Chapter 175 General Seaweed [4]
Chapter 175 General Seaweed [4]
“First of all… Makbong, doesn’t his respiratory rate seem to be dropping now?”
“Ah, yes, yes. It’s under six breaths per minute now. I think you’ll need to insert the tube.”
Makbong muttered as he looked at the lips that were beginning to turn blue.
In truth, if the lip color had already changed, that meant the oxygen saturation had dropped quite a bit.
If this had been an operating room, the alarms would probably have been screaming by now.
“His color’s changed too. Why are you so calm, you idiot?”
“Didn’t you say adults would be fine?”
“Not fine. I said he could endure it.”
“That’s the same th—ugh.”
Kanghyeok smacked the back of Makbong’s head, then immediately moved up to the head of the bed.
“Hand me the tube.”
“Yes, yes. Ow… that hurts…”
“I told you to keep a close eye on the breathing, and you’re still spacing out, you bastard.”
“It’s because it’s progressing so much faster than usual. He’s supposed to be a warrior, so I thought maybe he had some chronic illness or something.”
Makbong shook his head with a deeply wronged expression.
Kanghyeok let out a low sigh as he looked at him.
By then, the tube had already been inserted into Yasuharu’s throat.
Still, the fact that narcotic painkillers can suppress respiration… no matter how many times I say it, he probably keeps forgetting.
Because this one was Makbong, not Dolseok.
Even if he could not remember it perfectly, it would have been manageable if they had at least had an anesthesia machine.
Machines never spaced out or forgot what they were supposed to do.
But now, with human Makbong being used in place of a monitor, there was no room for that kind of slack.
“Hurry up and squeeze.”
“Yes, yes.”
After connecting the iron-ball-sack breathing bag, Makbong began squeezing air into it.
Before long, color began returning to Yasuharu’s lips.
At any rate, Makbong’s confident claim that he would be fine had not been entirely wrong.
“And what are you two doing? Aren’t you disinfecting?”
Looking relieved for the moment, Kanghyeok turned back down toward the lower half.
Dolseok and Yeoni were just sitting there blankly with disinfectant in hand.
Neither of them could quite figure out where exactly they were supposed to clean.
“Uh…”
“Ah, you idiots. I’ve had you with me for years already, and you still…”
Frowning, Kanghyeok came back down.
At once, cold sweat ran down Dolseok’s and Yeoni’s backs.
Did he not always become a completely different person once surgery began?
It would not do for him to be like this before it had even started.
So Dolseok desperately began talking.
“Well… that’s how medicine is, isn’t it? The more you learn, the more endless it seems…”
“What kind of nonsense are you spouting, you bastard?”
“You’re a genius, Young Master, so you might not know, but for ordinary people like us, this is really difficult.”
“Mm.”
Come to think of it, that was true.
Even during his grueling medical-school years, Kanghyeok had never really found things particularly difficult.
Despite the fact that all his classmates had walked around looking half-dead.
And those were supposed to be the smart ones.
It was the medical school of the best university in South Korea. Just imagine how brilliant those students had been.
And yet even there, Kanghyeok had stood out.
That was something else back then.
There had been one time when pathology had suddenly thrown everyone off.
A brand-new kind of exam had replaced the usual predictable format, and naturally the lecture hall had fallen into chaos.
The test range for pathology alone had been three hundred pages of the English textbook and five hundred pages of lecture notes.
On top of that, the previous exam had been only two weeks earlier.
What kind of lunatic could study all that in two weeks?
And it was not even the only exam.
Most people had studied from so-called exam compilations, collections of roughly ten years’ worth of past questions.
So there was no way proper scores could come out.
Even the professor came running in, shocked.
Because every single person had received a failing grade.
Except for one.
And that one person had gotten a perfect score.
That had been Baek Kanghyeok.
“Hmm… yes, I am a genius.”
As he said that, Kanghyeok stroked under his chin.
He looked deeply satisfied, nothing like the man who had been irritated just moments earlier.
Got him.
Seeing Kanghyeok nodding to himself over and over, Dolseok rejoiced inwardly.
His master was definitely smart and quick-witted, but he was also just that simple in certain ways.
Sure enough, when Kanghyeok turned back to him, his voice had become as gentle as could be.
“I was being shortsighted. Hand it over. I’ll show you.”
“Yes, yes, Young Master. Your teaching…”
“Yes. I’ll have to teach you myself, what else can I do?”
Kanghyeok even laughed heartily as he took the disinfectant.
Swipe, swipe.
Then he carefully began wiping down Yasuharu’s lower abdomen with the brown Betadine disinfectant.
To be more precise, it was the abdominal area below the navel.
“You’re disinfecting the scrotum too, though?”
“Ah, of course. The disinfected field must always be wider than the actual surgical site. If germs get in for no reason, it becomes a real headache.”
“But didn’t seawater get into the abdomen too?”
“That… that was just luck. The antibiotics worked absurdly well. You can’t rely on luck every time.”
Kanghyeok was in such a good mood that he was talking more than usual.
Whatever the case, it was far better than being yelled at, so Dolseok and Yeoni looked visibly brighter.
“All right, now that that’s done…”
After finishing the disinfection, Kanghyeok rummaged through the house-call bag.
As expected, the first thing out was the scalpel.
“Do you see this scar?”
“Ah… yes. But it’s really small.”
It had already been a small scar to begin with, and after the Betadine was applied, it stood out even less.
It did not look like the kind of wound that would cause such a major problem.
“I’m going to cut in here. This is definitely the culprit.”
“Really? It’s so small…”
Yeoni looked at Dolseok uneasily as he kept questioning things.
Normally, by now he would have been snapped at, or, if unlucky, smacked.
But today’s Kanghyeok was a little different.
It seemed praise did not just make whales dance. It could make even a fiend like Kanghyeok dance as well.
“Even something small can cause more than enough trouble. Watch carefully.”
Kanghyeok immediately drew the scalpel across.
Just as he had said, it was above the left groin, directly over the scar.
Slice.
Unlike usual, the amount of blood that flowed out was somewhat greater.
Because of that, Yeoni had to hurry and wipe it away with gauze.
She had been curious why, and soon Kanghyeok explained it aloud.
Today, Kanghyeok was in full-on kind mode.
“Look at the cut surface. It’s very different from normal flesh, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. Because it’s scar tissue?”
Dolseok, with his unusually good memory, recalled the surgery on General Kim Simin.
It had looked similar then too.
Though that had been on the face, so they had not cut directly through the scar.
“Oh. Right. Exactly. You’re actually rather quick.”
“Th-thank you.”
“Once our body is wounded, it never truly goes back to the way it was before. It heals by sticking together like this, through fibrosis. Of course, if it’s only a very shallow wound, that’s another matter.”
As Kanghyeok continued explaining, he kept cutting.
Since Yeoni never stopped wiping away the blood, the dissection was not especially difficult.
And besides, was the operating surgeon not the exceptionally brilliant Baek Kanghyeok?
Before long, the group was able to see a massive artery and vein through the opened tissue layers.
“Is that the femoral artery?”
Yeoni, now pulling back the incision edges instead of holding gauze, asked.
Dolseok, pulling from the opposite side, wore a similar look.
“That’s right. Wow, Yeoni, you’ve improved a lot too.”
“Then the one beside it is the vein, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Then what is that sac next to it?”
Yeoni pointed to the structure beside the vein.
It had been quite a while, but she had still studied anatomy once.
She knew perfectly well that there should not have been anything strange like that in this area.
“What do you think it is?”
Kanghyeok looked back at Yeoni with amusement.
If I knew that, why would I be asking… wait.
Yeoni made a sulky face, then suddenly tilted her head.
At the same time he asked the question, Kanghyeok had subtly lifted the incision further.
Because of that, Yeoni was able to see deeper inside.
Hm…?
Without realizing it, Yeoni slipped a finger in and began feeling inward.
Not long after, she was able to tell where this bizarre structure led.
“This… this goes there?”
“That’s right. This is the true identity of the fluid-filled sac in his scrotum.”
“What in the world is it?”
“A lymphatic-fluid sac.”
“Lymph…?”
“Yes. It’s part of the structure responsible for the body’s immunity.”
Nodding, Kanghyeok launched into a brief explanation of lymphatic fluid.
“Some people call it the lymph glands, but anyway…”
Lymph nodes were usually only the size of beans, but when inflammation occurred, they could swell to the size of coins or even larger.
It was not that they enlarged all by themselves. Each node was connected by lymphatic vessels, which sent reinforcements to the inflamed node.
Of course, the lymphatic vessels were so thin that they could not be easily seen with the naked eye like blood vessels or nerves.
That was why injuries to them often went unnoticed.
Just like now.
“So this was one of those thin lymphatic vessels?”
Yeoni asked with a look of disbelief.
Kanghyeok nodded as if it were obvious.
“That’s right. The lymphatic vessels connect throughout the whole body. Inflammation can occur anywhere.”
“But why has it swollen like this?”
“The substances that make up lymphatic fluid enter through the blood. But they return through the lymphatic vessels. So if the blood vessels are fine, but the lymphatic vessel gets blocked, what do you think happens?”
“It goes in but can’t get back out… so it swells up like this.”
Dolseok, who had been silently listening until then, finally spoke.
He seemed to have grasped the rough outline of what had happened.
“Exactly. Then what should we do?”
“If we open up the blocked lymphatic vessel…”
“That’s the easy thing to think, but no. That won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“How are you supposed to reconnect something so thin you can barely even see it?”
“Is there really something even you can’t do, Young Master?”
This time, Dolseok had asked sincerely, without any thought of secondary advantage.
That was how immense his trust in Kanghyeok’s medical skill was.
Naturally, Kanghyeok felt even better, but something impossible was still impossible.
His usual belief was that a true master physician was not someone who could list everything he could do, but someone who knew exactly what he could not do.
“It’s not that I can’t do it. It’s just impossible.”
“What kind of strange thing is that supposed to mean?”
“Anyway, that won’t work.”
“Then what do we do? Just say, ‘Ah, so this is why it happened,’ and leave it at that?”
“No, you idiot. There’s always another way. First, hand me a syringe. And something to collect the fluid in.”
“Ah… yes, Young Master.”
Dolseok hurriedly rummaged through the house-call bag and handed over a large syringe.
At the same time, Yeoni passed Kanghyeok the iron basket he had specially commissioned.
“Good. Dolseok, hold the basket. Yeoni, take another basket and stand by. There’s going to be a huge amount.”
“Uh… what exactly are you planning to do?”
“Just watch, you idiot.”
Silencing the chattering Dolseok, Kanghyeok picked up the syringe.
The needle was tremendously thick, probably because it was one used for transfusion as well.
It was almost like a small blade.
He drove it straight into the lymphatic sac.
Thunk.
There was not the slightest hesitation in his hand.
After confirming that white fluid had appeared at the tip of the syringe, he yanked out the plunger.
At once, a nearly milk-white liquid began pouring out in streams.
“Oh… is that lymphatic fluid?”
“Yes. It’s made up mostly of fat.”
“Then are you draining it all?”
“Yes. First we drain it all. Do you see that thing shrinking over there?”
Laughing, Kanghyeok pointed at the scrotum.
One side of Yasuharu’s greatly distended scrotum was rapidly shrinking.