The Weird One (3)

Senior Lee Min-jae's prophecy became a curse, and it came true with merciless precision.

From that day on, my standing at the Emergency Medical Center changed completely.

Not in a good way, I should probably add.

Or — hang on. Depending on how you looked at it, maybe it was a good thing?

One fact, at least, was beyond dispute: from where I was standing, nothing about this felt particularly positive.

It was a good thing for my classmates and the juniors, of course. The whole reason my reputation had inflated in the first place was because of them.

But the seniors? You people aren't supposed to be happy about this. Look, I get that having people come to you with questions can be a pain, but come on. I'm a first-year. I'm getting run ragged over here. You're supposed to be watching, at least a little.

Regardless, I was no longer being treated as the bottom-rung first-year grunt. I had become something else entirely — something saddled with embarrassing, crushing epithets like God of Diagnosis, Walking UpToDate, and Savior of the Juniors.

And the price was horrific.

"Dr. Han Hyeon-jae! Wait a second!"

Three in the morning. I was just starting to go cross-eyed processing the flood of incoming patients when an intern came sprinting toward me, white-faced, a freshly printed EKG strip clutched in his hand.

"There's a seventy-eight-year-old woman who keeps saying her epigastrium hurts and she feels nauseous. It looks like simple indigestion, but I ran an EKG just in case and it's… a little ambiguous…"

His voice was shrinking into the floor.

I swallowed a sigh and took the strip.

At a glance, it barely differed from a normal tracing. But just as the intern had said, the ST segments from V1 through V3 were depressed by a hair — maybe half a millimeter. The kind of finding a fresh first-year would write off as "within the margin of error" or "nonspecific changes" and move right along.

I held the EKG and stared at a point in empty air.

Accessing the Gallery.

Half a second after the post went up, that 118.235 IP dropped in again.

I checked the answer key, then turned my eyes back to the intern.

"Given her age and her symptoms, you cannot rule out an atypical myocardial infarction. This could be a posterior wall infarct, so put additional leads on her back from V7 through V9 ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and run the EKG again. Send cardiac enzymes including troponin right now, and notify me the second the results come in."

"What? A posterior infarct? Oh! Yes, sir!"

A short while later, the intern came back with the additional tracing. Leads V8 and V9 showed crisp, unmistakable ST elevation.

Classic posterior myocardial infarction. I called the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠on-call cardiologist immediately, and the patient was wheeled off for emergency catheterization.

One more patient who had come within a breath of being written off as indigestion while her heart muscle quietly rotted. Saved.

Pride. A warm little swell of it.

This kind of thing happened several times a day.

"Hyeon-jae, take a look at this one. Twenty-five-year-old guy, chest X-ray is perfectly clean, but he's had a dry cough and a fever for a week straight. Something about it just feels off."

Kim Ji-hoon scratched his head as he asked.

Accessing the Gallery.

"…Yeah, even with a clean X-ray it could still be atypical pneumonia. I'd think Mycoplasma and start Azithromycin empirically."

"Ah, right! Atypical pneumonia! I almost sent him home with cold medicine."

Kim Ji-hoon clapped my shoulder in genuine admiration.

The guy who stares off into empty space the second you ask him something, then a moment later hands you a brilliant answer.

That was my new title.

To the intern who had twisted an ankle and found an ambiguous bone fragment on the X-ray, I said, "That's an accessory ossicle — extra bone sitting on a normal one. Leave it alone." To the classmate whose pediatric patient kept fussing and tugging at an ear, I said, "If there's no tympanic erythema, something might have crawled into the canal. Take a look with an otoscope."

Thanks to the Gallery, I was dumping knowledge that far outstripped my year of training at all hours of the day and night.

Most of it, they told me, was the kind of thinking that became easy enough once you had a little experience under your belt. The kind of differentials anyone should be able to reach for.

Of course, I was a bottom-rung grunt, so I couldn't dredge most of those cases up on my own.

Before I knew it, five in the morning had come and gone.

Shredded by the endless barrage of questions, I slipped away from everyone's eyes and hid myself in a corner of the supply closet. I leaned my head against the cold wall, and my eyes slid shut.

Please. Just one minute. Don't let anyone find me.

Fuck. Just go ask the senior residents.

Don't come to me — go ask the third-years and fourth-years sitting right over there, you bastards.

I don't know either.

I'm just a first-year, same as you.

Head still tipped against the cold supply-closet wall, I opened the system window to check the wages of my labor.

For the past several hours I had been moving, thinking, and handing out answers without a single pause. I had become the savior of interns and classmates alike, catching their mistakes before they landed. And the reward for all of that was… what, exactly?

I tapped open the LP acquisition log. A petty little list unfurled across the screen.

That's it? You've got to be fucking kidding me.

All of it added up to twenty-two LP. My total sat at 622. A hollow laugh escaped me.

Fuck. They were all tiny cases, and because none of the ones I'd signed off on counted as treatments I'd performed myself, the LP barely moved.

The system was ice-cold. A diagnostic assist was just that — an assist — and it did not pay a full reward. Proper points only came in when I took the history myself, made the diagnosis under my own name, and started treatment on my own orders.

Playing human consultant and cleaning up everyone else's messes, the way I was now, I wouldn't hit 5,000 LP. Hell, it'd take months just to scrape together 1,000.

I shut the LP window in irritation and flipped over to the main screen of the Dead Medical Scholars Gallery, curious what fresh nonsense these ghost bastards were spouting now.

And then I doubted my own eyes.

The Gallery's trending list was plastered with nothing but stories about me.

I stared at the screen, too stunned to do anything else.

These ghost bastards had been watching my miserable grind in real time — live from the Gallery — and holding discussions about it.

To these insane Gallery-dwellers, I was no longer an ordinary living doctor. I had become something else: a twenty-four-hour livestreamer, there to soothe the boredom of a bunch of deranged ghosts.

I opened one of the threads and checked the comments.

These lunatics were treating my patients like a hobby.