Chapter 45: Intravenous Fluid [1]
Chapter 45: Intravenous Fluid [1]
Clatter-clatter! Clatter-clatter!
The carriage moved slowly, but still faster than a man could run, and eventually arrived back at the medical college.
Calling it a medical college was one thing, but it would not have been wrong to just think of it as a hospital.
There really was not much…
When you thought of a university, none of those facilities came to mind here.
“All right, all right. Let’s get down.”
“Uh, uh.”
“He’s still alive?”
Anyway, I jumped down from the carriage.
I even added a word to Joseph, who was asking something pointless.
“Idiot, I was checking him. He’s still alive.”
“R-really? No… I mean…”
“The pulse is weak at the wrist to begin with.”
“So that’s why… you were touching that weird place?”
A weird place?
What kind of nonsense was this lunatic talking about?
I looked down at my hand, and sure enough, if you were an ignorant fool, you might think that.
In other words, my hand was on the patient’s groin.
There was a reason for it.
“What weird place would there be for a doctor? It’s all just the human body.”
“But that spot… you can feel it better there?”
“Yeah. I can feel it better there. Um…”
How to explain that was another matter.
In the twenty-first century, it would have been common sense that the femoral artery was easier to feel than the radial artery at the wrist, but that was not the case here.
“Um… one of my hobbies is checking my own pulse on my body. Yeah.”
“Huh…? You had a weird hobby like that? Why didn’t I know?”
“Because it’s a little awkward to strip naked and do it in front of other people.”
“Ah.”
I had to make something up, but the excuse I came up with on the spot was pathetically flimsy.
No, not just flimsy. It was also a little strange.
Because of that, Joseph and Alfred edged away from me slightly.
That made the patient sway badly.
Well, he is a trauma patient… but at least there’s probably no broken bone injury.
And yet they moved him around like that while carrying him.
They really had no basic sense at all.
Even medics, huh, only started yelling, “We have to save him!” and running after getting the patient properly onto a stretcher…
Hoo… at least we made it to the lecture hall.
I stopped reminiscing.
There was no point in it besides making reality feel even more miserable.
Just look at things now.
It was hardly a good ward, but because I was not a doctor, I could not enter, and that made me feel bitter.
The places we were allowed to enter without permission were the lecture hall, the reading room, and the anatomy lab.
Of those, the place with facilities most similar to a ward was the anatomy lab…
No… you can’t. You can’t do that to a living person.
It felt wrong to lay this patient down there.
To begin with, the odds of him dying were far too high, and putting him there in advance felt ominous, didn’t it?
Fortunately, neither Joseph nor Alfred was rotten at heart, so they agreed to move him into the lecture hall.
“Uh, ugh!”
“Those lunatics brought in a corpse!”
We were not the only ones in the lecture hall.
Colin and his group were there.
And the corpse—no, no! The patient—we had brought in really did look exactly like a corpse, no matter how you looked at him.
He was covered in dirt, had no shoes, and his hands were tied…
At least they had tied them loosely. Otherwise, even struggling would have done him little good.
“No, he’s alive!”
“The Joseon bastard is using magic!”
Wow.
That son of a bitch just said exactly what I had been most worried about.
“This bastard, are you insane?”
“Urk.”
Fortunately, we had Joseph with us.
Colin was not exactly tiny, but compared to Joseph, he was just a child.
Once Joseph clamped a hand over his mouth, he could not make so much as a peep.
In the meantime, Alfred spoke up.
“Those bastards… they might bury him again because they don’t want to admit they were wrong.”
“What?”
Surely not.
That thought flashed through my mind for a moment, and then I found myself nodding.
That does sound possible. Then…?
“First, we need to get him to open his mouth. A living person can talk.”
“Um… I think his blood pressure is dropping again…”
“Blood pressure?”
“Ah, um. I mean his pulse is getting weaker.”
“Ahh.”
When exactly did the concept of blood pressure become fully established?
A thought flashed through my mind, but it felt too ominous, so I shook it off.
Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1945.
Where had I seen that again?
Ah, right.
I had seen it in Black-Haired American Marshal, that masterpiece by the god-tier writer Myungwon, the one ray of light in my bleak hospital life.
He would have kept the historical facts accurate. Then that means… blood pressure…
He was the president, after all. Surely he had been examined by doctors.
The problem, though, was that the doctor had been a quack.
Even when Roosevelt’s blood pressure shot past 180, the doctor kept insisting he was fine.
Worse still, Roosevelt was even complaining of symptoms caused by hypertension.
Symptoms caused by hypertension.
That made the phrase “silent killer” sound downright ridiculous.
So anyway, damn it… this means they don’t even have a concept of blood pressure.
Someone might think, What does it matter if they don’t have the concept of blood pressure?
If you were not in medicine, or had no intention of becoming medical staff, maybe it would not matter.
But for a doctor… that was a serious problem.
It meant they did not even understand the basic concept of circulation.
What was the principle of emergency medicine in modern medicine?
A, B, C.
A stood for Airway, meaning the airway.
B stood for Breath, meaning breathing.
C stood for Circulation.
“This person ended up like this… because they bled him, right?”
“Huh? Because they bled him?”
So if I started talking right now about giving blood or giving water, it would sound far too suspicious.
So I approached it through bloodletting.
I had no idea why these bastards were so obsessed with drawing blood, but I had really heard that if you bled people like that, some could become anemic or even die.
No.
Not heard.
I was literally looking at someone who had nearly died right in front of me.
“You mean if you draw blood, a person can…”
“No, blood is life. Life. If it’s gone, you die.”
“But they took this man’s blood for treatment.”
“Th-that…”
Why were they so crazy about bloodletting, about drawing blood?
It was all because of Hippocrates.
Considering the era he lived in, he was unquestionably a genius far beyond someone like me.
Even his description of migraines was so precise that there was not much for us to add to the symptom pattern he had recorded.
But the theory of the four humors really…
there was just no defending that.
It explained everything by saying people were sick because they had too much blood or too little blood, and because people were still learning that, they kept drawing blood over and over.
“But then he collapsed, didn’t he…? He has no color in him. Doesn’t he look exactly like someone who doesn’t have enough blood?”
“Couldn’t it be because his head hurt? Maybe there’s still too much blood in his head, huh?”
Oh ho.
So this was killing intent.
I trembled as I looked at Alfred, then realized it would do little good.
Of course it would not.
This man had been born into an age of barbarism and had not yet been enlightened.
Barbarism.
That was not a word that applied only to Alfred. It ran through the entire age.
“Let’s ask the patient first.”
“Ask what? We’re the doctors. We’re the ones who know illness best.”
No, you’re not.
Ah, now I get it.
This was why grown adults never listened to doctors and always said, huh, they knew their own bodies best.
That mindset must have come from living through an age of quacks like these.
“Hoo.”
I let out a sigh and then asked, “Sir, aren’t you dizzy?”
“Uh… yes. Very…”
The patient answered in a voice as faint as an ant crawling.
He really did seem to be barely holding on to consciousness.
That was only natural.
After losing that much blood, if he were still fine, he would not be human. He would be a monster.
“Is your heart pounding?”
“It’s pounding too much… I feel like I’m going… ugh.”
Anyway, wanting to help the patient who was struggling to answer, I turned back to Alfred.
“These are the same symptoms as anemia, aren’t they?”
“Anemia?”
“No, um… right. If someone goes hungry and suffers, don’t they look like this? Does this look like symptoms caused by having too much of something?”
“Ah… caused by not having enough…? Then was the treatment excessive?”
Treatment?
Watch your mouth, you insolent bastard.
“That’s right. Dr. Jémel was simply too overeager.”
“I see. Then what do we do? How do we fill it back up?”
“Since he’s become deficient in blood…”
Even while distracted, I was still the kind of man who could smile and talk.
Anyway, what came next was important.
This was the moment to make my move.
Blood.
If it was lacking…?
Wouldn’t you have to do a transfusion?
Amazingly, even in the twenty-first century, blood was still the best IV fluid.
At this point in time, there was even less doubt about it.
“But you can’t… give blood.”
“What?”
But the answer that came back was troubling.
Can’t give blood?
Since I was, after all, a scientist, my mind immediately began spinning.
When he said transfusion was impossible, a number of issues came to mind.
First of all, how would you even store blood?
That would have been impossible in this era.
Why?
Because that was not actually easy.
“The Papacy forbade it.”
Naturally, the reason was not scientific.
They had simply forbidden it.
“Why… why?”
How dare you question a decision of the Papacy.
You irreverent bastard.
Someone could have ordered him nailed to a cross for that, but in truth, ever since the earth goes around the sun and all that, people had long since started recognizing that a scientist’s questions had some legitimacy.
Besides, at the moment, Colin’s little rebellion had been put down by Joseph.
The patient had spoken, so they would not be able to accuse us of stealing corpses now.
Anyway, with the surroundings now under control, I asked the question, and Alfred merely shrugged.
“No idea. I heard lots of people died because of it in the past. I don’t really know the details.”
A man who could proudly say he did not know something—that was our senior.
Then again, there was no real reason for him to feel ashamed.
No one else would know either.
“So anyway, you’re saying blood can’t be given.”
“Yeah. Maybe it brings some kind of curse… anyway, you can’t. I heard people die.”
I knew that was not true.
But at this point in time, it was hard to say much.
Then what should we give him?
What else?
Water, at least.
“Then… let’s boil water.”
“Huh?”
“Water?”
Joseph, who had just come back after suppressing the rebellion, asked the question.
He looked utterly confused.
Naturally. He did not understand circulation.
If he did, it would not have been that hard to think that since the volume had decreased, it needed to be refilled.
“Yeah. Since we can’t give blood, let’s at least give water. But it’d be a bit off to give it just like that.”
“You mean put boiling water into him?”
“No, no.”
This lunatic.
Coming up with a fresh new torture method.
Boiling water into a vein…
Wow…
Thank God the ancients lacked imagination. Otherwise, damn, they really might have sent plenty of people off in agony.
“We let it cool first.”
“Then why boil it at all?”
“Um…”
“Joseph’s right. Why boil it?”
Joseph and Alfred looked at me with expressions like they were staring at an idiot.
It felt like my chest was about to burst.
But I could not exactly tell them that water might contain bacteria or viruses, could I…?
“It-it has to match body temperature, but can you boil it to exactly that temperature?”
“And you can cool it down exactly?”
So I tried to persuade them somehow, but it did not work.
It was a maddening situation.
“Damn it, if I say boil it, then boil it.”
“Huh?”
No, really, the swearing came out.
“Just fucking boil it, you bastard!”
“Uh, uh, okay.”
Oh.
So that worked?
Words really…