Chapter 193: Was It Really Because He Was Sick? [1]
Chapter 193: Was It Really Because He Was Sick? [1]
“Go on, examine me.”
Seonjo calmly held out his wrist.
Because of that, Baek Kanghyeok spent quite a while wondering just what exactly was going on. He said he was dizzy, so why is he sticking out his wrist? No matter how he thought about the causes of dizziness, the wrist had nothing to do with it.
But Kanghyeok soon remembered that this was Joseon. He had been living far too much as he pleased, so he had briefly forgotten. After reproaching himself for his own laxity, he nodded. Right. Joseon. An age when every physician took the pulse at the wrist...
Naturally, Baek Kanghyeok had never properly studied traditional medicine. So he did not know exactly where on the wrist one was supposed to feel. He merely guessed it was the radial artery. At least that let him tell the heart rate, rhythm, and a very rough sense of blood pressure.
So he first placed his fingers on the offered wrist.
“Hmm.”
He wore an expression that made him look as though he were contemplating something profound.
“How is it?”
“Shh. I must examine a little more first.”
He even managed to silence the anxious Ryu Seong-ryong. Thanks to that, Kanghyeok succeeded in looking like a very eminent physician in Seonjo’s eyes.
But in truth, the information he could gather about the patient that way was extremely limited. Hmm. I don’t know a damn thing.
Suppressing his true thoughts, Kanghyeok spoke. “First of all, Your Majesty’s heartbeat is perfectly normal. The spacing between beats is also good... You possess a very healthy heart.”
“That is good to hear.”
Seonjo nodded with a satisfied expression. After all, there were very few people who would frown when a doctor told them to their face that they were healthy. Perhaps only a young man about to enter military service or a criminal about to be imprisoned would react that way.
“Then why exactly am I having these dizzy spells?”
Seonjo stopped nodding and looked at Baek Kanghyeok as he asked. At the same time, the gazes of Ryu Seong-ryong and Yi Hangbok also focused on him. To have the king’s gaze fixed on him together with those of the two ministers was truly burdensome. If Kanghyeok had been an ordinary man, both his hands would already have been drenched in sweat.
But he was a man overflowing with confidence, even to excess. Even in such a situation, he did not shrink back. Instead, with the face of a teacher about to step into a royal lecture, he slowly opened his mouth.
“Your Majesty. Dizziness generally occurs for three major reasons.”
“Three? What are they?”
“The first is the head. I need to confirm that. Would Your Majesty please rise from your seat?”
“Rise?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Hmm.”
Seonjo did not move to stand at all and merely looked at Baek Kanghyeok. It felt as frustrating as choking down sweet potatoes, but Kanghyeok endured it for the moment. The man before him was the king.
“You must do as I say for a proper diagnosis to be made.”
“A diagnosis, you say.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. There can be no treatment unless there is a diagnosis.”
“Hmph.”
Once again, Seonjo merely snorted through his nose and did not move in the slightest. Kanghyeok’s temper was beginning to flare.
Ryu Seong-ryong noticed his anger and quickly opened his mouth. If Kanghyeok let his temper loose in the royal presence, it would be a disaster.
“Your Majesty, why not do as Cheomjeong Baek says? This is not a man who would do anything foolish.”
“I think the same, Your Majesty.”
At that point, even stubborn Seonjo had no choice but to rise. Whatever else the case, the two ministers before him were among the subjects he trusted and favored most.
“Very well. Since you both say so. There, I have risen.”
Seonjo acted as though the mere fact that he had stood up was some great act of grace. It was the sort of thing that made a man want to quit on the spot. If he really weren’t the king, I’d have smacked the back of his head.
Then again, if Seonjo were not the king, he probably would not have acted like this either. Unfortunately, Seonjo was the king, and both Kanghyeok and Seonjo knew that all too well. So Kanghyeok endured it again.
“Now then, please try walking the way I do.”
Baek Kanghyeok stepped forward with one foot, then placed the heel of his other foot right in front of it. In that manner, he walked straight ahead for roughly five meters. Naturally, there was not the slightest wavering.
“Hmm. Is this really helpful?”
Once again, instead of following right away, Seonjo first raised objections. It was infuriating, especially coming from someone who knew nothing. Wondering whether Seonjo perhaps attended some kind of academy for this sort of thing, Kanghyeok answered, “There is something called the cerebellum among the organs that maintain our body’s balance. This is an examination to see whether it is functioning properly.”
“Hmm. The cerebellum.”
Seonjo shook his head, clearly reluctant. But with the two great ministers watching him, he had no choice but to walk as Kanghyeok had shown him.
“Like this?”
“Very good. Next...”
Kanghyeok then carried out more cerebellar tests, such as alternately touching finger and nose and accurately touching another person’s finger. Quite unexpectedly, the conclusion he reached was that the head was normal. He acts so strangely I thought something would show up for sure, but nothing.
Clicking his tongue inwardly, Kanghyeok opened his mouth with a composed face. If anyone had seen how quickly his expression changed, they would have said even a master of face-changing would weep in defeat.
“Your Majesty’s head is perfectly fine.”
“That is good?”
“It is good.”
“Then I shall sit.”
Seonjo plopped down without asking Kanghyeok’s permission. Of course, he was not someone who needed to ask, but it was hardly pleasing behavior. This is the first time I’ve seen a patient this obstinate.
As if Seonjo could possibly have been Baek Kanghyeok’s first VIP patient. Back at Chungmu Hospital, he had seen not only the President of South Korea, but even the President of Mongolia and the Director of the Russian KGB. They had all been important people, but none of them had been this stiff-necked. Then again, those people didn’t hold my life and death in their hands.
By contrast, Seonjo was someone who could have him killed whenever things turned against him. Not just because he was king, but because he was Seonjo. Had Kanghyeok not seen that to exhaustion through the purge and the matter of establishing the Crown Prince?
So he put on a smile.
“The second major cause of dizziness is the heart... but I have already confirmed that earlier, so I will pass over it.”
Of course, to do it properly, he would have needed tests like a Holter monitor, four-limb blood pressure measurement, or a tilt test. But for now, he decided to let it pass. To be honest, it’s kind of a bother.
And he already had a suspicion.
Seonjo kept unconsciously tilting one ear toward him. Kanghyeok had noticed it before, but now that he was close, he was certain. There was clearly unilateral hearing loss.
“Hmm. Then what is the third and last cause?”
Kanghyeok answered Seonjo’s question at once. Only now were they reaching the main point, and he still had to perform the truly difficult examination.
“The third is the ear.”
“The ear? Are you saying dizziness can be caused by the ear?”
“Yes. More precisely, it is because of the semicircular canals behind the ear. If they are damaged, one becomes dizzy. In particular, it produces the sort of dizziness where the world seems to spin round and round.”
“Huh.”
Unlike before, Seonjo’s eyes lit up, because a spinning kind of dizziness was exactly the symptom he himself had been suffering from.
“And how does one examine that?”
He even stood up without being told.
Unfortunately, there was no need for that in this examination, so Kanghyeok had to seat him again.
“Your Majesty, please sit down first.”
“Ah. Is that so? Very well.”
Seonjo sat back down with an embarrassed little cough. Looking at him, Kanghyeok began to speak.
“First, questioning is important. I am going to ask several things, and Your Majesty must answer without hiding anything.”
“Very well.”
Baek Kanghyeok calmly selected the questions from his mental list. Dizziness caused by the ear came in many forms, and test results were often all over the place. So crucial clues were often obtained through questioning, which made it all the more important.
“Do these dizzy spells ever occur when Your Majesty rises after sleeping?”
“No. They come unpredictably.”
“And when one begins, about how long does it last?”
“Hmm.”
Seonjo tilted his head for a moment. Come to think of it, he had done nothing but suffer through the dizziness; never once had he thought to time it.
“Not exactly, but it seems to last about one dakyŏng.”
“One dakyŏng. Understood.”
One dakyŏng was roughly fifteen minutes. With ordinary positional vertigo, symptoms generally did not last that long. Then again, if it were positional vertigo, there would be no reason for hearing loss, nor any reason for the symptoms to keep coming and going like this for so long. So the most common form of ear-related dizziness, positional vertigo, was ruled out immediately. That meant he had to think of another disorder.
The cerebellar tests are perfect... the dizziness keeps recurring and lasts more than fifteen minutes, and one side even has hearing loss.
At that point, there was only one likely diagnosis.
“When the dizziness comes, do you perhaps hear some kind of sound in your ear? Especially... on the left?”
Baek Kanghyeok employed the fortune-teller trick he often used on patients who did not listen. It was the method where a doctor said something any doctor could infer as though he alone knew it, and surprisingly, it worked extremely well. Especially in Joseon, where superstition and fascination with mystery still flourished.
“Uh... yes. That’s right. Definitely.”
“And does your ear sometimes feel blocked or muffled?”
“Yes, exactly!”
“And when you are alone somewhere quiet, the sound becomes worse and worse, does it not?”
“Huh... how do you know that so well? That is exactly right.”
Seonjo was no exception, and the trick worked astonishingly well on him too.
“Th-then what exactly is my illness called?”
The initial stubbornness was gone, and he had become nothing more than an ordinary patient. It felt almost as though he had become a different person. Good. This is good... but what am I supposed to call the diagnosis?
Of all things, the diagnosis was Ménière’s disease. If Ménière had been some word with an actual meaning, he could simply have translated it. But that was not the case. Ménière was the name of a French otolaryngologist.
Trust is only just starting to build. There’s no need to ruin it by blurting out some tongue-twisting nonsense.
At the same time, he did not want to name it after himself. There had once been a fad for naming diseases after people, but that trend had long cooled. When one thought about it, was it not obvious?
Ah, damn it, I’ve got Ménière’s disease. Ménière’s disease is fucking awful.
It was exactly the sort of thing that invited cursing.
Hmm... right. Let’s go with this.
He figured it did not matter, since it would just become a name that got endlessly cursed soon enough anyway.
“The name of the illness is Japan Ear Disease.”
“Japan Ear Disease...?”
“Yes.”
Giving an unpleasant illness the name of a country one did not get along with was one of the oldest traditions there was, and even now it was still widely used. There was no need to look far; did people not commonly do the same with Japanese encephalitis? Surely no one believed mosquitoes from Japan flew over every summer. It was simply a disease transmitted by mosquitoes already living in one’s own country, yet that was what people called it.
“What a strange name. Why would it be called that?”
“This disease is very common in Japan.”
“I see. So it is a disease that mostly occurs in Japan. No wonder Cheomjeong Heo could not make sense of it.”
Taking Baek Kanghyeok’s nonsense quite seriously, Seonjo nodded. He bobbed his head for some time, then finally asked the truly important question.
“Then how is it treated?”
It was a question that made Kanghyeok flinch, because Ménière’s disease was still classified as a difficult condition to treat even in the twenty-first century.