatera patient upstairs and was almost finished catching up on my backlog of charting.
"Han, the chief's looking for you."
That single sentence sent my heart plunging through the floor. I was dead certain that the incident where I'd cursed out Choi Soo-min had finally reached the chief's ears.
But the first words out of the chief's mouth missed my prediction completely.
"Answer me!!! Han Hyeon-jae!!! Why have you been playing dumb this whole time!!! Huh?!"
The chief grabbed my shoulders and pressed in. There was a screw loose in his voice.
"...I'm sorry."
"Sorry? You're sorry right now? VEXAS Syndrome! And what? Ciguatera? A first-year — an EM first-year at that — nailing two rare cases in a row that even Internal Medicine can't catch? Does that make any sense?!"
I couldn't even blame him for the outrage. For the past few months, the chief had been running around covering for every disaster I'd caused. The time a drunk patient had grabbed me by the collar. The time I'd blown an IV more than five times and the family had filed a complaint. The one who'd gone in my place, every time, had been this senior.
Lee Min-jae's rant showed no sign of stopping.
"I believed in you, Hyeon-jae...! I believed you were a good-hearted, quiet kid even if you caused a few accidents! But pulling a hidden-camera prank like this on me? My heart! There's not going to be anything left of my heart!"
"No, sir, I—"
The moment I tried to put together an excuse, Yoo Sung-hoon — the fourth-year lying like a corpse on the battered sofa in the corner, staring at his phone — opened his mouth without so much as twitching.
"Come on, Min-jae. That's enough. Sit down. You're making a fool of yourself."
"Shut up, Yoo Sung-hoon! I'm channeling the pure passion from back when I wanted to go into theater to grill Hyeon-jae right now! The method actor inside me is waking up!"
The chief shouted, but Yoo Sung-hoon only snorted.
"Give me a break. Theater and film? A comedian, maybe."
"This son of a bitch, I swear..."
The chief shot Yoo Sung-hoon a glare, then turned back to me.
"Anyway, Hyeon-jae. Be honest. It's one of two things."
"The Han Hyeon-jae who couldn't even get a single IV in, who got chewed out for it, who wandered the hallways with vacant, glazed-over eyes — was that all an act? Or are you some lopsided freak who's got shit for hands but a brain specialized for Internal Medicine?"
An act, or a freak. I couldn't answer.
I could hardly say, One day I suddenly started seeing an internet community of dead doctors, and I've been cheating off it. But I couldn't claim it had been an act, either. Until a few hours ago, I really had been a first-year nobody, flailing around soullessly in the flood of incoming patients.
What answer would get me through this bizarre interrogation in one piece?
A method-acting doctor, or a half-baked genius.
Excluding the ugly truth of I'm actually a cheating piece of shit, there were only two paths I could take to survive.
The first: the legendary method-acting doctor. The setup that I was actually a fully-formed, overpowered prodigy who could do it all, but had been pretending to be clueless to preserve the hospital hierarchy and keep the peace — and to show a little humility as a newbie. This was insane. The moment I picked that story, I would become the biggest sociopath in the residents' office. People would go around saying, That's the crazy bastard, right? The one who told the chief to his face that he's a genius?
The second: the half-genius with useless hands. The setup that my brain was brilliant but my physical skills — my actual procedural ability — were still stuck at first-year level. This, at least, was realistic. The world was full of people who were encyclopedic on theory and a disaster with their hands. Of course, I might get mocked as the guy with shit hands for the rest of my life, and as an emergency medicine doctor who had to perform direct interventions in a crisis, it was a fatal weakness. But at least I wouldn't be treated like a lunatic.
Fuck. Picking the first one would mean giving up on being human.
Alright. Since it had come to this, I was going to commit to the concept.
"I've actually been studying my ass off!!!!"
I decided to survive as the pathetic but hardworking, book-smart nerd.
At my outburst, the chief's eyes narrowed.
"Hoh. Is that so? Studying? Not just studying — studying your ass off?"
His voice was half suspicion, half expectation.
"Yes! That's right!"
"Even the rare diseases? You're telling me you memorized every textbook there is, including things like VEXAS and ciguatera that you might see once in a lifetime?"
"Yes!!!!!!"
I was practically Pavlov's dog, barking out affirmatives to every question on command.
"Really? Then that's perfect. From now on, let's have Han handle every Internal Medicine case that comes into our ER. No need to attach a senior, an attending, or a fellow, right?"
...What?
Not attaching a senior? I wouldn't even get to go to the fellows and attendings — the ones who were harder to approach than the seniors, but whose answers were always insanely good?
Wait. Could the chief even decide that on his own in the first place? That can't be right. Can he?
"...Excuse me?"
I doubted my own ears. What had he just said?
"Did I hear that wrong?"
"You said you studied your ass off. You said you diagnosed things even a third-year doesn't know, no problem. At that level, you can see and diagnose pretty much any Internal Medicine case on your own, can't you?"
Cold sweat poured down my back like a waterfall. This lunatic was testing me.
If I answered Yes, that's right! here, starting tomorrow I would actually be dumped with every Internal Medicine patient in the building. Without the Gallery's help, I might not even be able to tell gastritis from pancreatitis and kill someone. That was a bit of an exaggeration — but there was no guarantee the Gallery always provided fast answers around the clock, either. I needed insurance.
"Ah, no! Senior! That's — I only learned it from books, so knowledge and actual clinical experience are different, aren't they! I need the seniors' rich experience and seasoned judgment..."
As I piled on the excuses for dear life, the chief finally couldn't hold it in and burst out laughing.
"I'm kidding. Kidding. Look at this kid's face going white."
He patted my shoulder as he spoke.
"I know, I know. Your type. Smart, but no real-world experience, so you're a coward. Honestly, I was the same. When I was a first-year, I saw an EKG with a new LBBB — left bundle branch block — and..."
"That story again?"
Yoo Sung-hoon muttered from the sofa, sounding bored out of his mind. The chief bristled and shouted.
"Hey, it's a fact that I became the star of the ER that day! Everyone thought it was an MI and was about to push thrombolytics, and I was the only one who shouted LBBB and saved the patient!"
Yoo Sung-hoon just shook his head instead of answering.
I listened to the two of them and thought to myself that this man really was a lunatic in his own right. An EKG lunatic, specifically. The chief was a full-blown electrocardiogram freak who could diagnose even the most deformed, nonspecific tracings like a damn psychic.
A fake genius cheating off the Gallery, putting on airs in front of a real one. The existential whiplash hit hard.
Once the commotion died down, Lee Min-jae looked at me again, his face suddenly serious.
"Anyway, Hyeon-jae. From now on, you're going to get a lot more tired."
"What?"
"Do you know how fast rumors travel? Especially on a cramped hospital floor like ours. Word's already spread that EM has a first-year who's a diagnostic demon."
The chief mixed a cup of instant coffee, handed it to me, and kept going.
"Pretty soon the interns are going to come running. 'Doctor, can you take a look at this EKG?' 'Doctor, this patient's labs look weird — what is it?' Why? Because they're terrified of asking seniors like me or Sung-hoon and getting ripped apart like dogs if we don't know. But you're different. They thought you were just a slightly-better-than-intern clueless first-year, and then you suddenly became a genius. You're the perfect window to get the right answer without the risk of getting chewed out."
"..."
"And it's not just the interns. Your co-resident Ji-hoon, the other first-years too. Before they notify the professors or the seniors or the fellows about a patient's status, they'll come to you first. 'Hyeon-jae, this patient seems like this — what do you think?' They want one more confirmation. You become a kind of human UpToDate."
I couldn't say a word. I had gotten two diagnoses right. That was all. And in return, I was on the verge of becoming the unofficial consultant for every junior in Emergency Medicine.
The chief, with that guileless look on his face, had no idea what was going on inside me. He tapped my shoulder and grinned.