The Aftermath (2)
I placed my hands over the keyboard. A blank word processor screen. A blinking cursor. When it actually came to typing the first word, my fingers wouldn't budge. My mind went completely blank. In the end, clutching at straws, I knocked on the door of the Deceased Doctors Gallery.
Their comfort wasn't comforting at all. Especially that bone-pervert bastard—he was only thinking of himself until the very end. But yes, we were in the same boat. If I got fired here, the ghosts' only sightseeing ticket to the living world would vanish too.
After some time passed, the consensus of the gallery finally converged on one goal: 'Let's save Hell Slave first.'
And so, the worst collaboration that absolutely nobody wanted began. Under the guidance of the God of Scalpel, I started writing my incident report.
I typed the first sentence: 'Upon admission, the patient was in a state of severe hypovolemic shock.' Then, I paused and threw a question to the God of Scalpel.
Sigh... Whew... Fine. Listening to his explanation, I transcribed exactly what the God of Scalpel dictated into the incident report.
'...Therefore, concluding that continuous fluid and blood transfusion therapy alone was insufficient to sustain the patient's life, I decided to perform an emergency laparotomy for damage control as the sole means to directly identify and control the source of the hemorrhage.'
Oh. Look at that phrasing. It sounded incredibly professional. I kept firing off questions.
The Q&A with the God of Scalpel continued. I filled in the blanks of the incident report by transcribing his comments. Medically speaking, the report was turning into a flawless, airtight document. But the real problem started now. The realm that couldn't be explained by medical science.
He had a point. With a deep sigh, I added a line to the incident report as instructed. Next problem. This was the real highlight.
I despaired once again at his words. Right. There was no way to explain it logically. Because something completely illogical had actually happened. In the end, following that advice—if you could even call it that—I had to package the secret of my miraculous hand skills into a fantasy-novel-like sentence: "superhuman concentration and mental imagery." Would anyone actually believe this?
Meanwhile, Yoo Sung-hoon sat in a chair at the nursing station, pressing his temples firmly as he held his head. He couldn't take his eyes off the empty Bed 2 in the resuscitation room. He simply couldn't believe that what had transpired there just moments ago was real. His brain was refusing to process the information.
Sung-hoon desperately retraced the past hour in his mind. Everything was completely out of whack.
First, Han Hyeon-jae was insane. This was an undeniable fact. He had suddenly gotten dead-fish eyes and spat informal speech right to his seniors' faces. This wasn't just a stress response or a temporary state of shock. He clearly had a severe psychiatric issue.
Second, that lunatic put a blade to a patient's body. A first-year Emergency Medicine resident. The very same Han Hyeon-jae who couldn't even secure a proper IV line, leaving more bruises on his patients' arms than on his own, and who possessed absolutely zero clinical skills, had picked up a scalpel and sliced open a human abdomen. Up to this point, it should have ended as a horrific medical accident—a historic attempted murder committed by a deranged resident. But.
Third, that lunatic saved the patient. A dying patient. A patient who had one foot over the threshold of death due to massive hemorrhage.
Fourth, he saved him through surgery, no less. It wasn't some clumsy butchery. In the eyes of Sung-hoon himself, and even in the eyes of the general surgery professor, Kang Hyeon-jun, it was a near-perfect, swift, and precise damage control surgery.
Fifth, the surgery didn't take place in an operating room equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, but in an ER resuscitation room exposed to all kinds of contamination.
Sixth, the person who performed it wasn't a surgeon with decades of experience, but an Emergency Medicine doctor.
Seventh, and the most nonsensical fact of all: the one who pulled all of this off wasn't even a specialist, but a mere resident who had barely shed his first-year tag.
Did any of this make sense?
Each of these premises could exist individually. A crazy first-year. A doctor who saved a patient. A procedure performed in the ER. But all of these premises had occurred simultaneously within a single individual named Han Hyeon-jae. It was a logical contradiction. A collapse of causality.
Sung-hoon's brain stopped thinking. His reason could no longer handle this event.
Sung-hoon called out to Nam Ju-hyeon, who was sitting next to him, staring blankly into space with an equally dazed expression.
"Hey, Ju-hyeon."
"...Yes, senior."
"Does this..."
Sung-hoon couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence, his lips merely trembling.
"Do you think this makes any sense?"
"Pardon? What do you mean?" Ju-hyeon asked back with unfocused eyes.
"Hyeon-jae."
At those two syllables, Ju-hyeon furrowed his brow as if trying to process something, but soon shook his head.
"Ah... I don't know."
Seeing that reaction, Sung-hoon became certain that his thoughts weren't wrong. He leaned toward Ju-hyeon and lowered his voice.
"No, seriously. Do you think he's possessed or something?"
"...What?"
"Think about it. Those hand movements. That informal speech. This can't be explained by some sudden awakening or an explosion of latent potential."
Sung-hoon's voice grew increasingly confident. Faced with a phenomenon that couldn't be explained by reason, he was arriving at the most irrational conclusion.
"Is there a famous shaman near our hospital? Shouldn't we get an exorcism or something?"
To that dead-serious question, Ju-hyeon didn't answer. Instead, he merely stared at Sung-hoon with a look that said, Why are all of our EM fourth-years like this...
I stared blankly down at the incident report I had just finished.
Who on earth would believe this kind of nonsense?
With a deep sigh, I closed my laptop. Whatever happens, happens. My mind was a mess. I wanted to forget about it for a moment. Without thinking, I logged back into the Deceased Doctors Gallery.
I scrolled down to find the trace of my desperate scream. And beneath that post, I discovered a brand-new festival unfolding in a completely unexpected direction. Prompted by my incident, the ghosts were sharing their own disciplinary hearing stories that they had kept buried in their hearts.
I let out a hollow laugh.
Starting with that post, all kinds of legendary heroic tales—or just the bizarre antics of lunatics—began pouring out.
Reading that post, I unconsciously clenched my fist. This guy was definitely a lunatic. The next post was a bit more academic.
Starting with those posts, the gallery filled up with all kinds of bizarre disciplinary stories. Reading through them one by one, I burst out laughing without realizing it. They were all lunatics who broke the rules and crossed boundaries in their own ways, in their respective eras.
I found myself no longer so terrified of the disciplinary committee. Of course, it was still scary, shitty, and something I wanted to avoid. But at least I wasn't trembling in fear that my medical career was over, like before. Instead, I felt a strange sense of belonging. I, too, was about to put my name on the lineage of these legendary lunatics. As "the guy who sliced open a patient's belly in the ER."
...Though, since I didn't actually do it myself, is it a bit weak?
I chuckled and closed the laptop where my incident report was saved.