Cross Check
The air in General Surgery Ward 4 on Tuesday morning felt even more tightly wound than usual. Two sets of footsteps set off simultaneously from opposite ends of the ward corridor. Normally, this would have been morning rounds, with Baek Ijun trailing closely behind Oh Jae-hyeong. But today, an abrupt outpatient callback for the surgery chief had completely split their routes. In an unusual arrangement, the entire patient load of Ward 4 had been divided in half: Baek Ijun would cover the odd-numbered rooms alone, while Shin Seoyun would handle the even-numbered ones.
This was the first time they had ever walked their separate paths through the same ward at the same time. When Ijun finished a dressing change in Room 3 and stepped back into the corridor, his eyes met Seoyun’s as she emerged from Room 4. She skipped even the most basic nod of greeting. Her gaze remained coldly fixed on the data displayed across her tablet screen. Her movements were mechanical, stripped of any unnecessary motion. Ijun withdrew his own gaze and mentally pulled up the chart for his next destination—Room 5.
Park Jeong-hee. Fifty-four-year-old female. Two days earlier, she had undergone an emergency appendectomy for acute appendicitis that had been on the verge of perforation. The postoperative course had been excellent; both her vital signs and lab values traced a stable upward curve. Park Jeong-hee was sitting half-reclined against the raised back of her bed. It was the second day after surgery for acute appendicitis. A meal tray rested on her lap, but the spoon hovered motionless in midair, as if it had lost its way. The expression on her face wasn’t the simple weariness of someone with no appetite. It was an empty, hollow look, as though something vital had been taken from her.
As Ijun entered the room, he summoned the Archive that hovered beyond his retinas.
E-01 Bian Que — Visual Penetration Diagnosis Activated
There were no flashing red warnings for bleeding or inflammation around the surgical site. No physical problems existed. Ijun shut the system down without hesitation. If the machine’s sensors couldn’t detect it, this was territory that had to be read entirely through human intuition.
“Mrs. Park Jeong-hee.”
The patient’s gaze drifted slowly from the tray. “This morning, it looks especially difficult for you to get food down.”
“It’s just… I don’t know, Doctor.”
“Is the surgical site hurting?”
“It hurts or pulls a lot less than yesterday.” The patient shook her head weakly. “It’s not that. My insides just feel… off.”
Ijun slipped on latex gloves and carefully palpated her abdomen. No tenderness. Normal bowel sounds. The vague phrase ‘it just feels off’ that patients utter when they can’t find precise words often compresses every clinical clue inside it.
Removing his gloves, Ijun lowered his upper body to meet the patient’s eye level. “Does your whole body feel heavy, like it’s sinking under a thousand pounds?”
The patient stared at him without answering.
“Or is it that, without any physical reason, your mood feels sunken, as if a corner of your heart has gone completely empty?”
Realizing this was no perfunctory question, the patient finally spoke. “My mood.”
“……”
“They told me taking out an appendix was no big deal, so I lay down without thinking much of it.” The patient gently stroked her lower right abdomen. “But after I woke up from anesthesia, I keep thinking that something that used to be inside me is gone forever.”
“Does your chest feel tight?”
“Even when I chew, the food feels like sand. I keep spacing out.”
Medically speaking, the appendix is a vestigial organ with no function. But to the patient, it was a permanent loss—the surgical removal of a part of her body that had been with her for decades.
“A great many people experience that sense of emptiness right after this kind of surgery,” Ijun reassured her in a calm, steady voice. “Our nervous system instinctively remembers and reacts even to the smallest sense of loss.”
“So I’m not just being dramatic?”
“Even if it was an unnecessary organ, it was still something that had been part of you your entire life, suddenly severed.”
A faint spark of life returned to the patient’s previously hollow eyes. “I thought I was the only weird one, so I’ve been watching the person in the next bed, worried about what she might think.”
“Just as the wound on your body will heal, these unfamiliar sensations will naturally find their way back to normal.” Ijun gestured toward the tray. “Don’t force yourself to eat. Just take in whatever you can manage comfortably.”
After confirming that the patient had picked up her spoon again, Ijun left the room. The moment he closed the door to Room 5 and turned around, he came face-to-face with Seoyun emerging from Room 6. The two walked side by side down the corridor. Just before Room 7, Seoyun’s steps came to an abrupt halt. As Ijun tried to walk past her, her dry voice rang out through the hallway.
“The patient you just saw in Room 5.”
Ijun stopped. Seoyun flipped through the chart for Room 7, eyes fixed forward as she continued. “Room 5, Park Jeong-hee. Yesterday evening she ate less than half of the meal that was served. This morning’s intake was down at a similar level.”
Ijun looked at Seoyun’s profile with interest. “This morning’s intake hit rock bottom at the same level.”
“How did you check that data? She isn’t even one of your patients, Dr. Shin.”
“Because during last night’s night shift I opened the EMR system, scanned every blood test result for the entire Ward 4, and cross-verified all the nursing notes and dietary intake records along with them?” Seoyun answered while tapping her tablet screen. “Impressive.”
“Post-operative depression.” Seoyun’s gaze finally turned toward Ijun. “There’s no fever or pain, so it doesn’t show up on the main chart, but it’s clearly slowing her recovery rate.”
Ijun gave a light nod. “I just caught exactly the same issue inside the room a few minutes ago.”
Seoyun’s eyes narrowed slightly. “How?”
“I saw that the food on her tray was untouched.”
“And?”
“I checked her eyes, spoke to her directly, and asked about her emotional state.”
Seoyun’s gaze lingered on Ijun’s face for a moment. “I identified it through objective dietary intake data and the nurses’ twenty-four-hour observation records.”
“Completely different routes.”
“Still, we arrived at exactly the same conclusion.”
Seoyun offered no further reply. She opened the sliding door to Room 7 and disappeared inside. Ijun stared quietly at the closing door.
Shin Seoyun, who read truth through data. Baek Ijun, who read truth through people’s voices and eyes. The order in which they gathered information was completely opposite, yet the medical conclusions they reached matched with zero margin of error.
Half past twelve in the afternoon. The hospital cafeteria. In a corner of the bustling dining hall, Ijun sat alone with his tray in front of him, quietly working his way through his meal. Perhaps because of the lingering aftertaste of morning rounds, today he kept his mind empty and focused solely on eating. At that moment, Seoyun approached carrying a silver tray. It was a wide four-person table. Instead of taking the seat directly across from him, she deliberately set her tray down with a clatter right beside Ijun and sat there.
Ijun looked at her with puzzled eyes, spoon still in his mouth. “Nowhere else to sit,” Seoyun tossed out the unasked-for excuse indifferently and immediately picked up her chopsticks. Ijun’s gaze swept across the cafeteria. Five or six completely empty four-person tables caught his eye. He chose not to point it out and simply continued chewing in silence. An odd distance where their shoulders almost—but not quite—brushed. Seoyun kept her eyes fixed on her tray and broke the silence first.
“The Room 5 case this morning.”
“Yeees~.”
“Dr. Baek Ijun. That method of yours—charging straight at the patient without even looking at the chart and firing off questions first. Exactly when did you start doing that?”
Ijun swallowed his rice and answered leisurely. “From the very first day I started as a resident at this hospital.”
“You made diagnoses based solely on what patients said from the beginning?”
“Because the raw language that comes out of a patient’s mouth is the fastest direct route to understanding the problem.”
Seoyun stopped moving her chopsticks and looked straight at him. “If you get trapped inside the numbers on a chart, you end up interpreting the patient only within the frame those numbers provide.”
Ijun continued in a calm voice. “But when you face the patient first, the underlying factors the chart can’t express become visible.”
Seoyun countered dryly. “Human emotions and words are uncontrollable variables that change all the time, aren’t they?” Her eyes remained perfectly rational, without the slightest wavering. “I always set an objective direction first using the numbers in the EMR chart.”
“……”
“That way I won’t be fooled by the patients’ subjective complaints or lies, and I can place their words on precise coordinates for evaluation.”
It was a meticulous and logical rebuttal. Ijun inwardly savored the directness of her speech with quiet pleasure.
“So. Between the two of us, whose method is more correct?”
It was a characteristically blunt question from Seoyun. “That’s… hard to declare definitively,” Ijun said, setting down his spoon and meeting her eyes. “Today we took completely different routes yet arrived at exactly the same answer.”
“But it won’t always be this ideal, will it?”
Ijun gave a light nod. “True. But if you blindly trust the chart like you do, Dr. Shin, you won’t be able to prevent a patient’s sudden death when the records themselves contain errors.”
“……”
“And if you rely on what patients say like I do, you might miss subtle changes in lab values and make a fatal misdiagnosis.”
Seoyun’s gaze remained fixed on Ijun’s face without any tremor. “So what’s the conclusion?”
“It means both of our approaches need to coexist.”
“Coexist?”
“If we’re bound together as a perfect team.”
A faint ripple passed through Seoyun’s eyes. The two continued eating without another word. It was a quiet time in which two data-driven physicians who spoke different languages were finding the optimal solution together.
After finishing her meal, Seoyun stood up, tray in hand. “You said team, right?”
Ijun looked up at her. “Yeah. Since we’re both covering the same Ward 4.”
Seoyun looked straight ahead and tossed out casually, “Room 5, Park Jeong-hee. Let’s cross-check together whether her dietary intake numbers go up tomorrow morning.”
“OK! You bring up the data, Dr. Shin.”
As Seoyun rose to return her dishes, she added, “From now on… let’s drop the formal speech. We’re a team working together.”
Ijun quietly watched Seoyun’s retreating back. It was quite different from the Shin Seoyun he had known. A gesture of closeness. Shin Seoyun suggested we check it together. The thorough lone wolf that she is has defined her relationship with me as a team. And even though the cafeteria was overflowing with empty seats today, she deliberately sat right next to me.
The feeling that she, who had never before made room for anyone beside her, was approaching him first. Ijun chewed and swallowed the remaining grains of rice with a pleasant feeling.
During afternoon rounds, Ijun opened the door to Room 5 again. Park Jeong-hee, leaning against her bed, was comfortably watching the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window. The heavy shadow that had darkened her expression that morning had lifted considerably when she saw him.
“Are you feeling a bit more comfortable inside this afternoon?”
“Yes, Doctor.” The patient answered warmly. “Thanks to what you told me this morning, it feels like the heavy stone that was sitting on my chest has moved down a little.”
“I’m glad.”
“I asked my husband to bring some soft pumpkin porridge this evening.” A gentle smile spread across the patient’s lips. “I’ll try to get a little of that down, at least.”
The next morning. The station in Ward 4. Two main monitors were turned on side by side. Seoyun sat in front of the left monitor, Ijun in front of the right. Seoyun clicked the mouse and brought up the latest data for Room 5 on the screen.
“Room 5, Park Jeong-hee. Breakfast intake reached seventy percent.” Seoyun’s dry voice cut through the morning air of the station. “When we include the liquid diet brought in from outside yesterday evening, her nutritional status has clearly entered an upward trend.”
Ijun closed the patient’s morning vital signs window on his own monitor and replied leisurely. “Blood pressure, pulse, and temperature are all normal.”
“……”
“The problem of decreased condition due to post-operative depression has been completely eliminated.”
Seoyun kept her eyes on the monitor and began typing indifferently. “Chart update complete. Next target is which room?”
Ijun picked up the chart folder and stood. “Starting with Room 2, which you covered yesterday.”
One who reads truth from records, and one who reads truth from people. Two different trajectories had finally meshed into a single solid axis and begun to turn together.
As if by prior agreement, Ijun and Seoyun left the station at the same moment and walked down the patient corridor.